Do you feel like darkness is your 'closest friend'?
Mitch Chase
Near the end of Book Three in Psalms (which is from Pss. 73–89), things grow dark. In fact, when you enter Psalm 88, you feel like you’re in a room so dark that you can’t see your hand in front of your face.
Suffering can feel like that. Some trials feel so overwhelming, so disorienting, that the language of Psalm 88 fits them. The psalmist embodies the agonies and despair that a believer can experience in a fallen world. Don’t let anyone tell you that a real believer would never feel overwhelmed and despondent. Psalm 88 would beg to differ!
Pastors get depressed, too
Howard Satterthwaite
In recent years, many of us have become more aware of the toll that emotional, spiritual, and mental struggles can take.
Christian leaders, of course, are not immune. In fact, some of us are quietly limping through discouragement, or even depression, while still seeking to lead with strength and clarity.
When darkness is your only friend
God assures us that His written Word is not only absolutely reliable, it is also profitable: “All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable” (2 Tim. 3v16). All Scripture is profitable. Not some of it, not most of it, but all of it. This is wonderfully reassuring... until you read a passage like Psalm 88. Stop reading now and read the Psalm.
From beginning to end, Ps. 88 is unremittingly bleak. The Psalmist is “full of troubles”, he is a man with “no strength”, all his companions shun him, God’s wrath has swept over him, “Your dreadful assaults destroy me. They surround me like a flood all day long”. The Psalm closes with the words, “my companions have become darkness”. What possible profit are we to gain from reading this sad and sorrowful litany? If Ps. 88 was your daily reading and you felt cast down in your soul, would it not be wise to jump to Ps. 89 with its exalted views of the covenant Lord? No!