FOR THE DIRECTOR of music. A psalm of David.
1How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
3Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;
4my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
5But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6I will sing to the LORD,
for he has been good to me.
Original Meaning
Psalm 13 is a brief poem of only six verses. But those verses plumb the depths of near despair before concluding with an unexpected confession of trust and confidence. The psalm is a lament characterized at the beginning by a series of four plaintive questions. Structurally the psalm falls into three stanzas, each composed of two verses: the initial series of questions (vv. 1–2), a plea for deliverance from approaching death (vv. 3–4), and a concluding expression of confidence and trust (vv. 5–6).
The Heading (13:0)
NO NEW TERMS appear in the psalm heading. The psalm is referred to “the director of music”1 and described as a “psalm of David.”2
QUESTIONING GOD IS an ancient tradition in Israel. In Genesis 4, Cain responds to God’s concern for the whereabouts of his brother, Abel, with a question of his own: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (4:9). Abram answers God’s promise of great reward with the poignant question, “What can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” (15:2). The greatest example of a questioner outside the psalms is Job, whose questions begin in Job 3 and are not quelled until God appears in chapter 38.
The questions at issue here are not simple requests for knowledge but express deep human misgivings about the character and activity of God and their effect on human life. This kind of questioning—flung in the face of God, as it were—is a product of and a response to the experience of the hiddenness of God, who refuses to appear and act as humans expect and desire.3 Rather than information, these questions seek divine presence and action on the questioner’s behalf. Such questions reveal a faith seeking to understand in the midst of painful experiences that shake the very foundation of believing.
How long? The four lines with which our psalm begins are each introduced with the same interrogative phrase, ʿad ʾanah (lit., “until where?”), translated as “How long?”4 These questions are addressed directly to God, as the vocative use of Yahweh and the second-person verbs connected with God in verse 1 show. The questions express the sense that God has withdrawn from the psalmist’s present experience and has hidden himself. God’s failure to appear and act leads to a fear of abandonment—that Yahweh has forgotten the psalmist. Such divine forgetfulness threatens to undo him, because to be known and remembered by God is to be in the relationship of blessing (as Ps. 1:6 clearly suggests).5
The experience of God’s absence has inward emotional effects on the psalmist. His sense of abandonment leads to inward “wrestling” with thoughts (13:2—“I take counsel within myself”) and daily “sorrow” (yagon, “torment”) in his heart. There are also external consequences since the psalmist—no longer convinced or certain of Yahweh’s active presence in his behalf—wonders whether the enemy can be held at bay much longer (13:2).
Plea for Deliverance from Approaching Death (13:3–4)
THE PSALMIST’S SENSE of desperation is voiced in a series of pleas to God that expand in almost inexorable fashion:
Look! Answer me, O Yahweh my God.
Cause my eyes to shine6 lest I sleep in death,
Lest my enemy say, “I have overcome him!”
(Lest) my oppressor rejoice that I am shaken.7
Without the hoped-for divine intervention, the psalmist can only anticipate rapid decline, defeat, and death.
Trust and Confidence (13:5–6)
THIS PSALM CONCLUDES with an unanticipated expression of trust and confidence. As unexpected as such a turn might seem in any individual lament psalm, it is actually more common than one would think for laments to turn to confidence at the end.8 In this case the psalmist’s trust is based on an understanding of the character of God as well as the psalmist’s previous experience of goodness from Yahweh’s hand.
Your unfailing love. The psalmist finds the grounds for hope in Yahweh’s ḥesed—translated here as “unfailing love.” The term has more of “loyalty” or “enduring allegiance” about it than the emotions we normally associate with “love.” The context is one of commitment to a covenantal agreement between parties—perhaps a king and a vassal. The covenant partner who demonstrates enduring loyalty to the covenant relationship and faithfully fulfills his covenant obligations, not because he is forced to but because of a sense of commitment to the relationship—such a person is said to do ḥesed (“unfailing [covenant] love”).
In the case of Yahweh and Israel, Yahweh has freely chosen to enter into a covenant relationship with Israel to be her God while she is his people. Yahweh chooses this relationship, not because of Israel’s greatness but simply because he loves Israel and desires to fulfill faithfully the promises made to the patriarchs (Deut. 7:7–8). That is ḥesed. Even when Israel fails in her commitment to her covenant obligations (as in the monarchy before the Exile), her God remains faithful. Though he may punish Israel for her sins, he remains true to his purpose for her. That is why Israel can continue to hope for restoration in the face of the loss and destruction of the Exile. That too is why the psalmist can continue to hope for personal restoration even as death is at the door. Therefore, his heart can rejoice in Yahweh’s anticipated salvation (Ps. 13:5), and he can sing songs concerning Yahweh’s goodness (13:6).9
Bridging Contexts
THE ABSENCE OF GOD. The human experience of God is fraught with paradox. God is totally other than humans, but he makes himself known within their world of experience. God is good and all-powerful, but he allows evil to happen. God is always present and knows all, but we often experience him as absent and inactive.
The biblical view of God mirrors that of human experience. Alongside texts of God’s entry into the human world through creation, theophany, and wondrous works of deliverance, we discover testimonies to his hiddenness. A sense of divine abandonment is particularly well etched in Job. Job—whom we know from the beginning to be righteous—experiences loss after loss: possessions, family, health, and even reputation. His agonized search to find God in the mess his life has become and his desire to understand how divine presence and righteous suffering can possibly occupy the same place are met only by divine silence. For Job, God’s purposes remain hidden while experience seems to contradict the traditional understanding of God’s essential nature as incompatible with evil and relentlessly good.
Although God ultimately breaks his silence in the later third of the book, Job’s experience of divine abandonment permeates the first thirty-seven chapters and resonates too clearly with human experience. Even when God does appear at the end of Job, his statements do little to answer the repeated question of Psalm 13: “How long?” Ecclesiastes is another book that agrees that the purposes of God in the world of human experience are impossible to know. Experience shows that good and evil happen without regard for the recipient’s righteousness.
Within the Psalter, divine hiddenness is a dominant theme in the first two-thirds. Both lament and thanksgiving acknowledge the reality of God’s absence.10 These psalms continued to play a key role in Israel’s worship during the exilic and postexilic periods. The loss of the land and kingdom were significant blows to the identity of the Diaspora Jews, situations that needed to be squared with the understanding of God as powerful, present, and in control.
The arrangement of psalms of lament in the Psalter provides a literately structured response to the plaintive cries of lament: “How long?” Books 4 and 5 (Pss. 90–150) point the exilic community to a new source of hope: Yahweh is coming to judge the earth and to rule directly over humanity. Like Job, the faithful will hold on in the interim until Yahweh reveals himself and his Messiah in power.11
Christ too experienced abandonment by God. His suffering was particularly severe on the cross—because of the sheer pain of it, the loss of his disciple band, and the obvious failure of any broad-based human response to his earthly ministry. Jesus expressed his greatest pain in the words of Psalm 22:1: ʾeli ʾeli lamah ʿazabtani (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).12 Jesus’ example shows that it is not wrong to experience the abandonment of God, nor is such an experience necessarily the result of personal sin. Often when one is most firmly in the center of God’s purpose and will are attacks most severe and God seems most distant.
Like his Old Testament counterparts in the Psalter, Jesus stayed the course, choosing to remain faithful to the purposes of God throughout his suffering and death. We know that he was steeped in the Old Testament literature and used it to understand and articulate the character and purpose of his own ministry. He must have known the Psalter well—it is the most frequently quoted Old Testament book in the New Testament—and Psalm 22 in particular.13 He must have drawn much strength, courage, and understanding from such texts.
Diaspora Judaism came to understand the pain of the Exile as redemptive suffering. We tend to consider the nation of Israel/Judah as a monolithic whole. We insist that the Exile was visited on the whole nation because of its sins. We forget that within this nation just prior to the destruction and captivity, there were many faithful followers of Yahweh who had not forsaken the covenant, who did not worship other gods, who worshiped Yahweh in spiritual truth and not empty rituals, and who upheld justice and compassion.14 Yet these righteous ones found themselves torn from their land and taken away into exile along with their covenant-breaking neighbors! Where was the God of the righteous then?
It is true that a sort of community solidarity permeates the people of God in the Old Testament that runs counter to our Western sense of fierce independence. When Achan sinned (Josh. 7:1–11), we read that “Israel has sinned; they have violated my covenant”; thus, the entire nation suffered the consequent defeat at Ai. When David angered Yahweh by taking a census of Israel (2 Sam. 24; cf. 1 Chron. 21), the whole nation suffered the punishment of a plague.
So, in the aftermath of the Exile, when the Deuteronomic historians of Israel explained the loss of the kingdom and the land as the result of the sin of the nation, the answer must have been less than personally satisfying for those faithful followers of Yahweh, who found themselves suffering the consequences of national wickedness through no fault of their own.15
Throughout the centuries since, the convention arose of understanding the continuing suffering of Diaspora Judaism as redemptive, vicarious suffering by the faithful remnant for the sins of the whole community. This draws on Isaiah’s four Servant Songs (Isa. 42:1–6[9]; 49:1–6; 50:4–11; 52:13–53:12), in which Yahweh’s servant (variously identified as Israel, a faithful remnant, the prophet, or some future servant/messiah) suffers innocently for the sins of the people.16
In this regard the acute and tragic suffering of the European Jewish community under the Nazi program of exploitation and extermination during World War II has come to be called “the Holocaust,” a reference to the completely burned sin offering offered yearly on the Day of Atonement for the sins of the nation. In this way the suffering and death of six and a half million Jews and their survivors has been interpreted as vicarious and redemptive sacrifice by the innocent for the sins of the world. This reinterpretation of the suffering of the faithful follows the lead of Job and Ecclesiastes in affirming that the absence of God is not a sign of his lack of power or concern. Nor is God’s delay in coming a necessary indication of the wickedness of those who suffer in the interim. God is still God and worthy of worship and allegiance despite the inability of humans to comprehend human suffering fully.
Contemporary Significance
RESPONDING TO A sense of God’s absence. Many in today’s world live out of a sense of abandonment. The existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre calls this sense of loss of the divine the “condemnation of freedom,” because without God everything is permissible and nothing has any true significance or purpose. As a result, each human is “forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.”17
There are several possible responses to this sense of abandonment. Some assume that God has withdrawn or hidden himself because he doesn’t want to associate with me. This attitude assumes that I am the root cause of God’s apparent absence. Many today struggle with such feelings of unworthiness, believing that abandonment by parents or even active abuse is the result of some wrong within themselves rather than brokenness within the parents or abusers. The psalmist of Psalm 13 talks of wrestling with thoughts and experiencing daily sorrow in the heart. Such inner turmoil often grows out of self-condemnation and can lead to anger, paralysis, and despair.
Others respond to the hiddenness of God by denying his existence altogether. If God is out of the picture, then humans are left entirely to their own devices. The only avenue available is to rely on self-power and self-control. When God is removed, we are left to make our own way in the world.
The third possible response is that mirrored in Psalm 13: to “wait” on God as an acknowledgment of our own powerlessness and dependence on him. This need not be silent suffering, for both Job and our psalmist fill the void with their questions and appeals to God. And that is as it should be. The continuing conversation, even though one-sided, affirms the relationship—just as a father estranged from his son (or vice versa) continues to write letters even when no response is received.
The lessons the Psalter offers regarding divine absence include the following.
• The experience of divine abandonment is real and painful and is rightfully brought to God in laments and questions. God is not offended by our honest questions or even our heated complaints. Both confirm our desire for relationship and our faith that all is not as it should be.
• Divine absence need not be seen as the result of some failing within ourselves. Even the righteous suffer, and indeed suffering without divine intervention can be understood as one of the hallmarks of faithful living.
• Suffering the absence of God can be redemptive as others are brought to realize through our experience that the painful realities of life do not deny the existence, power, and compassionate concern of our God.
• God is worth holding on to faithfully even when we do not experience him as present.
Regaining a sense of God’s presence. Finally, we must consider some practical responses to the question: “When God is absent, how do we regain a sense of his presence?” I will offer three from personal experience.
Voicing our complaint. Whenever we experience God as absent, we must vocalize our experience openly and honestly. I am not speaking here of talking incessantly to our family and friends about how distant we feel removed from God or complaining about how alone we feel. I mean instead that we should talk openly and honestly to God about our sense of abandonment. I don’t know what form this conversation may take for you, but personally I have found two avenues for carrying my own complaint directly to God.
One is through writing poetry that reflects the inward turmoil and anguish I am feeling. This is for me an effective way of opening up my spiritual and emotional wound to the sight of God. Journaling is a similar concrete way of expressing inner reflection in a less poetic form.
The other way I have conversed with an absent creator is through audible, spoken words. This is best pursued for me when I am alone—perhaps in the car or on a walk in the woods. I don’t want to be observed by those who might fear I am becoming unhinged. But actually speaking the words I think and feel has a way of getting out of my head and objectifying them. It also gives God a certain presence as the one to whom I am speaking—walking alongside me or sitting in the passenger seat of my car. By voicing my complaints—really voicing them—I acknowledge a continuing connection with God where none is immediately apparent.
Getting out of ourselves. Another way to begin to restore a sense of God’s presence is to turn my attention away from myself to others. When I focus on myself, I tend to increase my sense of isolation and aloneness. But when I turn my eyes and hands to others in compassionate caring and service, I bring them into my world and break my self-imposed silence. It is amazing how seeking the welfare of others opens me to the gracious action of God in their lives and ultimately in my own.
In the recent film Life Is Beautiful, a Jewish father who is taken to a Nazi concentration camp with his five- or six-year-old son chooses to carry on an elaborate fiction to protect his son from the desperate reality of their situation. They are in a competition to win an awesome prize and must be willing to suffer the constraints of the camp to ensure their chance of winning. The father mugs, spins tales, coerces the rest of the inmates into his conspiracy, and ultimately struts comically to his death in order to preserve the hope of his young son. Along the way the father communicates to his son, his wife, and other inmates that regardless of the ugly spin that humanity can put on it at times, life as God intends it is beautiful, and that beauty must be held on to even in life’s darkest moments.
In the community of faith. Finally, when God is absent for me, it is possible to catch a glimpse of him—or at least a testimony of his presence—when I stand within the community of faith. When I sit or stand shoulder to shoulder with my fellow Christians in worship, I can hear songs of praise to God even when my own heart is silent. Communion with God’s people is a down payment on the promise with which the psalmist concludes Psalm 13: “I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.”