“He was despised and rejected— a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.
We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.”
The verse above from Isaiah is universally accepted as a messianic verse referring to Jesus the Christ and can be linked to a few gospel passages such as:
“He told them, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.””
Two songs came to mind as I read Psalm 88 today. One is a hymn I have know since I was a child and I feel emotional when ever I sing or say the words even today. It deeply expresses the wrongness and yet rightness of the way Jesus suffered:
for the Son of God, who came
ruined sinners to reclaim:
Hallelujah, what a Savior!
If you don’t know this hymn and the story of the writer then I encourage you to enrich your heart and mind with both the music and story of P. P. Bliss.
The other song might have influenced the translators of the New Living Translation or the bible might have influenced Paul Simon, when he wrote at 21 the Sound of Silence and penned the iconic words, “Hello darkness, my old friend” which sounds a lot like “Darkness is my closest friend.” Paul Simon, explained in an interview, "It’s a young lyric, but not bad for a 21-year-old. It’s not a sophisticated thought, but a thought that I gathered from some college reading material or something.” (UCR)
MAIN POINT: God knows how you feel when darkness seems your friend, Jesus felt the crush of sorrow.
“That evening the people brought to him many who were demonized. And by Jesus only speaking a word of healing over them, they were totally set free from their torment, and everyone who was sick received their healing! In doing this, Jesus fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: He put upon himself our weaknesses, and he carried away our diseases and made us well.”
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”
“And he is able to deal gently with ignorant and wayward people because he himself is subject to the same weaknesses.”
Isn’t it amazing that this Psalm is in the bible? So real and raw, packed with emotion and I wonder if various verses in this Psalm point to many different fears we all struggle with? And the Psalmist dares to blame God for his situation. Jesus knew it was God's plan for him to be crushed with sorrow. For Jesus this is eminently clear that it was the will, the plan, the purpose of God to crush him.
“Father, if you are willing, please take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”
Can you see that Jesus knew that the cup of suffering was the will of the Father. And though you may find it difficult to accept, I wonder if the writer of Psalm 88 was also aware that it is God will that we suffer. It is for our good.
Psalm 88 verse 12 has this haunting question,
“Can anyone in the land of forgetfulness talk about your righteousness?”
Even if it isn’t the intention of the Psalmist I read these words with one of my fears and asked God how I will be able to praise you when I face dementia or Alzheimer's.
Fear is a foe for me. And I couldn’t always read this Psalm. I think my mind was made numb to these words many times in my life because I could not have taken them. They would have drowned me. We can get so down and so fearful and so overwhelmed by pain that the expression of pain (even a few thousand years old wordshere in the Psalm) would be too much for us. I have been so deep in mental and physical suffering like this Psalm that my misery could not bear this Psalm’s company. Our fears, our hurts and our pain can seem to be the only faithful friends we have. But they are not our friends. We may need them, but like a surgery or a medicine or a bit of discipline, they have their place. We are not meant to stay and embrace these feelings without limit. We are meant to feel and cry out for help, beg friends to pray for us, call out to God, rehearse His goodness. Debate and wrestle with the thoughts and the feelings and the why of it all. But we are ultimately helped when we admit defeat to our pride, defeat to our power, defeat to relying on our strength or our reasoning ability and coping ability. We are meant to work it out. To get to the place where we say not my will but yours be done.
I am pretty sure that Jesus didn’t lose his mind at any time on earth. But could Jesus have feared it ? May it have been that Jesus thought he would go crazy with his and other peoples ignorance and suffering? Jesus was surely accused of of being mad even by his close family.
“Some said, “He’s demon possessed and out of his mind. Why listen to a man like that?””
“When his family heard what was happening, they tried to take him away. “He’s out of his mind,” they said.”
And Jesus faced so many false accusations it would have driven anyone crazy to have faced the same.
Jesus at least once sounded very much like Psalm 88. So I think we are being taught it isn’t wrong or sinful to express such powerful and deep emotions. We should have patience and understanding for people who sound like this Psalm. Listen to Jesus possibly quoting Psalm 22:
“At about three o’clock, Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?””
Listen to the anguish. Listen to the pain and loneliness.
BUT where do the 88th Psalmist and dying Jesus turn?
They turn to God the Father. They go to God in prayer. They cry out to God. And the descendants of Korah in Psalm 88 continue to confess the salvation (v.1), the mercy (v.9), the wonderful deeds (v.10), unfailing love (v.11) and the righteousness of God (v.12).
Conclusion:
So you don’t have to always pretend you are “okay” and not every situation immediately is answered with Romans 8:28. Sometimes we are like Jesus when we are people of sorrow and acquainted with grief. It just means we get it; We understand the hurt of this world and sin and death. But We turn to God in our deepest sorrows because we know even in spite of all of this he is good.
Cry out to God in your pain. It is okay to do so.
“Jesus wept”
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