Psalm 88 — The Psalm That Never Turns

Today’s Passage: Psalm 88

This psalm does not turn. It never rises to praise, never settles into trust, never reaches back to a remembered rescue. It opens in trouble and it closes in trouble, and the last word it speaks is darkness. That is not a flaw in the poem; it is the poem itself, and we should not invent a rescue it does not give.

As you read, hold this: Darkness is my closest companion.

Psalm 88:1-2 (BSB)

¹ A song. A Psalm of the sons of Korah. For the choirmaster. According to Mahalath Leannoth. A Maskil of Heman the Ezrahite. O LORD, the God of my salvation, day and night I cry out before You. ² May my prayer come before You; incline Your ear to my cry.

He does not open with the dark. He opens with a name: the God of my salvation. Hold that title against every verse that follows, for he has not stopped believing who God is. He is praying to that God from a place where salvation does not yet feel true, crying out day and night, and the rest of the psalm will show how long this has gone on. He still asks only that his prayer come before Him. The psalm that never turns still begins as a plea addressed to that same You.

Psalm 88:3-6 (BSB)

³ For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. ⁴ I am counted among those descending to the Pit. I am like a man without strength. ⁵ I am forsaken among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom You remember no more, who are cut off from Your care. ⁶ You have laid me in the lowest Pit, in the darkest of the depths.

Sheol is the place of the dead, and he does not say that he merely feels low; he says his life is drawing near to it. He counts himself among those going down, forsaken among the dead, cut off from Your care. Then verse 6 lays the weight where it hurts most: You have laid me there. The God of my salvation is the very One he names as doing this, and he neither softens the line nor explains it. The accusation and the title sit together in the same prayer, and that tension is not a problem to be solved before the psalm can be used. It is the psalm.

Psalm 88:7-9 (BSB)

⁷ Your wrath weighs heavily upon me; all Your waves have submerged me. Selah ⁸ You have removed my friends from me; You have made me repulsive to them; I am confined and cannot escape. ⁹ My eyes grow dim with grief. I call to You daily, O LORD; I spread out my hands to You.

Wrath, then waves, then friends taken away, made repulsive to them, confined with no way out. The isolation is not only in the body. In Heman’s telling, God has also removed the people, so that no one is left to share the trouble with. And still, at verse 9, he calls to You daily and spreads out his hands. Honesty about the dark is not the same as giving up the prayer. He keeps praying, though he does not pretend the praying has fixed anything. A person can be friendless and still have an address to cry toward.

Psalm 88:10-12 (BSB)

¹⁰ Do You work wonders for the dead? Do departed spirits rise up to praise You? Selah ¹¹ Can Your loving devotion be proclaimed in the grave, Your faithfulness in Abaddon? ¹² Will Your wonders be known in the darkness, or Your righteousness in the land of oblivion?

Three questions, all built the same way, and he is arguing rather than asking out of curiosity. If I die, he says, Your loving devotion has no witness left and Your faithfulness has no mouth in the grave. Moses once argued from God’s name in the wilderness, and that plea was answered. These questions are not. They hang unanswered, and the psalm never comes back to close them. Instead it says the same wound again in the verses that follow, the way a person circles a point that no one else will finish for him.

Psalm 88:13-14 (BSB)

¹³ But to You, O LORD, I cry for help; in the morning my prayer comes before You. ¹⁴ Why, O LORD, do You reject me? Why do You hide Your face from me?

Morning comes and the crying resumes, in almost the same words as verse 2, because the night did not change anything. Then comes the plainest question in the psalm: Why do You reject me? Why do You hide Your face? He is still only able to ask why.

Psalm 88:15-18 (BSB)

¹⁵ From my youth I was afflicted and near death. I have borne Your terrors; I am in despair. ¹⁶ Your wrath has swept over me; Your terrors have destroyed me. ¹⁷ All day long they engulf me like water; they enclose me on every side. ¹⁸ You have removed my beloved and my friend; darkness is my closest companion.

Do not finish the prayer for him, and do not seal shut, on the poem’s behalf, an explanation for suffering that the text itself leaves open. Why the dark lasts this long is not answered here. Other psalms turn; this one does not. Its mercy is simply that it was kept. A person whose praying looks like this still has a psalm to pray. The last word is darkness (מַחְשָׁךְ) machshak, pronounced makh-SHAHKH,. Strong's H4285, darkness, a dark place. The word appears only seven times in the whole Old Testament, and Psalm 88 uses it twice: once at verse 6, where he says he has been laid in it, and again here, in the very last line. Those two uses form a frame around the whole psalm. The dark he was laid in at the beginning is the same dark still standing at the end, and nothing lifts between them. , and yet the address is still “You.” That is as much light as the poem will give, and it is enough to keep praying without forcing an ending.

Darkness is my closest companion.