Every Day I Call Upon You

Two things are true of the man who wrote Psalm 88, and they will not sit together.

The first. He prays. Every day I call upon you, O LORD; I spread out my hands to you (Psalm 88:9). Not once, in a crisis. Daily, and by the look of the psalm for most of a life — afflicted and close to death from my youth up (Psalm 88:15). He is still at it in the last verse. Whatever else has gone, the praying has not.

The second. Nothing comes. Not a delayed yes. Not a no he can work with. The psalm records no answer of any kind — the darkest in the book, the one that ends with no turn at all, with Psalm 39 its nearest rival. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness (Psalm 88:18). That is the last line. There is no eighteenth-and-a-half verse.

We are quick here. We say he was heard anyway, that the psalm's place in the book is itself the answer. Those are guesses about his inner life. And the cross, which is no guess, was still a long way off — a later event the psalm could not know, though the whole book now stands inside it. He had neither. Only the praying and the silence, in the same week, for years, and he wrote both down without reconciling them, which is harder than either believing or giving up.

Take each alone. A man who prays daily into nothing, and knows it is nothing, stops — that is not piety, it is arithmetic. A man who is certain of an answer does not write verse 18. He keeps the practice of a man who expects God and keeps the record of a man who has not met him. He is pleading, and Scripture everywhere invites that: pressing God on his own covenant word, the way Moses and Job and Jeremiah press him. What we do with the silence is a different thing. We start keeping the ledger — all those mornings, surely owed something. That is our idol, not his, and it hides well because it looks like faithfulness. Underneath it is a plainer want: we would rather have the evidence of his love than the One who loves.

We are not built to hold both for long. Either no one is there, which costs us the praying, or the silence is a hidden answer, which costs us our actual week. Both halves into one hand, and the hand can go down.

He would not let it down. He went on calling the One he could not find the God of my salvation (Psalm 88:1). At Golgotha Christ prayed into that same silence — I cry by day, but you do not answer (Psalm 22:2) — and Hebrews says he was heard (Hebrews 5:7). Heard, and not relieved. The God we cannot find has himself gone unanswered in our place, so verse 18 is not our sentence but a place we may be. The man there is not only holding on. He is held. The dark is occupied ground.

I do not think the last line is an oversight. Christ wanted us from inside that dark, before we could want him rightly, and his wanting held. The question is not whether the answer is coming but what we are asking for — the answer, or him. One phrase, carried all day with nothing added: O LORD, God of my salvation. The psalmist says it from inside verse 18.