Psalm 13 Amplified Bible

Prayer for Help in Trouble.

To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David.

13 How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?
How long will You hide Your face from me?
² 
How long must I take counsel in my soul,
Having sorrow in my heart day after day?
How long will my enemy exalt himself and triumph over me?

³ 
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
Give light (life) to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
⁴ 
And my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
And my adversaries will rejoice when I am shaken.

⁵ 
But I have trusted and relied on and been confident in Your lovingkindness and faithfulness;
My heart shall rejoice and delight in Your salvation.
⁶ 
I will sing to the Lord,
Because He has dealt bountifully with me.

The Word of God for the Children of God. Gloria! In Excelsis Deo! Alleluia! Amen.

Silence, disappointment, doubt, and suffering are not things that are foreign to Christians – they are common to us all.

When we are at our end, desperate, alone, surrounded by darkness, it seems like God is not there, is deliberately, intentionally maliciously hiding his face; those feeling of abandonment can be devastating to the maximum.

It can feel worse than the trouble itself to feel alone in our pain.

As we set our hopes and prayers on something, someone, our trust, our heart, and it shatters at our feet, this can hurt more than to have never hoped at all.

They say it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all, but the pain and loss of not knowing love or having known true love are very real.

Silence hurts.

Theodicy, the issue of how a loving God can allow suffering, is a perennial atheist question, and a legitimate and honest one.

But I think it is first and foremost a question for believers.

It is of vital importance to us, precisely because we do believe in a good and sovereign God, that we resolve this issue with ourselves and with God.

It’s crucial and vital to our spiritual development and a healthy growing trust with God that we face these questions and our pain head on.

That is what this devotional is prayerfully going to be about.

Theodicy is not a cold theological question.

It is one of passion. “I cry to you God but you do not answer. I stand before you, and you don’t even bother to look” screams Job in genuine state of desperation.

Clever intellectual answers won’t cut it here.

The deeply desperate answer we each seek in our pain is not so much one of explanation but of relief.

When we desperately cry “Why!” what we genuinely mean is “Make it stop.”

Before we can really approach an answer to the problem we need to stop for a moment, realize just how close this question is intertwined with our very being.

We cannot approach this from a distance.

This is not even close to being a neutral subject, or anonymous topic for us.

It deals with our entire lives in the most intimate and central way imaginable.

So long as we, our allegedly not too foolish theories, stay on an intellectual level and do not touch us so close to where we live, they will remain merely academic.

We must yet each approach these questions from a different angle, a personal angle, a Father, Son and Holy Spirit angle, if we truly want an answer that will touch us and heal us rather than only a superficial and theoretical explanation.

Whether atheist, believer, or never introduced to God, these are our questions, no amount of mental gymnastics can make the questions, our needs, go away.

We have all these myriad questions because God has placed them in our hearts.

God always wants us to ask – when we stop asking we stop being truly human.

God wants us to perpetually, persistently, perseveringly, ask Him “why me?!” “why must I long suffer like this?!” “Why must my suffering persist?” (Luke 18:1-8)

Jesus said, deeply pleaded, Matthew 6:33 AKJV: But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

God is to bring it to a point where even our darkness asks: “why am I yet here?”

God has given all of us an inborn need for love and meaning – Psalm 139:1-18

139 O Lord, you have searched me [thoroughly] and have known me.
² 
You know when I sit down and when I rise up [my entire life, everything I do];
You understand my thought from afar.
³ 
You scrutinize my path and my lying down,
And You are intimately acquainted with all my ways.
⁴ 
Even before there is a word on my tongue [still unspoken],
Behold, O Lord, You know it all.
⁵ 
You have enclosed me behind and before,
And [You have] placed Your hand upon me.
⁶ 
Such [infinite] knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is too high [above me], I cannot reach it.

⁷ 
Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
⁸ 
If I ascend to heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol (the nether world, the place of the dead), behold, You are there.
⁹ 
If I take the wings of the dawn,
If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
¹⁰ 
Even there Your hand will lead me,
And Your right hand will take hold of me.
¹¹ 
If I say, “Surely the darkness will cover me,
And the night will be the only light around me,”
¹² 
Even the darkness is not dark to You and conceals nothing from You,
But the night shines as bright as the day;
Darkness and light are alike to You.

¹³ 
For You formed my innermost parts;
You knit me [together] in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ 
I will give thanks and praise to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
¹⁵ 
My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was being formed in secret,
And intricately and skillfully formed [as if embroidered with many colors] in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶ 
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were appointed for me,
When as yet there was not one of them [even taking shape].

¹⁷ 
How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
¹⁸ 
If I could count them, they would outnumber the sand.
When I awake, I am still with You.

Ultimately, until “every tear is wiped away” we will silently carry these heavy, and very deeply intimate questions around with us – in the silence of our hearts.

As soon as we stop asking why, as soon as we stop yearning for justice, yearning for God to step in unannounced, to touch, to heal, to restore, as we all dispel the reality, the devastating effects and the affects of spiritual darkness, as soon as we casually justify suffering, Hell, there will be something very wrong with us.

God gave us His Spoken Word – The Words of God for His Beloved Children.

Through however many opportunities for ancient scriptural editors to modify, to remove those passages which might be too harsh for future contemplation,

Guess what?

We still have these “ancient words, these “ancient truths” as God spoke them.

Keeping ancient desperate pleas like Psalm 13 in the Scriptural Canon means God has a very specific 2022 intention for them which ancient New Testament writers and ancient biblical editors and too interpreters succinctly recognized:

We should never stop asking these “why me” questions on our side of eternity!

It is absolutely fundamental to who we are, how Father God reveals His Image.

What we need to learn and know is how to live healthily with these questions.

13 How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?
How long will You hide Your face from me?
² 
How long must I take counsel in my soul,
Having sorrow in my heart day after day?
How long will my enemy exalt himself and triumph over me?

The importance of persistent prayer, how to live in the raising tension of being in a fallen world, full of pain, injustice, but having hope and trust in a good God.

³ 
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
Give light (life) to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
⁴ 
And my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
And my adversaries will rejoice when I am shaken.

These eternally complex, “unanswerable,” “unknowable” questions – because they are so deeply ingrained in our being, so crucial to us – have the potential to pull us into despair and away from God, or, if we have the courage to face them, can tell us a great deal about ourselves, about what life is about, and who God is.

Psalm 23 (Authorized King James Version)

¹ The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
² He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
³ He restoreth my soul:
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
⁴ Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
⁵ Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
⁶ Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

The real question becomes, “what does God want to tell us by making us ask?”

⁵ 
But I have trusted and relied on and been confident in Your lovingkindness and faithfulness;
My heart shall rejoice and delight in Your salvation.
⁶ 
I will sing to the Lord,
Because He has dealt bountifully with me.

But sometimes trusting and relying on God is easier said than done.

When your health is failing, your finances are taking a beating, or you lose someone you love, or your job or marriage is on the line, or something happens to your child, it’s not always easy to say, “But I trust in your unfailing love.”

When life becomes a valley, it can be a challenge to “sing the LORD’s praise.”

And yet the only way to live is by trusting the Lord through persistent Prayer.

You can’t always trust your health or your investments because they can fail you at any time. You can’t bank on your government because its power is quite firm, expansive. The only one we can really trust is the Lord. He never fails us.

It is only God’s grace that enables us to perpetually, persistently, perseveringly say, shout and sing: “I will sing the LORD’s praise, for he has been good to me.”

In the name of God, the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit,

Let us persistently, perpetually, perseveringly, Pray,

God, my Fortress, what a joy it is to have a friend in Jesus. Even when I am overcome by feelings of abandonment, prolonged silence, You are there with me. I know that I am never truly alone. Fill me with Your love and direct me in the way I am to love all neighbors. Change my priorities away from needing approval from other people to instead having comfort in knowing that I am accepted by You. Thank You, Father. Thank You Jesus and Holy Spirit. Gloria! In Excelsis Deo! Alleluia! Alleluia! Amen.

https://translate.google.com/