The Eighty-Eighth Psalm Ends in the Dark and Nobody Fixed It

A woman on our coast told me she had stopped praying out loud in front of anybody because she could not do the ending.

I asked what she meant by the ending.

She said: the part where you turn it round. The part where you have said the hard thing and then you say but I know that God is good, and everybody says amen. She said she can say the first half honestly and she cannot say the second half honestly, and she is not willing to say it dishonestly, so she has stopped.

That is not unbelief. That is a person with more integrity than the room she learned to pray in.

And she had never been told, in a lifetime of church, that there is a psalm in the Bible that does the same thing she does. It says the hard thing, at length, and then it stops, and nobody turns it round.

How it opens and how it ends

The eighty-eighth psalm begins with an address, which is the thing worth noticing before anything else.

O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee. (Psalm 88:1, King James Version)

God of my salvation. He begins there. Whatever else this psalm is, it is not the prayer of a man who has given up on who he is talking to.

And then it goes on for seventeen verses about drowning, about being counted with the dead, about friends who have gone, about wrath and about being shut up so that he cannot come forth.

And here is the last line.

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness. (Psalm 88:18)

Into darkness. That is the last word of the psalm in the Hebrew and very nearly the last word in the English.

There is no turn. There is no verse nineteen. Nobody comes along at the end and adds a hopeful clause, and that psalm has been sung by the people of God for something like three thousand years exactly as it stands.

You have a psalm that does not resolve, and it was kept in the book in that shape on purpose (Psalm 88:18). The Spirit is the one who preserved it so that somebody in your position would have somewhere to stand.

What the keeping of it means

I want to say plainly what I think that psalm is doing in the canon, because it is not an accident and it is not an oversight.

Somebody could have fixed it. Editors handled these texts for centuries and the fix would have taken one line. Nobody did.

Which means that when the community of faith assembled its songbook, it deliberately included a song with no lift in it, and it did that knowing that people would need to sing it.

That is a decision about honesty. It says that a prayer which does not arrive anywhere is still a prayer, and that a person in that condition is still in the assembly and still has something to sing.

You have something to sing tonight, and it was put in the songbook by people who knew somebody would need it (Psalm 88:18), and it is His Spirit who preserved a song with no lift in it across three thousand years for a reason.

You are not outside the songbook, and the community that assembled it made room for a song that ends in the dark (Psalm 88:1), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who moved men to keep a psalm that offers nothing at the end of it.

And Lamentations does something similar in the middle of its third chapter. The famous verse about mercies being new every morning sits inside a book that is otherwise almost unrelieved, and the verse right before it is about a soul being humbled in remembrance.

My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. (Lamentations 3:20)

Still in remembrance. He has not stopped carrying it. The hope in that chapter does not replace the memory, it sits next to it.

The address is the thing that holds

So if the ending is not required, what is.

The address. That is what runs through the whole of the eighty-eighth psalm and never once drops away. Every complaint in it is aimed. O LORD. God of my salvation. Unto thee have I cried.

A prayer that stays aimed at God is a prayer, whatever it does or does not resolve into. What stops being prayer is not despair. What stops being prayer is turning away and saying it to the ceiling instead.

You have been aiming it the whole time, and that is what makes it prayer rather than the ending you cannot produce (Psalm 88:1). That work is the Spirit's, and He keeps a person facing the right direction when nothing in them wants to.

And Paul describes a kind of praying with no content in it at all that he attributes directly to the Spirit.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Romans 8:26)

Groanings which cannot be uttered. That is not a prayer with a weak ending. That is a prayer with no words in it, and Scripture calls it intercession and says the Spirit is the one making it.

And this belongs here and it is never a footnote. This category reaches people in real danger. If what you are carrying has taken you to the place where being here at all has come into question, do not sit with it alone tonight. Tell somebody: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength, and it is what I would want for anybody I love.