The Gravity of a Godly Lament Text: Psalm 31:9-13
Introduction: The Honesty of True Faith
We live in an age that has contempt for two things: objective misery and objective truth. Our therapeutic culture wants to medicate all sorrow, and our relativistic culture wants to deny all sin. The result is a shallow, plastic faith that has no categories for the kind of raw, honest, and brutal lament we find in this psalm. Modern evangelicalism often wants a faith that is a perpetual walk on the beach, a series of uninterrupted victories. When trouble comes, the first instinct is to question God's goodness or to pretend the trouble is not really there. Both are forms of unbelief.
But the Bible is a rugged book for a rugged world. It does not flinch from the reality of suffering. And what is more, it gives us a vocabulary for it. The psalms of lament are God's gift to His people for the times when life feels like a complete collapse. They are not expressions of doubt; they are expressions of faith in the midst of the furnace. A man who cries out to God when he is in distress is a man who still believes God is there and that God is the only one who can do anything about it. The man who has lost his faith is the one who suffers in silence, or who turns to whiskey or entertainment to numb the pain.
Psalm 31 is a powerful example of this. David has just finished, in the previous verses, a remarkable expression of trust in God. He has declared his hatred for idols and his confidence in the Lord's mercy. And then, without missing a beat, he plunges into the depths of his affliction. This is not a contradiction. This is the rhythm of the Christian life. We trust, and then we lament. We lament, and then we trust again. Faith is not the absence of trouble; it is the anchor in the midst of the storm. And in these verses, David shows us what it looks like to be honest about the storm while still clinging to the anchor.
We must learn this language, because the world is full of affliction, and the devil is full of accusations. We will have seasons when our bodies fail, our friends betray us, and our enemies plot against us. What will we do then? Will we adopt the stoic stiff upper lip? Will we embrace the therapeutic platitudes of the age? Or will we learn from David how to bring our brokenness, our sin, and our sorrow and lay it all bare before the throne of grace?
The Text
Be gracious to me, O Yahweh, for I am in distress; My eye is wasted away from grief, My soul and my body also. For my life is worn down with sorrow And my years with sighing; My strength fails because of my iniquity, And my bones waste away. Among all my adversaries, I have become a reproach, Especially to my neighbors, And an object of dread to my acquaintances; Those who see me in the street flee from me. I am forgotten like a dead man, out of mind, I am like a broken vessel. For I have heard the bad report of many, Terror is on every side; While they took counsel together against me, They schemed to take my life.
(Psalm 31:9-13 LSB)
The Internal Collapse (v. 9-10)
David begins his lament by describing the internal, all-consuming nature of his distress.
"Be gracious to me, O Yahweh, for I am in distress; My eye is wasted away from grief, my soul and my body also. For my life is worn down with sorrow And my years with sighing; My strength fails because of my iniquity, And my bones waste away." (Psalm 31:9-10)
His first appeal is for grace. "Be gracious to me." This is where the man of faith always begins. He does not begin with his rights, his merits, or his resume. He begins with a plea for unmerited favor, because he knows his only hope is in the character of God, not in the quality of his own performance. And the reason for this plea is simple: "for I am in distress." The Hebrew word here speaks of being in a tight, narrow place, of being hemmed in with no way out.
This distress is not a minor inconvenience. It is a total-body experience. It affects his eye, his soul, and his body. The eye "wasted away from grief" is a picture of a man who has wept until he can weep no more. His sorrow has physically exhausted him. The Bible has a holistic view of man; it does not separate the spiritual from the physical in the way we moderns do. A sick soul will produce a sick body. Deep, unresolved grief will eat away at you physically, and David is brutally honest about it. His entire being, his nephesh (soul) and his beten (belly, body), is consumed.
Verse 10 intensifies this description. His life is "worn down," spent, finished. His years are now measured not in joys but in "sighing." This is a life that has been hollowed out by sorrow. But then he gives us the theological core of the issue, the bitter root of it all: "My strength fails because of my iniquity, And my bones waste away."
Now, we must be very careful here. David is not articulating a simplistic karma where every specific suffering is a direct, one-to-one punishment for a specific sin. The book of Job demolishes that idea. However, David, speaking by the Holy Spirit, understands a deeper principle. He knows that he is a sinner, and that all suffering in this world is ultimately the result of the fall. More than that, he is not too proud to connect his current misery to his own personal sin, his own "iniquity." He is not blaming God. He is not shaking his fist at the heavens. He is acknowledging that his own sin has contributed to his weakness, that it has given his enemies an opportunity, and that it has added a spiritual weight to his physical suffering. This is not the whining of a victim; it is the confession of a saint. He knows that even when other men are the immediate cause of his pain, he himself is not without blame before a holy God. This humility is the necessary prerequisite for deliverance.
The Social Collapse (v. 11-12)
From the internal decay, David moves to the external, social consequences of his affliction.
"Among all my adversaries, I have become a reproach, Especially to my neighbors, And an object of dread to my acquaintances; Those who see me in the street flee from me. I am forgotten like a dead man, out of mind, I am like a broken vessel." (Psalm 31:11-12)
The pain is now compounded by public humiliation. He is a "reproach," a thing of scorn and contempt. And this is not just coming from his declared enemies. The sting is that it comes "especially" from his neighbors. These are the people he shared a property line with, the people he saw every day. His misery has made him socially toxic. His acquaintances see him and are filled with "dread." They don't want to be associated with him. When they see him coming down the street, they cross to the other side. They flee from him.
This is a profound form of human suffering. We are created for fellowship, for community. To be ostracized, to be shunned by those who should be your support, is a heavy blow. David is experiencing what we might call a social death. His reputation is ruined, his friendships are gone, and his community has rejected him. This is not paranoia; it is his lived reality.
He summarizes this experience in verse 12 with two powerful similes. First, "I am forgotten like a dead man, out of mind." Once a man is dead and buried, he quickly fades from the daily thoughts of the living. Life goes on without him. David feels that he has been completely erased from the memory and concern of his people. He is out of sight, and therefore, entirely out of mind. Second, he is "like a broken vessel." A piece of pottery, once shattered, is useless. It is thrown out on the trash heap and never thought of again. It has no value, no purpose, no future. This is how David sees himself in the eyes of his society: a worthless, discarded fragment.
The Sinister Plot (v. 13)
Finally, David identifies the active, malicious source behind his suffering. It is not just a series of unfortunate events; it is a conspiracy.
"For I have heard the bad report of many, Terror is on every side; While they took counsel together against me, They schemed to take my life." (Psalm 31:13)
He is the subject of slander, the "bad report of many." Lies and rumors are circulating, poisoning the well of public opinion. This creates an atmosphere of pervasive fear: "Terror is on every side." The phrase here, magor-missabib, is the same one Jeremiah uses to describe the overwhelming opposition he faced. It is a feeling of being surrounded, trapped, with threats coming from every direction.
And this is not random chaos. It is organized. His enemies are taking "counsel together against" him. They are holding meetings, forming committees, and laying plans. This is a deliberate, calculated effort. And their ultimate goal is not just to ruin his reputation or to make him miserable. Their goal is lethal. "They schemed to take my life." This is not a social squabble. This is attempted murder.
So, we have the complete picture of David's lament. He is decaying from the inside out, his body and soul consumed by grief rooted in his own iniquity. He is a social pariah, rejected and forgotten by his community. And he is the target of a deadly, whispering conspiracy. It is hard to imagine a more desperate situation.
The Greater David
As with all the psalms, we must read this with Christian eyes. We must see how this lament finds its ultimate fulfillment in the Lord Jesus Christ. David was a type, a shadow, but Christ is the substance. If David felt these things, how much more did the Son of David experience them?
Was Jesus in distress? Was His eye wasted with grief? In the garden of Gethsemane, He was in such agony that His sweat became like great drops of blood. His soul was "very sorrowful, even to death" (Matt. 26:38).
Did His strength fail because of iniquity? Not His own, for He had none. But the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). Our sin is what crushed Him. Our iniquity is what made His strength fail on that cross. He became sin for us, and so He felt the full weight of this verse in a way David never could.
Was He a reproach among His adversaries? He was called a glutton, a drunkard, a friend of sinners, and a blasphemer. Did His neighbors reject Him? "He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him" (John 1:11). The people of His own hometown of Nazareth tried to throw Him off a cliff. Did His acquaintances flee from Him? In His hour of greatest need, "all the disciples left him and fled" (Matt. 26:56).
Was He forgotten like a dead man, like a broken vessel? He was buried in a borrowed tomb, and the authorities set a guard, hoping everyone would forget about the whole business. He was discarded by His nation as a piece of broken pottery.
Did His enemies hear bad reports, take counsel, and scheme to take His life? The entire passion narrative is the story of this verse. The Pharisees and chief priests met together, they brought false witnesses against Him, and they schemed until they had successfully orchestrated His execution. "Terror was on every side."
Conclusion: Our Lament in Him
This psalm, then, is a profound comfort to the suffering Christian for two reasons. First, it gives us permission to be honest. It gives us a divine vocabulary to express our deepest anguish to God without sinning. God is not afraid of your grief, your pain, or your honest assessment of your circumstances. He invites you to pour it all out before Him, just as David did.
But second, and more importantly, it reminds us that we never suffer alone. Our Lord Jesus has walked this path before us. He has plumbed the absolute depths of this lament. He took all of it, the internal decay of bearing our sin, the social collapse of being rejected by His own, and the sinister plot that led to His death, and He absorbed it into Himself. He became the ultimate forgotten man, the ultimate broken vessel, so that we might be remembered by God and made whole.
Because He endured this, our laments are now different from David's. We lament in Christ. We know that even when we are a reproach to our neighbors, we are accepted in the Beloved. We know that even when we feel forgotten like a dead man, our names are written in the Lamb's book of life. We know that even when terror is on every side and men scheme against us, our times are in His hand (v. 15). The story does not end at verse 13. David will go on to trust and to praise. And because of Jesus, so can we.
Therefore, when you find yourself in the tight place, when your soul is wasting away and your friends have fled, take this psalm on your lips. Pray it to your Father. But pray it through your elder brother, Jesus, who prayed it for you and fulfilled it for you. He knows your distress. He bore your iniquity. And because He was raised from the dead, He will deliver you. He will turn your sighing into singing, and your reproach into praise.