The Cry From the Cliff Edge Text: Psalm 38:21-22
Introduction: The Honesty of Agony
We live in an age that prizes a certain kind of plastic piety. The modern evangelical impulse is often to present a perpetually smiling face to the world, as though the Christian life were a matter of having no problems, or at least being polite enough not to mention them in public. If you are afflicted, if you are in agony, if you feel abandoned, the temptation is to believe that your faith must be malfunctioning. But the book of Psalms is God's authorized prayer book, and it serves as a powerful corrective to this shallow and dishonest spirituality. The Psalms give us a vocabulary for the entire range of human experience, from the heights of exultant praise to the very depths of despair.
Psalm 38 is one of the seven penitential psalms, and it is a raw, unfiltered cry from a man who is being crushed. He is afflicted by disease, abandoned by his friends, and assaulted by his enemies. And all of it, he recognizes, is happening under the sovereign hand of a displeased God. This is not a psalm for the comfortable. This is a psalm for the man on the rack, for the believer who feels the arrows of the Almighty sticking in him. It is a prayer saturated in pain.
The final two verses of this psalm are the climax of this desperate plea. They are not the tidy conclusion of a man whose problems have just been solved. They are the frantic, last-ditch cry of a man who is about to go over the edge, clinging to the only one who can possibly save him. And in this, we find a profound lesson. True faith is not the absence of desperation. True faith is knowing where to take your desperation. The world, when it is in agony, cries out into the void. The Christian, when he is in agony, cries out to his Father.
These verses teach us that in the crucible of suffering, when God feels a million miles away, the most spiritual thing you can do is yell for Him to come back. It is a prayer that finds its ultimate fulfillment in the mouth of the Lord Jesus Christ, and it is therefore a prayer that God is eternally pleased to hear from the lips of those who are in Him.
The Text
Do not forsake me, O Yahweh;
O my God, do not be far from me!
Make haste to help me,
O Lord, my salvation!
(Psalm 38:21-22 LSB)
A Plea Against Abandonment (v. 21)
The psalmist begins his final appeal with a raw cry against desertion.
"Do not forsake me, O Yahweh; O my God, do not be far from me!" (Psalm 38:21)
The first thing to notice is the honesty of it. The psalmist feels like he is being forsaken. To him, God feels distant. This is not a theological statement about the omnipresence of God. This is the cry of a hurting soul. The Bible never requires us to pretend that we are not in pain. It does not demand that we lie about our circumstances or our feelings. What it demands is that we bring our honest pain to the right place. David does not say, "Yahweh has forsaken me." He says, "Do not forsake me, O Yahweh." This is the difference between a complaint of unbelief and a lament of faith. Unbelief mutters about God behind His back. Faith takes its anguish and throws it at God's feet.
He addresses God by His covenant name, Yahweh. This is the name God revealed to Moses, the great I AM, the God who keeps His promises. In the midst of feeling abandoned, David appeals to the very character of God as a promise-keeper. He is essentially saying, "You are the God who promised never to leave or forsake Your people. Be true to Your name!" This is how faith argues. It takes God's own promises and fires them back at the throne of grace in prayer.
Then he makes it personal: "O my God." This is crucial. Despite the pain, despite the feeling of distance, the covenant relationship is still intact. He does not say, "O God, who used to be my God." He says, "O my God." His theology is holding his emotions in a headlock. His feelings are telling him God is gone. His faith, battered and bruised as it is, still clings to the possessive pronoun: my God. This is the anchor in the storm. Our relationship with God is not based on our feelings of closeness to Him, but on His sworn oath to be our God, sealed in the blood of His Son.
This cry, "Do not be far from me," finds its ultimate echo on the cross. The Lord Jesus, who never knew a moment of broken fellowship with His Father, cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He experienced the ultimate divine distance, the full weight of God's wrath against our sin, so that we, in our darkest moments, would never truly be forsaken. He was forsaken for a time so that we would be accepted for all time. When we feel that God is far from us, we must remember that He is never farther than the cross, where He proved His love for us in the most profound way imaginable.
A Summons for Swift Salvation (v. 22)
The plea then shifts from presence to action. It is not enough for God to be near; He must act, and act quickly.
"Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation!" (Psalm 38:22 LSB)
The psalmist is out of time. His enemies are closing in, his strength is gone, and his friends have vanished. He needs help now. "Make haste" is not a suggestion. It is an urgent, desperate command. Is it permissible to speak to God this way? The book of Psalms insists that it is. This is not the insolence of a spoiled child demanding a toy. This is the cry of a drowning man to the lifeguard. It is an expression of utter dependence. He knows that if help does not come from this one source, and come quickly, he is finished.
God, in His sovereignty, often brings His people to these cliff-edge moments. He loves cliffhangers. He brings us to the shore of the Red Sea with Pharaoh's army thundering down behind us, and only then does He part the waters. He waits until the moment of maximum desperation to display His maximum power. Why? So that there is no confusion about who gets the glory. So that we know, beyond any doubt, that our deliverance is from Him and Him alone.
And notice how the psalm ends. It ends with a declaration of faith, disguised as a title for God. "O Lord, my salvation!" The final word is not "help" or "haste." The final word is "salvation." The Hebrew here is Yeshua. He is crying out, "O Lord, my Jesus!" In the depths of his agony, David looks to the Lord and confesses that this God is not merely one who might provide salvation. This God is his salvation. His identity is wrapped up in this fact. He is not just in a tight spot, hoping for a rescue. He is a man whose entire existence is defined by the fact that the Lord is his salvation.
This is the bedrock of Christian assurance. Our salvation is not an abstract concept. It is not a thing that God gives us, like a trinket we might lose. Our salvation is a person: the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul says that our life is hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). To lose our salvation would be for Christ to be torn apart. Therefore, even when we are at our weakest, when our prayers are nothing more than frantic, one-line cries for help, we can end with this profound confession. He is my salvation. Everything else can be stripped away, my health, my friends, my reputation, but this one thing remains. The Lord is my salvation.
Conclusion: The Gospel in the Depths
So what do we do with a prayer like this? We pray it. God has included this in His word not to scandalize us with its raw emotion, but to arm us. There will be times in your life, Christian, when you feel exactly like this. Times when sin, sickness, and the malice of men conspire to crush you. Times when God feels absent and silent. In those moments, do not retreat into a stoic silence. Do not pretend everything is fine. Take this psalm, take these words, and hurl them at the gates of heaven.
Cry out, "Do not forsake me!" Plead with Him, "Do not be far from me!" You are not informing God of something He doesn't know. You are reminding yourself of what is true. You are reminding yourself that He is a covenant-keeping God, that He is your God, and that He has promised to be near.
And when you feel you are about to go under, cry, "Make haste to help me!" Do not be afraid to convey your urgency. Your desperation is not a sign of weak faith; it is a sign that you know you have no other hope. You are not trusting in yourself, or your friends, or your own wisdom. You are trusting in Him alone.
And ground it all in this glorious, unshakable truth: "O Lord, my salvation!" This is the faith that cannot be conquered. It is a faith that can stare into the abyss of suffering and abandonment and still name the name of God aright. Because the Lord Jesus Christ has plumbed the depths of this psalm for us, because He was truly forsaken, we can be assured that our cries are heard. He was cast into the outer darkness so that we might be brought into the eternal light. He was crushed by the wrath of God so that we might be embraced by the love of God. Therefore, even from the cliff edge, we can cry out with confidence to the one who is not just our helper, but our very salvation.