The Dark Night of the Soul Text: Psalm 77:1-3
Introduction: The School of Affliction
We live in a soft age. Our entire culture is a massive, complicated conspiracy to prevent us from ever experiencing any form of discomfort. We have air conditioning for the heat, entertainment for the boredom, and pharmaceuticals for the sadness. The result is that when true, gut-wrenching distress inevitably crashes through our carefully constructed defenses, we are found to be utterly unprepared. We have the spiritual constitution of a jellyfish. We think that the normal Christian life is supposed to be one of uninterrupted sunniness, and so when the storm hits, we assume that God must have abandoned His post.
The Psalms, however, are a bracing tonic for this kind of sentimentalism. They are relentlessly honest about the reality of suffering in the life of a believer. The psalter is God’s inspired prayer book, and it is filled with cries from the depths, with confusion, with anguish, and with a desperate reaching for a God who feels absent. These are not prayers from the spiritually elite who have it all figured out. These are prayers from the trenches. And they are in our Bibles to teach us how to pray when our world is falling apart.
Psalm 77 is one such prayer. It is a psalm of Asaph, a man who knows what it is to have the bottom drop out. This psalm is a journey from the brink of despair to a place of firm-footed faith. But the journey does not begin in the light. It begins in the suffocating darkness of a troubled soul. In these first three verses, Asaph shows us what it is to be in a state of spiritual crisis, where even the thought of God brings not comfort, but more agitation. This is a hard school, the school of affliction, but it is in this school that we learn the most profound lessons about who God is and who we are. It is here that faith is stripped of all its fair-weather pretense and is forged into something that can withstand the blast furnace of reality.
The modern church, with its attractional model and its therapeutic gospel, doesn't know what to do with a passage like this. It is too raw, too honest, too messy. But for the saint who is actually trying to walk with God in this broken world, these verses are a lifeline. They give us permission to be honest with God. They show us that crying aloud in our distress is not a sign of weak faith, but the very essence of it.
The Text
My voice rises to God, and I must cry aloud; My voice rises to God, and He will hear me.
In the day of my distress I sought the Lord; In the night my hand was stretched out without weariness; My soul refused to be comforted.
I remember God and I am disturbed; I muse and my spirit faints. Selah.
(Psalm 77:1-3 LSB)
The Necessity of Crying Aloud (v. 1)
We begin with the psalmist's raw and unfiltered cry.
"My voice rises to God, and I must cry aloud; My voice rises to God, and He will hear me." (Psalm 77:1)
Notice the repetition. "My voice rises to God... My voice rises to God." This is not a calm, collected, quiet-time prayer. This is a desperate shout. The Hebrew for "cry aloud" carries the idea of a gut-level scream. This is the prayer of a man at the end of his rope. Our tidy, respectable evangelicalism often frowns on this kind of thing. We prefer our prayers to be polite, well-ordered, and kept at a reasonable volume. But the Bible is full of saints who yell at God. Job did. Jeremiah did. Jesus Himself cried out with a loud voice from the cross.
There is a profound theological point here. This kind of prayer is an act of faith, not unbelief. To cry out to God in your pain is to affirm, in the midst of the storm, that He is there and that He is the only one who can help. The atheist in his distress has no one to yell at. He can only curse the meaningless void. But the believer, even when his faith is hanging by a thread, knows the address of the throne room of the universe. He knows who is in charge. And so he directs his anguish upward.
Asaph is not just venting. He says, "and He will hear me." This is the anchor in the whirlwind. It is a raw statement of faith. He does not say, "He will deliver me immediately." He does not say, "He will make the pain go away." He says, "He will hear me." In the middle of his crisis, his faith is stripped down to this one, bare, essential truth: God hears. For the Christian, no prayer ever hits a brass ceiling. Every cry, every groan, every tear is registered in heaven. This is the foundation of all true prayer. We are not speaking into the void; we are speaking to a Father who is attentive to the voice of His children.
This is a rebuke to our stoicism. It is also a rebuke to our fatalism. The stoic grits his teeth and bears it, pretending it doesn't hurt. The fatalist sighs and resigns himself to the inevitable. The Christian cries aloud to the sovereign God who ordains all things, including the distress, and who is able to work all things together for good. Your suffering is not meaningless machinery; it is a summons to prayer. God is not just the one you complain about; He is the one you complain to.
The Unconsoled Soul (v. 2)
Verse 2 describes the persistent, agonizing nature of the psalmist's struggle.
"In the day of my distress I sought the Lord; In the night my hand was stretched out without weariness; My soul refused to be comforted." (Psalm 77:2 LSB)
His seeking is relentless. It is a day and night affair. "In the day of my distress I sought the Lord." This is the proper response. Trouble should drive us to God, not away from Him. But then the night comes, and the struggle intensifies. "In the night my hand was stretched out without weariness." This is a posture of desperate, unending supplication. His hand is reaching up, grasping for a hand that he cannot feel.
And here we come to a very difficult, but very real, aspect of the Christian experience: "My soul refused to be comforted." This is a shocking statement. It is one thing to say, "I could not find comfort." It is another thing entirely to say, "My soul refused to be comforted." It suggests a state of such profound agitation and grief that the soul itself rejects all attempts at solace. The usual platitudes, the well-meaning encouragements, the simple truths that once brought peace, they all bounce off. The soul is in a state of lockdown. It is inconsolable.
This is a deep and dark providence. Why would God allow one of His own to fall into such a state? Because God is more interested in our holiness than our immediate happiness. He is doing a deeper work. Sometimes God must allow us to hit the very bottom, to come to a place where all our usual props and comforts fail us, so that we are left with nothing but Him. It is in this place of utter desolation that we learn that He alone is our portion. All other comforts are created things. They are good gifts, but they can become idols. And sometimes God, in His mercy, smashes our idols. He allows our soul to refuse comfort from any other source, so that we will be driven to find our comfort in Him alone, even when He feels a million miles away.
When God is the Problem (v. 3)
This brings us to the climax of the psalmist's crisis in verse 3.
"I remember God and I am disturbed; I muse and my spirit faints. Selah." (Psalm 77:3 LSB)
This is, perhaps, the most terrifying verse in the entire psalter. For the believer, the thought of God is supposed to be the ultimate comfort. "When I am afraid, I will trust in You." But for Asaph, in this dark night, the thought of God is the very source of his turmoil. "I remember God and I am disturbed." The word for "disturbed" is a strong one; it means to be agitated, to moan, to be in an uproar.
What is happening here? Asaph is remembering God's power, His sovereignty, His holiness. And in his current state of suffering, these attributes are not a comfort but a terror. He is thinking something like this: "God is all-powerful, and this is happening to me. Therefore, He must be doing this to me. He is my adversary. The very one who is supposed to be my refuge has become my terror." This is the logic of Job in his darkest moments. This is the cry of a man who feels pinned down by the Almighty.
He muses, he meditates, he thinks deeply on this, and the result is that his "spirit faints." He is overwhelmed. His spiritual strength gives out. He is at the point of collapse. This is not a failure of intellect; it is a crisis of the soul. His theological framework is intact, he knows God is sovereign, but that very truth is crushing him.
And then we have that word, "Selah." This is a musical or liturgical notation, but its function is to tell the reader to pause. Stop. Think about what was just said. We are meant to sit in the silence of this fainting spirit. We are meant to feel the weight of a man for whom the memory of God is a source of disturbance. We are not to rush past this. We are to acknowledge that this is a real station on the pilgrim's path. There are seasons when God, in His inscrutable wisdom, leads His people through this valley. It is a place where faith is tested to its absolute limit.
Conclusion: The Honest Struggle
So what do we do with these verses? First, we thank God for their honesty. The Bible is not a book of religious propaganda that papers over the hard realities of life. It is a book that meets us where we are, even when we are in the darkest pit. If you are in a place where your soul refuses to be comforted, where the thought of God brings you agitation, you are not the first. You are in the company of Asaph, and Job, and Jeremiah.
Second, we must see that this is not the end of the psalm. This is the beginning of a journey. Asaph begins in the dark, but he will end in the light by verse 20. How does he get there? He gets there by remembering God's past works of redemption (vv. 11-15). He gets there by rehearsing the story of the Exodus. In other words, he preaches the gospel to his own fainting soul. He forces his mind away from his immediate, overwhelming circumstances and fixes it on the objective reality of God's saving character, demonstrated in history.
This is the path for us as well. When our feelings are a chaotic storm, when our soul is in turmoil, we must not trust our feelings. We must trust the facts of the gospel. Our comfort is not found by looking inward at the state of our own soul. Our comfort is found by looking outward, and backward, to the cross of Jesus Christ. At the cross, we see the ultimate answer to the problem of suffering. We see a God who did not remain distant from our pain, but who entered into it. We see a God who was forsaken so that we would never be. We see a God who took the ultimate disturbance upon Himself, so that we might, in the end, find everlasting consolation.
Your dark night of the soul is not the final word. It is a chapter, not the whole story. The command is to cry aloud, to keep your hand stretched out, and to preach the mighty acts of God to your own fainting spirit. For the God who heard Asaph is the same God who hears you. And He will, in His time, lead you out of the depths and set your feet on solid ground.