The Black Psalm: Christ in the Depths Text: Psalm 88:3-9
Introduction: A Song Without a Dawn
The book of Psalms is the Bible's songbook, and it contains a song for every conceivable human experience. There are psalms of high praise, psalms of quiet trust, psalms of royal celebration, and psalms of historical reflection. And then there are the psalms of lament. These are the psalms for when the bottom drops out. But even among the laments, Psalm 88 is unique. It is the blackest of the psalms. It is a cry from a man drowning, and it ends with him still under the water. Other laments begin in the valley but end on the sunlit peak. Think of Psalm 22, which begins with "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" but ends with a declaration of praise in the great congregation. Psalm 88 does not do this. It begins in the dark, it descends into deeper darkness, and the last word is "darkness."
So what is this psalm doing in our Bibles? Why has the Holy Spirit preserved for us a prayer that seems to go unanswered, a song that ends on a dissonant chord with no resolution? We are tempted to skip over it, or perhaps to tack on a happy ending of our own making. But we must not do this. This psalm is a gift, and it is here for a profound reason. It is here to teach us about the nature of true faith in the crucible. But more than that, this psalm is not ultimately about Heman the Ezrahite, its author. This is a messianic psalm. This is the song Jesus sang in His heart during the final hours of His passion. This is a window into the soul of the God-man as He absorbed the full, undiluted, infinite wrath of His Father on our behalf. This is the anthem of the atonement.
If you have ever felt that your prayers were hitting a brass ceiling, that God was your enemy, that you were utterly and finally alone, then this psalm is for you. But it is for you because it was first for Christ. He descended into this pit, this black hole of dereliction, so that we would never have to. He drank this cup of wrath to the dregs so that it would pass over us. This psalm, in its brutal honesty, is one of the most glorious portraits of the gospel in all of Scripture. It shows us the cost of our salvation and the depth of our Savior's love. It is a hard psalm, but a necessary one, for it takes us to the very heart of the cross.
The Text
For my soul has been saturated with calamities, And my life has reached Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am like a man without strength, Released among the dead, Like the slain who lie in the grave, Whom You remember no more, And they are cut off from Your hand. You have put me in the pit far below, In dark places, in the depths. Your wrath lies upon me, And You afflict me with all Your breaking waves. Selah. You have removed my acquaintances far from me; You have set me as an abomination to them; I am shut up and cannot go out. My eye has wasted away because of affliction; I have called upon You every day, O Yahweh; I have spread out my hands to You.
(Psalm 88:3-9 LSB)
Saturated in Calamity (v. 3-5)
The psalmist begins by describing his condition. It is not one of minor inconvenience; it is a total saturation of soul.
"For my soul has been saturated with calamities, And my life has reached Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am like a man without strength, Released among the dead, Like the slain who lie in the grave, Whom You remember no more, And they are cut off from Your hand." (Psalm 88:3-5)
He says his soul is "saturated" with calamities. The Hebrew word means to be full, to have had your fill, to be glutted. He has had more trouble than he can stomach. His life is not just heading toward death; it has arrived at the gates of Sheol. Sheol, the pit, the grave, these are all terms for the realm of the dead. He is, for all intents and purposes, a dead man walking. He is counted, or reckoned, among those who are already gone. He is like a man with no strength, utterly spent.
Verse 5 intensifies the horror. He is "released among the dead." This means he is forsaken, abandoned to the company of the dead. He is like the slain in the grave, whom God "remembers no more." This is the heart of his terror. It is not just that he is dying, but that he feels he is dying outside the memory and care of God. To be "cut off from Your hand" is to be severed from the source of all life, all blessing, all hope. This is a description of total abandonment. This is the language of excommunication from the land of the living and, seemingly, from God Himself.
Now, we know from Scripture that God does not forget His people in the grave. But this is the language of dereliction. This is how it felt. And this is precisely what Jesus experienced. He was counted among the transgressors (Isaiah 53:12). He was crucified in weakness (2 Cor. 13:4). On the cross, He was cut off from the land of the living. And in that moment, He bore the curse of feeling utterly forgotten by His Father, so that we, who deserved to be forgotten, would be remembered forever.
The Divine Antagonist (v. 6-7)
In the next verses, the psalmist identifies the ultimate source of his suffering. It is not fate, it is not chance, and it is not the devil acting on his own. It is God.
"You have put me in the pit far below, In dark places, in the depths. Your wrath lies upon me, And You afflict me with all Your breaking waves. Selah." (Psalm 88:6-7)
Notice the direct address: "You have put me." This is a staggering confession of faith, even in the midst of this darkness. A lesser man, an unbeliever, would curse his luck or shake his fist at the sky. But the man of faith, even when he is in the abyss, knows who is sovereign over the abyss. He knows that his affliction is not random. It has an author. God has laid him in the lowest pit, a place of utter darkness and watery depths.
And the reason is stated plainly: "Your wrath lies upon me." This is not just a trial. This is not a gentle chastisement. This is the full weight of divine fury. He feels it like a physical pressure, a crushing burden. God is not just allowing him to be afflicted; God is the one afflicting him with "all Your breaking waves." Imagine being in the sea during a hurricane, with wave after wave crashing over you, pushing you down, giving you no chance to breathe. This is the psalmist's experience of God's wrath. The "Selah" that follows invites us to pause and consider this terrifying reality. This is what our sin deserves. This is propitiation from the inside. This is what Jesus Christ endured when He became sin for us.
On the cross, it was the Father who put the Son in the lowest pit. It was the Father's wrath that lay hard upon Him. It was the Father who afflicted Him with all the breaking waves of judgment that we deserved. Jesus did not experience this as a theological abstraction; He experienced it as the psalmist did, as a terrifying, soul-crushing reality. "To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor. 5:19).
The Pain of Isolation (v. 8)
The wrath of God has a horizontal, social consequence as well. Divine abandonment leads to human abandonment.
"You have removed my acquaintances far from me; You have set me as an abomination to them; I am shut up and cannot go out." (Psalm 88:8)
Again, the agency is God's. "You have removed..." God's action has resulted in his total isolation. His friends, his acquaintances, are gone. But it is worse than that. He has been made "an abomination to them." They look at him with horror and disgust. His suffering has made him ritually and socially unclean. He is a pariah.
This finds its ultimate fulfillment in the passion of Christ. "Then all the disciples forsook him, and fled" (Matt. 26:56). His own people cried out, "Crucify him!" He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. The very ones He came to save treated Him as an abomination. He was "shut up and cannot go out," a prisoner handed over from one authority to another, trapped in the machinery of a corrupt justice system, with no one to speak for Him. He endured this total social collapse so that we, who were alienated from God and one another, could be brought into the fellowship of the saints.
Prayer From the Pit (v. 9)
Even in this suffocating darkness, with God as his apparent enemy and all human support gone, what does the psalmist do? He prays.
"My eye has wasted away because of affliction; I have called upon You every day, O Yahweh; I have spread out my hands to You." (Psalm 88:9)
His body is failing. His eyes are dim from constant weeping. He is physically wasting away under the strain of it all. And yet, what is his response? "I have called upon You every day, O Yahweh." This is the bedrock of faith. He calls on God by His covenant name, Yahweh. This is the name God revealed to Moses, the name of promise, the name of salvation. Even when it feels like God is the God of wrath, he appeals to God as the God of covenant faithfulness.
He spreads out his hands, the posture of a helpless, pleading child. This is the great paradox and the central lesson of this psalm. Faith is not the absence of darkness; it is calling upon the name of the Lord from within the darkness. It is clinging to the character of God when the providence of God seems to contradict it. It is believing God against God. This is what Job did: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" (Job 13:15). This is what Christ did. From the cross, in the deepest agony, feeling the full force of His Father's wrath, He cried out, "My God, my God..." He still called Him "my God."
The Darkness and the Gospel
So where does this leave us? This psalm forces us to confront the reality of suffering, the terror of God's wrath against sin, and the pain of feeling abandoned. It gives us permission to be honest with God in our darkest moments. It validates the cry of the afflicted. You are not a sub-standard Christian if you have felt these things.
But it does more than that. It points us directly to the cross. Jesus went into the darkness of Psalm 88 for us. He was saturated with the calamity of our sin. He was laid in the lowest pit. The Father's wrath lay hard upon Him. His friends forsook Him. He was made an abomination. And He did it all so that the final word of our story would not be "darkness."
Because He endured this, we can know that our sufferings are not pointless. They are not the wrath of God against us, for that wrath was exhausted at Calvary. For the believer, suffering is a form of fellowship with Christ (Phil. 3:10), a tool of sanctification, a means by which our Father disciplines us for our good. Because Jesus descended into this pit, the pit has no claim on us. Because He was cut off, we are grafted in. Because He was forsaken, we are accepted in the Beloved.
This psalm, then, is a black velvet cloth upon which the diamond of the gospel shines most brightly. Christ entered this starless night of the soul so that He could become our morning star, the one who brings the dawn. He went into the grave so that He could break its power. He endured the silence of God so that for us, God's ears would be forever open to our cry. He took the darkness so that we could walk in everlasting light.