There are passages of Scripture that comfort us because they tell us exactly what we hoped to hear, and then there are passages that comfort us because they admit, with almost uncomfortable honesty, that faithful people have sometimes felt the very things we are ashamed to admit.
Psalm 77 belongs to the second kind.
It begins with a man praying, but there is nothing composed about his prayer.
“I cried unto God with my voice, even unto God with my voice; and he gave ear unto me. In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord: my sore ran in the night, and ceased not: my soul refused to be comforted.”
Asaph is not describing a small disappointment that passed after a good night’s sleep.
He is describing a season in which sorrow followed him into the night, where the very comforts that once might have helped could no longer reach him.
He says, “I remembered God, and was troubled: I complained, and my spirit was overwhelmed.”
Even the thought of God had become complicated.
I think sometimes we tend to imagine that remembering God should immediately make everything feel better.
Sometimes it does.
Yet, there are other seasons when thinking about God raises painful questions because we know what He is capable of, we know what He has promised about His character, and yet the circumstances in front of us seem to tell a story we cannot reconcile with what we believe.
Asaph knew that tension.
He says, “Thou holdest mine eyes waking: I am so troubled that I cannot speak.”
Anyone who has lain awake with a burden understands something of that verse.
There comes a point where you have already turned the situation over in your mind from every possible direction, prayed until your words begin repeating themselves, and wondered whether there is anything left to say.
Then he begins looking backward.
“I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient times. I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart: and my spirit made diligent search.”
And this is where the questions begin.
They are startlingly direct.
“Will the Lord cast off for ever?”
“Will he be favourable no more?”
“Is his mercy clean gone for ever?”
“Doth his promise fail for evermore?”
“Hath God forgotten to be gracious?”
“Hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?”
Those are not small questions.
The Psalmist is wondering whether God has rejected him permanently, whether favor has ended, whether mercy has finally run out, whether God’s promise can somehow fail, whether the God who has always been gracious has ceased to be gracious, and whether anger has closed the door on compassion.
If somebody said those things in a church hallway today, I wonder how quickly we might try to correct them before we allowed them to finish.
We can become nervous around questions that sound too honest.
Yet God allowed these questions to remain in Scripture.
That does not mean every conclusion produced by pain is true.
Asaph himself will recognize that.
It does mean there is something deeply human about reaching a place where what we know about God and what we presently feel seem miles apart.
David knew that kind of place too.
Psalm 77 belongs to Asaph, but David, the man God described as “a man after mine own heart,” cried in Psalm 13:1, “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?”
David knew God had not literally forgotten him, yet there were moments when God’s silence felt so complete that forgotten was the only word his hurting heart knew how to use.
That matters to me.
There are seasons when Christians can feel almost guilty for being confused.
We tell ourselves that stronger faith would not ask why.
We assume mature believers should move through suffering with an answer ready for every ache.
Then we open the Bible and find Asaph asking whether mercy has disappeared, David wondering whether God has forgotten him, Job trying desperately to understand what had happened to his life, and men and women of faith praying words that sound remarkably like the things we whisper when nobody else is listening.
Questioning God in pain is part of the human experience.
What matters tremendously is what we do after the question.
That is where Psalm 77 turns.
After asking whether mercy has failed and whether God has forgotten how to be gracious, Asaph says:
“And I said, This was my infirmity: but I will remember the years of the right hand of the most High.”
There it is.
“But I will remember.”
Something shifts in him, although his circumstances have not necessarily changed.
The psalm does not tell us that the trouble vanished between one verse and the next.
There is no report that a messenger arrived with wonderful news or that the burden suddenly resolved itself.
Asaph changes what he is giving his mind to.
He recognizes that his present distress has begun interpreting God for him, and he deliberately reaches backward for what he knows.
“I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old.”
“I will meditate also of all thy work, and talk of thy doings.”
That is much more than positive thinking.
He is calling history as a witness against his present fear.
Pain had asked, “Has His mercy disappeared?”
Memory answered by bringing back every evidence that God had been merciful before.
Fear had wondered whether His promise had failed.
Asaph began considering what God had already done.
His emotions had produced the question, “Hath God forgotten to be gracious?”
Then he forced his mind to remember the years in which the right hand of the Most High had already proved otherwise.
There are seasons when we will have to do exactly that.
There will be moments when God’s goodness feels distant even though His character has not moved an inch.
There may be a prayer we have carried so long that we no longer know how to ask it without exhaustion.
A loss can remain tender long after everyone else has returned to ordinary life.
Something we believed God would do may never unfold the way we imagined, and disappointment can begin whispering dangerous things about Him if we allow the circumstances of one season to rewrite everything we already know.
In those places, memory becomes spiritual work.
We have to call things back.
There have been times in my own life when present pain had grown so loud that I needed to deliberately remember earlier chapters, because if I judged God entirely by the page I was presently living, I could have convinced myself He had changed.
He had not.
I was hurting.
Those are very different realities, although pain can make them difficult to separate.
That may be why Scripture gives us the language of encouraging ourselves in the Lord.
When David returned to Ziklag and found the city burned and the families taken captive, the men with him were so broken that they spoke of stoning him. First Samuel 30:6 says, “but David encouraged himself in the LORD his God.”
There are moments when somebody else can encourage us, and we should be grateful for those people.
But, more importantly there are moments when we have to know how to encourage ourselves in the Lord.
That requires having something stored away to remember.
We remember what God has done.
We remember how He carried us through another season we were once certain would crush us.
We remember prayers He answered that we have almost stopped thanking Him for because the answer became ordinary life.
We remember the times His provision came from a direction we never expected.
We remember who He has revealed Himself to be in His Word, especially when our feelings begin describing a God Scripture does not recognize.
Sometimes we have to speak truth back into our own soul.
Ephesians 5:19 says, “Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.”
I think we often read that communally, and certainly it belongs in the fellowship of believers, but I love the wording, “speaking to yourselves.”
There are days when your own heart needs preaching.
You may have to take a hymn you have sung for years and finally listen to the words as though your life depends upon believing them.
You may need to open a psalm and read it aloud because your mind has spent all morning rehearsing fear.
You may need to tell yourself, even through tears, what you know about God while waiting for your emotions to catch up.
That is part of faith too.
Faith has never required pretending everything feels wonderful.
Sometimes faith is a hurting person saying, “I do not understand what God is doing, but I remember who He has been.”
I think Asaph gives us permission to be honest enough to say that we are troubled while also showing us the danger of remaining forever inside the question.
There is a point where we have to turn.
He asked, “Will the Lord cast off for ever?”
Then he remembered.
He asked whether mercy had ended.
Then he remembered.
He wondered whether God had forgotten to be gracious, and eventually he brought his mind back under the testimony of everything God had already done.
By verse thirteen he says:
“Thy way, O God, is in the sanctuary: who is so great a God as our God?”
That is a remarkable distance to travel in thirteen verses.
The man who began the psalm unable to sleep and too troubled to speak has not received a complete explanation for his suffering, yet he has recovered his view of God.
Sometimes that is the answer we need before any other answer comes.
I have learned that there are questions God may not answer on my timetable, and perhaps some He will never explain fully on this side of eternity.
Still, I have enough history with Him to remember.
When I cannot understand His hand, I can remember His character.
When the present season feels barren, I can look backward and see places where He was faithful even when I could not recognize what He was doing at the time.
When my own heart begins asking whether His mercy has somehow reached its limit, I can remind myself how many times I have already lived on mercy I did not deserve.
There will probably come another season when I need to do this again.
That does not make me faithless.
It makes me human.
The danger comes when I begin treating the questions produced by a dark season as the final truth about God.
Asaph did not stay there.
He remembered.
Perhaps a friend reading this is in the middle of one of those nights where the mind will not settle and the heart has started asking things you would never say aloud at church.
Has God forgotten me?
Is He still good to me?
Did I misunderstand everything?
Will this ever change?
You are not the first believer to ask such things.
Do not be ashamed of the question, but do not build your house there either.
Go back.
Remember.
Call to mind the years of His right hand.
Tell yourself the stories you already know about His faithfulness.
Open His Word and allow truth to speak more loudly than the conclusions pain is trying to draw.
Encourage yourself in the Lord your God.
Speak to yourself in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs until the heart that could only see the present moment begins remembering that this present moment belongs to a much longer story.
Maybe the circumstances will change tomorrow.
Maybe they will take longer.
But while you wait, remember.
Because the God whose way Asaph finally recognized in the sanctuary is still the same God when the room is dark, the prayer remains unanswered, and the heart is asking questions it never expected to ask.
“I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old.”
Sometimes remembrance is how faith finds its footing again.
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