In Psalms, chapter eighty-eight, verse eighteen, some regard this as the saddest of all Psalms. The supplicant has suffered much, as in verse three, perhaps as a leper in verse eight. He feels that he is nearing death and that God has rejected him, as in verses seven, fourteen, sixteen through eighteen. He has cried out day and night unto God and appears to have received no answer, as in verses one through two and thirteen. He is dejected and has little hope.
Yet in faith, he will not let go of God; he confesses that the Lord is still his salvation, as in verse one. The psalmist’s experience is much like Job, though not told the reason behind the suffering and God’s apparent silence. This psalm reveals that God occasionally permits times of sadness and despair in a believer’s life. It is a dark experience when there is no apparent reason for our problems, and God seems far away. Throughout some suffering experiences, the mystery of a few will remain until we are with God in heaven. In the meantime, faith in God as our salvation and our right relationship with Him is essential to get us through. And we never forget that in the final analysis, as in Romans eight, verses thirty-eight to thirty-nine, “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
The theme chapter is a prayer psalm, facing difficult circumstances until it’s hard to bear. “Hear my prayer, O LORD, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were,” as in Psalms thirty-nine, verse twelve.