If you are anything like me, waiting in line is really hard for you. Some of my more frustrating experiences are when I see no forward motion in the line I am waiting in. As you are waiting for your turn to get to the counter, you can even see the end of the line; but for some reason the turnaround rate is incredibly low. When I stay in the same spot indefinitely, waiting to get even one step forward in progress, that bubbling irritation of impatience starts to well up inside me.

As Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part. Psalm 130:5–6 gets at this reality: “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.” The night watchman has a difficult task. He must keep guard until morning breaks. In the same way, in hard seasons we wait to see the end of our time of burden when the Lord’s light cracks the dark night of the soul. Nevertheless, the night watchman has the relief of knowing that morning is coming and about how long morning will take to come. If you know how long your trouble will last, you can often grit your teeth through the trial until relief arrives.

Waiting is harder when you do not know when the end of that trouble will come. Enduring a struggle of uncertain length weighs heavier than if we have some sense that our trouble has a set expiration date. The uncertainty is arguably the harder aspect of the problem. That waiting is the hardest part.

In Psalm 13, David reflects upon that struggle of uncertainty. We find him at the breaking point, cracking because he does not know how long he must wait to see the streaks of dawn’s light crack the hard night. This prayer considers not only what it is like to go through hard times as we walk with the Lord, but also what it is like when it seems that our struggles have gone on longer than we expect God would let them. That is when that question starts setting in: How long, O Lord? Is this a temporary trial or an unending one?

The main point is that trust in God’s steadfast love is the only cure for the desperation that sinks in amidst struggles of seemingly unending length.

A Grouping of Prayers

The Psalter is a book about the king of God’s people and what it is like to walk with God as the nations rage against his king. Although each psalm stands on its own to help us distinctly in some way, they also hang together as a book that starts somewhere, goes somewhere, and ends somewhere. They develop to tell a story and to make a point that grows as we read and sing this book. In that respect, the Psalms instruct us in the godly response to the full spectrum of experience and emotion that we encounter in the Christian life. They teach us about how to walk with God in the ups and downs of all that the world throws at us.

Within that whole big book, smaller groups also belong together. Psalms 9–14 are a group of five prayers, followed by one wider reflection on the general human condition. These repeats the same pattern of five prayers and a reflection that we saw in Psalms 3–8. In this run, we are learning more pointedly that the Christian life has its prominent ups and downs.

The whole stretch of Psalms 9–14 is about the faithless and godless attacking the righteous. The arrangement shows how we feel the force of that opposition differently at different times. In Psalm 9, we saw a strong statement of confidence. That confidence cracked in Psalm 10. Psalm 11 takes us back up to the solid place of trust that God’s faithfulness makes doubt seem foolish. Psalm 12 sees another dip in that fortitude.

As a surprise twist to that up and down pattern, Psalm 13 stays down and even intensifies that sense of desperation.¹ One commentator summarizes: “Faced with the faithless and their attacks, if Psalm 11 manifests cool confidence and Psalm 12 a wrestling for confidence in Yhwh’s word, Psalm 13 arises out of deep sense of abandonment, even though it ends in confidence.”²

The pattern of the Christian life is not always simply up and down, up and down. Sometimes it is up, down, down, and any mix of those challenges. How do we navigate those dynamics of the Christian life before the Lord? That this song was given to us and kept for use in singing as God’s people shows that God wants to encourage afflicted believers when we might feel that he has abandoned us and we are at our wits’ end.³

Psalm 14 as the Experiential Side of Psalm 2

Psalm 14 confirms that point about the experience of ups and downs in the Christian life as it rounds out this section within Book I of the Psalter. Psalm 14 will show us that the developing point of the Psalms is still grounded in that reality of Psalm 2.⁴ Psalm 2 provided a guiding idea of the Psalter as it began by asking, “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?” (Ps 2:1) The question points to the futility of striving against God. Psalm 14 gives another vantage on the same idea by stating, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps 14:1). The foolishness of living as if God is not real corresponds to the same notion that the nations act in vain as they rage against God and his messianic king.

The Lord sees the godless play out their ways on earth as he judges from heaven. “The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God” (Ps 14:2). This action corresponds to Psalm 2:4–6: “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, ‘As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill.’”

The parallels continue. In Psalm 14:5–6, God describes his judgment on the fools who try to live without him: “There they are in great terror, for God is with the generation of the righteous. You would shame the plans of the poor, but the Lord is his refuge.” This judgment on the wicked relates to the Father’s promises to the Son in Psalm 2:8–9: “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” Whereas Psalm 14 observes what plays out for the wicked on the earthly plane, Psalm 2 describes its grounding in God’s decree on the heavenly plane.

Psalm 2 and Psalm 14 look at the same phenomena from two sides. Psalm 2 provided the heavenly perspective on how God perceives the futility of raging nations. Psalm 14 speaks with the psalmist’s own voice about how he knows that God will come through. He remembers the sure promises of Psalm 2 and so assesses what is happening around him in light of that reality.

Psalm 14, as the end of this smaller grouping of psalms in Psalm 3–14, brings us back up to the high note. Although realistic and not overly triumphalist, it still reflects upon the coming reality that God will bless his people and protect them from the raging nations. Further, Psalm 14 may have been of special help to God’s people while they were in exile.⁵ That use may explain exactly why we find it placed after Psalm 13, which reflects upon extended times of hardship. Ultimately, however, God will show the godless to have been foolish, no matter how it looked as things played out in history.

Psalm 13 as Waiting for Confidence

Why is Psalm 13 the extra down note in this grouping of psalms? It shows us that sometimes we have to wait longer than we would have imagined or expected for relief to come. The Christian life often has a normal up-down-up-down experience, as seen in Psalms 9–12. Sometimes, however, we also endure an up-down-down experience, as seen in Psalms 11–13. Psalm 13 gives us words for when we cannot see light at the end of the tunnel.

Psalm 13 also reminds us that these difficulties still take place within the sphere of God’s promises. Even when the experience of hardship lingers longer than we think we can handle, we cannot forget that we are under God’s watchful eye. Our experience in Psalm 13 takes place at the same time as God’s vigilance in Psalm 14. We are always in his care. We learn to look to him to restore our confidence that his promises will come true and that he has not abandoned us.

Notes

1. John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries, 22 vol. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 4.2:181.
2. John Goldingay, Psalms, 3 vols., Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006–8), 1:204.
3. Allen P. Ross, A Commentary on the Psalms, 3 vol. (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic Press, 2011–16), 1:362.
4. Ross, Psalms, 1:381.
5. Ross, Psalms, 1:383.

© Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

You can find this whole series here.

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Post authored by:

• Harrison Perkins

  

  Harrison Perkins (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast; MDiv, Westminster Seminary California) is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), a member of the of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, a Senior Research Fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards, associate online instructor in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, a visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and author of Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction.

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