Psalm 13: How Long? (Part 2)—Our Deep Need For God’s Rescue

by on January 11, 2025 | 2 Comments

Psalm 13 is about how to navigate waiting before God. The Psalter functions at least in part to instruct us about the godly response to the full spectrum of experience and emotion that we encounter in the Christian life. Psalm 13 considers how we should respond when it seems like our trouble is unending and we see that God must come through for us.

What do we do when it seems like God has delayed far longer than we can bear to go without him? How should we respond to such trials? Should we be stoic and pretend as though nothing has phased us? Or should we entirely melt down? Psalm 13 charts the way between our emotional Scylla and Charybdis options. The way of Psalm 13 is to recognize our hardship and bring it to the Lord who is able to help us.

Our Search

When we come to the text of Psalm 13, the dominant note of the whole passage is that opening phrase, “How long?”1 As is the case with so many psalms, we do not know for certain what the specific context was in which David wrote Psalm 13. Nonetheless, this psalm is clearly a lament during a serious time of trouble.2David’s heart is on his sleeve as he comes before the Lord in verses 1–2:

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I take counsel in my soul

and have sorrow in my heart all the day?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Four times in a short space of words, David repeats, “How long?” He felt as though the time of his need for the Lord’s help had drug on without the sort of response he thought he needed. He languished in this hardship. It felt like God had forgotten him; it felt like God’s face was pointed in another direction, that God was letting sorrow and enemies overtake him.

The next stanza shows us how we should respond when we feel the same. David proves a model of not giving up on trusting the Lord. Given his dire circumstances, in verses 3–4, David calls on God to end the time of waiting:

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;

light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,

lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”

lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

David’s request was that God might give light to his eyes and protect him from death and enemies. The running theme here is divinely granted victory.

This second stanza relates to the first by showing us what we ought to do when we feel like God has gone too long without dealing with our trials. We are supposed to continue seeking after him. A time never comes when the right response is to give up on God.

David knew that God cares about his glory. A theme throughout the Old Testament is that God ties his honor to the fortunes of his people. If God’s people were defeated, it would seem as though the nations had triumphed over the true God. The Lord will not let his glory be tarnished. So, David appeals to the God’s glory as good reason to end this period of tribulation: God’s provision of victory would undermine any claim to victory that someone else could make, showing God to be the great champion for his people.

But the punchline is in verses 5–6 where David states that he continued to trust God and to rejoice in his salvation even though his struggles linger on.

But I have trusted in your steadfast love;

my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

I will sing to the Lord,

because he has dealt bountifully with me.

Despite his troubles, David still had great reason to sing. In these hard times, our search is for God to show us these reasons for joy. He makes himself known as the kind God who deals bountifully with those who belong to him. Some moments make that reality harder to see. Nevertheless, our search must always be for the joy and provision that comes from God himself.

Our Struggle

How does this psalm apply to us today? We see how it grew out of an ongoing situation of opposition from enemies. Despite the great unlikelihood that readers of this space will have armies coming after you, what help might this passage still offer us?

This psalm teaches us how to press forward when God does not always remove our burdens exactly when we think that reprieve is necessary. It is a lesson in accepting and trusting God even when his providence is hard. Those moments of hard providence will come to each of us, if they have not already.

That application deserves further attention. Sometimes things hang over us for what feels like far too long. Although our circumstances could change, we cannot see how or when. We may have to accept that not everything we yearn to be changed will change. Maybe we have an ongoing disease. Maybe we have hardship in our family. Maybe we are single and have hoped for a relationship. Maybe we are married and hoping for children, but so far have been unable to have any. These difficulties often weigh incredibly heavy on people’s hearts as they hope for change. In these examples, change may well be a possibility.

On the other hand, sometimes life hands us difficult cards that are really hard and will not change. Some kinds of health issues cannot be undone. Death is permanent until Christ returns. The sadness around some losses in life cannot be rolled back when those losses are particularly hard. We may have a hardship, challenge, or difficulty that is not going to go away. Some burdens will not be removed, a reality that some of you know.

In either sort of case, we have to reckon with how we will press forward. We may call out to God about how long we have to wait for the light of dawn to break. We might also have to accept that our situation may not change. If that be the case, we have to work to accept providence and trust God that he knows best how to care for us and what we can handle.

Although this leadup has probably sounded negative, it does arrive at an encouragement. Although this psalm is about feeling like God is waiting too long to come your aid, its presence in holy Scripture shows that God cares very deeply about your ongoing struggles even when you feel like he is far away. Believer, God has given you Psalm 13 because he wants you to have words to pray to him when you feel abandoned. He wanted you to have these words to pray in those seasons so that you would know he has not abandoned you. Our struggle may stay with us. But God will stay with us too.

Our Savior

How does this psalm point us to Christ? First, it is one of those psalms that Christ himself could have prayed directly. As he suffered at the hands of sinful leaders and rulers who punished and executed him, a fitting question would have asked how long God would let his enemies prevail against him. To some degree, even while his body rested in the grave and his soul was in heaven with the Father, when, at least on earth, it appeared like his enemies had defeated him, he could have prayed this psalm.

This psalm points us to how Christ persevered through all the humiliation that he endured so that he could rescue us. He knew, as David said in verses 5–6, that the Father would eventually come through for him with the fulfillment of good things.

We also know that Christ is the reason why we can have the same hope as that which David expressed in the end of this psalm. God has provided reasons for us to rejoice now. And eventually, even if after this life, he will lift all our burdens from us.

Christ did suffer the Father’s abandonment on the cross as he died in place of sinners. That death which we deserved secured the forgiveness of our sins. It secured our place in the life to come so that even if hard providences last our whole life here, we have hope before us and cause for rejoicing. Because of our Savior, we know that God always considers us, always answers us, will never let us stay forever in the sleep of death, and will fill our hearts with rejoicing even amidst suffering, a rejoicing we could know only by the joy of belonging to Christ.

Notes

  1. Allen P. Ross, A Commentary on the Psalms, 3 vol. (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic Press, 2011–16), 1:364.
  2. Ross, Psalms, 1:362.

© Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

You can find this whole series here.

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