The time eventually comes for an all-systems failure. You have nursed your car for 250,000 miles with only minor repairs and maintenance—brakes, tires, an alternator—but then, one after another, all the dominoes tumble: Engine blows, transmission cracks, the exhaust falls out. This car will not live again. The upkeep on your house has been manageable for years. Yet when you are out, the hot-water heater blows, flooding everything, which exposes a cracked foundation, major termite damage, and mold throughout. You practically have to rebuild.

And in due course, such a widespread breakdown happens to us: hands shaking, digestion broken, lungs cancer filled, skin rash covered, mind gone, and heart feeble. Death imposes on us an all-systems failure that can torment us in our final months and be one of the worse things we suffer. This total collapse springs on the psalmist directly from the hand of God, which leaves us searching to see if any hope remains.

If you were to set this psalm to music, there is no mystery about what sort of tune you should pick—a sad one, the notes and tempo of a dirge. This is not a happy psalm but a traumatic and grief-stricken one. In most laments of the psalter, there are at least a verse or two of confidence in the Lord, rejoicing in deliverance, or vows to praise, but Psalm 38 lacks any clear expressions of such positives. A few verses are not quite as dark as the others—a sort of indirect light—but no unclouded light shines forth. And the reason why hits us in the first verse, as the Lord is judging in wrath.

The psalmist pleads that God would stop rebuking him in anger, which is the most horrific experience in the cosmos. In the Old Testament, there are two different methods of judgment. The first is to be judged in justice, which is an individual punishment tempered by large doses of mercy and compassion. Such is a fatherly correction to work sanctification in the end. The second, though, is judgment by wrath that roars forth without leniency or mercy. The furious justice of the Lord devours without pity, destroying sinners and vindicating his holiness. As it says elsewhere, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living and holy God (Heb 10:31). A sinner in the palms of an angry God—it is not possible to imagine a more terrifying thing, and this is where the psalmist has fallen.

Therefore, he begs for mercy under the pitiless cloud of fury. Please, Lord, do not rebuke me in wrath. Or better, stop judging me in anger. The punishment is in full operation. The arrows of God have already pierced the psalmist; he is a pincushion for the darts of the Almighty. Also, the hand of the Most High has come down on him, squishing him into the heat like a smash burger. And God shooting his arrows adorns him as a warrior, acting the enemy toward the psalmist, which is another tell-tale sign of judgment absent all compassion.

The question is, though, Why is the Lord so hostile to the psalmist? Why is His holy wrath inflamed? Has the psalmist been swept up in a corporate judgment against Israel as whole, but he is innocent? Or, has the psalmist broken the law himself? The answer jumps off the page. God’s indignation devours because of “my sin” (Ps 38:3). He confesses his guilt numerous times: My iniquities pass over my head like a flashflooding river. He confesses his iniquity and is sorry for his sin. It is unmistakable. He feels the agony of wrath not for someone else’s sin but for his own. The psalmist is guilty of transgressions.

Even though there are these clear confessions, the actual law violations are lacking. No commandment is cited to condemn the psalmist for murder, adultery, idolatry, or oppression. With David as the author, we are not able to locate this psalm of confession within his story. There are no clear links to the debacles with Bathsheba, Amnon, Absalom, or the census taking. His specific crime(s) do not matter; David fully admits that he sinned and God’s wrath is judging him for his iniquities. This psalm is not about general hardships or innocent persecution. This flexes with the wages of sin, the terrifying wrath of the Holy One.

And the hand of anger has fallen hard! Note the long description of the psalmist’s torment, particularly how it has wrecked his body, his whole self. As punishment, the Lord inflicted the psalmist with ailments, disease, and injuries from head to toe. Starting at the top, sins flood over his head. He is drowning, and each breath is labored as if it could be his last. His eyes lose their light, showing that life is draining from him and his vision has gone blurry with growing dark spots. The ears and mouth are next to fail. As though he is deaf, he cannot hear. He opens his mouth, but, like a mute, no words come out. The pain then spills down into his torso. The pounds of his transgression weigh him down, being too heavy for him. His spine bends and twists like a corkscrew; he hunches with a hump. Open wounds and sores bleed and go rancid. His injuries are foul and festering, reeking of death, with the stench of gangrene. He yet breathes, but he smells like a rotting corpse.

Hence, he wanders and roams around with strength gone, in constant pain, and blackened skin. At a distance, he appears to have rolled around in ashes, but as you get closer, you realize that it is a rash. The agony has also permeated to his bones, robbing him of all peace and relief. He feels like armies of germs are warring within his very skeleton. The torment has also attacked his loins. His groin is on fire; he is burning up below the belt. Finally, the misery bored its way into his feet. Unsteady and frail, he is on the edge of falling every second. Swollen and with broken arches, his feet can barely hold him up. Clearly God’s wrath has sickened and racked with pain the psalmist from crown to claw. Twice he moans, “There is no soundness in my flesh” (vv. 3, 7). Not an ounce of health remains, but infirmities plague every bodily system.

Moreover, the reach of this judicial trauma extends beyond the body into the soul. His mental health goes unsound as well. As he states in verse 8, his heart, or mind, is in tumult. Inside his skull, a heavy metal music concert is raging; it is all noise, and he cannot turn down the decibels. Likewise, his heart throbs; his mind reels and jitters violently. Such loud turmoil in the brain is the headache of anxiety, the searing migraine of depression, which severs the cords of sanity. A quivering mind is a panic attack causing a mental breakdown. The hammer beats of wrath are driving the psalmist into madness.

This is an all-systems shutdown with every organ failing, pain unceasing, and depression causing insanity. And all these wounds of God are crystal clear heralds of sin. No guesswork required. No speculation needed. All doubt and mystery is removed. The psalmist suffers as punishment for his iniquity. He lives under the law, and the law is firing on all cylinders. The wages of sin are death, and death hunts this sinner. We find ourselves recoiling at the horror of it all. How could things get worse? And yet, they do.

As the psalmist decays on his deathbed, as he wanders around half dead like a senile old man, the community gangs up on him. You would think that being in dire misery would earn him some pity, but it does not. First, his enemies see an opportunity to strike. Haters lay snares and traps for him. They dig potholes in the path for this decrepit man with a walker. They yell doom at him, spit deception, and mock him as a Helen Keller felon.

Moreover, these foes are strong and numerous. A horde of strong men oppose David; they charge and accuse him for doing good. They repay his good with misery. Note that even though the psalmist has sinned in some way or another, he still pursues good and has done some good. The psalmist is not some unbelieving pagan who does only evil but a saint with good inclinations who fell into sin.

Yet for hateful enemies to kick you while you are down is not out of the ordinary. The animosity that the psalmist deals with, though, hails not just from far off but from up close (Ps 38:12). His friends and lovers stand back from his plague. His intimate kinsfolk abandoned him. Literally, friends, lovers, and intimates abandon the psalmist. His lifelong buddies will not come to see him. Kids and parents pretend he does not exist. Even his wife will not have anything to do with him. One of the few comforts of your hospice bed, beside the morphine, is to have your loved ones around you to hold your hand, to offer spiritual encouragement. To tell you before you close your eyes that they love you and are thankful for you. But these deathbed consolations have been banished by wrath. Judged for sin, denied mercy, opposed by foes, and abandoned by loved ones—the ingredients of this recipe bake up the Frankenstein cake of despair and agony. Can the psalmist be anything but a lost cause? We will discover the answer in part 2.

©Zach Keele. All Rights Reserved.

You can find the whole series here.

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Post authored by:

• Zach Keele

  

  Rev. Zachary Keele grew up on a ranch in a small town named Crawford, Colorado. He attended Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and received his Master of Divinity from Westminster Seminary California. He has served as the pastor of Escondido OPC since 2006.

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