The question everyone is asking these days, 6 weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic is “how much longer?” How long til we flatten the curve, how long til we can re-start out economy? How long til we can visit and hug our kids and grand-kids, our elderly. How long until we can resume life like the social beings we are?

How long til we have a vaccine? We aren’t the first generation to wonder how much longer the unbearable is going to continue. 

The siege of Leningrad was 872 days and the Greeks held the city of Troy hostage for 10 years.  

The terrible civil war in Syria is now in its 9^th year and still raging.

How long can humans put up with intolerable confinement?

Eighteen times the book of Psalms asks this question “how long?” – and four of them are here in Psalm 13.

O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts,
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy have the upper hand?    Psalm 13:1-2

This is truly a lament psalm, marked by an honest, unvarnished cry to God about the anguish the poet is experiencing.  It is called a David psalm and it seems to express the character of Israel’s poet king, a man of great faith and passion, hostile enemies and often deep feelings of desolation. He is desperate for a return to normal.

In this psalm he cites five aspects of his desolation.

First, he feels God has forgotten him, even worse, God may be intentionally hiding his face.  Third, he is restless and distracted, his mind wrestling with conflicting thoughts, hopes and fears. (Have you ever felt like that?)

Fourth, sadness has numbed his heart – and this has been going on so long, he fears it is the new normal.  He can’t bear the thought of that. And in addition to his internal turmoil, he faces a growing hostility from his enemies.  That’s five.  He is desperate for God to intervene.

So David turns from lament to plead with God, but his pleas sounds more like a demand, the kind a child makes of a parent:

Turn and answer me, O Lord my God!
Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die.
Don’t let my enemies gloat and rejoice at my downfall.   Psalm 13:3-4

I love the audacity of David’s plea to God. It claims the right – or pleads the need for personal encounter.  ‘Please, God, I need a response, I need to know you’re real. I can’t live this way.’

And then the poem changes tone completely.  Nothing changes in his circumstances; his enemies haven’t backed off; his sorrow hasn’t lifted; his turmoil still rages, but the poet adopts a strategy of trust. Having named his distress and impatience, David now makes the choice to turn from it and throw himself on God.

But I trust in your unfailing love.
My heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord
because he has been good to me.   Psalm 13:5-6

This is a sheer act of faith.  He takes hold of two pillars of God’s goodness: his unfailing love – the Hebrew word ‘hesed’ is one of David’s favorite words (and mine too); it means God’s faithful ever-constant love. David throws his entire heart and soul onto that pillar to stabilize him in his turmoil.

And the second pillar is God’s salvation, the whole Biblical story of God as a Rescuer, all the occasions of God’s saving action, both in the nation’s history and in his own experience.  Salvation is God’s action to free his people from evil, from enemies and from themselves. David says I have tasted God’s goodness in the past and I am going to trust him with my intolerable present and face the future with joy and hope.

Professor N. T. Wright says in his book The Case for the Psalms,

“The Psalms teach us to pray and sing at the intersection of the times – of our time and God’s time. We are given these psalms so that we can pray them ourselves out of our own impatience.” .

N. T. Wright

I hope the words of Psalm 13 will help you today to pray at this intersection of your history and God’s, trusting God’s timeless, faithful love to help you endure however long you have to wait.

To watch the video of this post see YouTube – Those Amazing Psalms