The “lament” psalms are a group of psalms that grieve, and or complain, expressing deep sorrow for the travails of a person or nation (Israel). The psalms also ask for God’s blessing or intervention.
We find few psalms with a happy disposition. Many are laments, which grumble to God about some experience of trouble, which also meditates on our suffering and our negative emotions, such as anger and fear.
In these series of lessons, we will explore four types of lament psalms.
Communal: 12, 44, 58, 60, 74, 79, 80, 83, 85, 89, 90, 94, 123, 126, 129
Individual: 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 17, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 36, 39, 40:12-17, 41, 42, 43, 52, 53,
54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 64, 70, 71, 77, 86, 89, 120, 130, 139, 141, 142Penitential: 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 143
Imprecatory (judging or cursing one’s enemies): 35, 69, 83, 88, 109, 137, 140
The bolded psalms are ones we will study in our survey.
The Lament Psalms as Prayer (Their Value, part 1)
These psalms show us how we learn to pray as we face our troubles with God. They consist of individual, standard parts, which each psalm combines in various ways. First, we find the psalm speaks to God. He is usually invoked by His holy name and addressed in what follows. God’s name prevents the complaint from becoming a self-indulgent act of rebellion or a sentimental exercise in self-pity, for His name involves and brings Him into that person’s trouble.
Second, we find the complaint itself, which is often full of raw anger and hostility. This part often predominates the psalm. The complaint usually goes in three directions:
- The person may describe his distress in vivid imagery, which is still general enough to suit any circumstance from sickness to public disgrace.
- He may either confess his guilt or protest his innocence. A shift now takes place, describing the injuries suffered at the hand of his enemies. From there, the psalm may delve into a biting description of these enemies in all their demonic malice.
- The person also may direct his complaint against God for His dereliction of duty. It is not as if God is the source of the evil that has come to the psalmist, though it may have come to him as an act of God’s judgment. The psalmist often complains that despite God’s promises, He has either abandoned him or decided to do nothing to help him in his dire need. God has failed to keep His promises.
We do well when we study these psalms, for they are the seedbeds of prayer. In them, we learn we can get emotional with God and cry out to Him. They pour out the bitterness in our hearts to God and vent our anger as we argue with Him. They refuse to accept disaster as the proper condition of God’s people and so protest against it with fervor.
In these psalms, we find no calm resignation in the face of misery. These complaints expose the disparity between God’s promises of protection and the experience of feeling abandoned by Him. By their vivid portrayal of trouble, they appeal to God’s compassion, His justice in the face of injustice, and His grace in the face of His wrath.
Contrary to the evidence of experience, these laments assume that God is still involved with His people in their trouble and remains committed to them. They take God at His Word, refusing to stay silent until He intervenes and deals with the calamity. We can learn from these psalms about the art of protesting to God about the misery and injustice around us, as individuals and community.
These laments ask God for help.
- This help may be in the form of a prayer against an enemy, hidden within a wish instead of a demand. In them, the psalmist, who had previously voiced his anger at his humiliation and experience of injustice, expresses a yearning for vengeance and gives his injury to God, expecting Him to act on his behalf.
- By doing so, the person gives up the right to avenge himself against his enemies. Then, once he has handed the matter over to God, he no longer has the right to take revenge. In a sense, this giving over to God is like forgiveness, lifting a burden away, giving it to God. The emotional burden of wanting vengeance no longer weighs you down, eating at you from the inside out.
As Christians, we are often squeamish about using these psalms as prayers. Didn’t Jesus tell us to forgive our enemies and pray for them (Matthew 5:43-48). Yes!
Still, if we discard them all together, we may not be able to get rid of our deep-seated hostility against those who have injured us, combat the compulsion to take revenge, and deal with the injustice in this world. In balance, the New Testament also teaches us that we may ask God to grant justice (Luke 18:7) and avenge His people (Revelation 6:10). We need both in our arsenal: venting through metaphorical vindication before being able to forgive.
We also find praise within these laments. No matter how terrible the condition may be, the psalmist never stops praising God. Why? He anticipates God’s deliverance in his thanksgiving for what God will yet do rather than for what He has done.
The psalmist also promises to praise God after his deliverance and to tell others about God’s help in his trouble. This praise often includes a call for the community to join in. The person, earlier alienated from the congregation by his troubles, is now reintegrated into it by joining in its praises.
Deliverance results in one’s faith being confirmed and leads to a renewed thanks to God. This part of the psalm expresses the reflective truth that we learn to praise God in and through the experience of trouble. (Who want to hear that?!) The worse the trouble, the greater the deliverance and the richer the resulting praise.
These psalms may also include short confession of faith: Who God is and what He does. These confessions are rooted in God’s character as expressed in His name, God’s saving deeds in the history of His people, and His promises to them.
Confession works in two ways.
- It motivates and guides the psalmist in his complaints about his troubles, his prayers against his enemies, and his pleas for help.
- It also affirms the faith of the psalmist, which has been tested and confirmed by his experience of distress.
The Poetry of the Psalms
The Psalms are all poetry. So, if we do not read them as poetry, we are reading them improperly. What God wants us to receive in the psalms are not dusty facts, taken in as a science book, but imagery, sounds, meter, repetition—all meant to touch us in a deeper way than mere information. Poetry intensifies the human experience, for both the poet and the hearer.
Biblical poetry grounds itself on a parallelism of meaning, where two ideas are repeated, further developed, or contrasted. Sometimes, instead of two lines, a couplet, we may find a three-part stanza, a triplet.
Hebrew poetry does not use rhyme, though we do find an occasional rhyme here or there.
Here’s the irony of studying biblical poetry. Such poems are not meant to be analyzed but received. Something about poetry evades scientific inquiry and critical investigation—but without doing so, that which came naturally to the Hebrew native speaker will elude us. Further, the poetic “feel” does not often come across well in our translations, shunting the poetic force from having its way with us.
So, we are forced to study the poetry of these lament psalms to value them and adopt them as our own.
Intensification
In Psalm 6, one of the “lament” psalms we will be studying, we find a more common or general term for an idea appears in the first part of a couplet; in the second, we find a more unusual Hebrew word, a stronger word, sharpening the thought made earlier. It may be a metaphor for the previous word in first part of the couplet, carrying with it the vividness or heightening involved in figurative language. This building of momentum from verse to verse is part of the power of biblical poetry.
Psalm 6:2:
Have mercy on me, O Yahweh, for I am spent,
heal me, O Yahweh, for my limbs are stricken.
We find the second line repeating an idea, but also further developing it. The abstract, “Have mercy on me,” becomes the physical, “heal me.” The general condition of misery, “for I am spent,” now becomes concrete, “for my limbs are stricken.”
Giving us a sense of God
Psalm 90, another “lament” psalm we will study, helps us sense beyond our intellect the overwhelming disparity between God in eternity (outside of time) and our brief experience of life within the bounds of time.
Psalm 90:4:
For a thousand years in Your eyes
are but as yesterday gone,
like a watch in the night.
This triplet uses time as a metaphor for eternity to give us a vision of it from God’s perspective. As something shrunk and gone, the poem takes us from a thousand years to a yesterday already vanished, to one watch in the night, four hours long. The time metaphor helps us sense the extent of eternity using ideas we can understand.
Imagery
Psalm 90 also abounds with images to help express what is beyond our grasp. We find such imagery as a watch in the night, a dream after waking, grass that sprouts and dies, a sigh (90:4-6, 9)—all applied to the swiftness of human life.
Contrast
“Antithetical parallelism” brings out an idea and then contrasts it.
Ps 32:10:
Many are the torments of the wicked,
but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in Yahweh.
Here the psalm puts “torments” side by side with “steadfast love” and contrasts “the wicked” with “those who trust in Yahweh.” Opposite ideas are heightened by having the starkness of one standing next to the other.
The Value of the Lament Psalms, Part 2
Meditations on our trouble confront us with what we are suffering and how it impacts us. They confront us with those experiences that, we think, contradict what we believe. For we are all “theologians of glory”: If I am following God, shouldn’t He reward me and keep me from suffering? With such a theology, we lose the way of the cross.
Through these lament psalms, we confront our “theology of glory” and learn to take God at His Word and hold Him to His promises. They look for God’s light in the face of darkness, for His grace in the face of His wrath, His justice in the face of injustice, and His help in the face of trouble. Instead of assuming something is wrong with the faith of people who wonder “why?”, these psalms of lament help give voice to the anguish in our hearts.
When life is going well, it’s easy to recognize the hand of God and to believe in His goodness. Not so when the bottom falls out of our lives. Surrounded by darkness, our eyes often fail to recognize His goodness. That’s when we need the eyes of faith most of all, eyes that see Him at work with us, bringing good out of evil and life through death.
When Christians fail to voice their frustration in the face of sickness or death, they open the door to spiritual temptation. We experience this in the form of despair, unbelief, or other shame and vice, including resentment and bitterness, which undermines our faith in God’s goodness and salvation.
These psalms can lead us to recognize this through the experience of the psalm writers who also endured affliction, not like stoic heroes, but by voicing their fear and frustration. They went to God’s throne of grace as children of the heavenly Father, unburdening their hearts with all the boldness and confidence of dear children who ask their dear Father.
We often find healing when we let the feeling or longing for revenge come out into the open—if we then give it to God! Faith, trusting God will do what is right at the proper time, allows us to surrender our blood lust for revenge to Him. “Vengeance belongs to me [God]; I will repay” (Deuteronomy 32:35). “Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay,” says the Lord (Romans 12:19).
These Psalms can teach those who suffer illness or face death an approach to prayer that unburdens the contents of their heart to a merciful and loving God. Then, we can find comfort amid distress, light in the gloom of darkness, and healing even in sickness and death. These Psalms direct our eyes of faith—not to speculate on what we are experiencing and what that may mean—but to the unseen things of God as He reveals them under cover of the opposite.
In Jesus, we learn that God shows His strength in weakness, His peace in turmoil, His comfort in distress, and He gives His life under cover of death. In the cross of His only Son, our Lord has destroyed death in His death and brought life and immortality to light.
In the end, even the lament psalms point us to Christ. We will also explore this messianic facet of these psalms, through Psalm 6, 32, 44, 51, 88, 90, 130, 143. As a bonus, if pastor’s language skills are not too atrophied, and he has time, we will explore these psalms using his translations as he prepares these lessons.
