Psalm 88: Darkness Is My Closest Friend

Psalm 88 is the darkest prayer in the Bible, and it is in the Bible on purpose. Almost every other lament in the Psalter has a turn: a "yet," a "but," a moment when the singer pivots from grief to trust. Psalm 13 does it. Psalm 22 does it. Psalm 42 does it. Psalm 88 does not. The singer cries to God day and night (v1), recounts the closeness of the grave (vv3-7), describes friends withdrawing (v8), pleads with arguments (vv10-12), confesses lifelong suffering (v15), and ends, in the Hebrew, with the word "darkness." The BSB renders the last line, "darkness is my closest friend." The Hebrew literally says "my companions are in darkness" or "darkness has become my familiar one." Either way, there is no resolution. The lights do not come up. The credits roll on a sufferer still in the dark. And the Holy Spirit chose to put this in the canon.

Heman the Ezrahite is named in the superscription, and 1 Kings 4:31 lists him among the wisest men of his generation, alongside Solomon. This is no marginal voice. The wisest men in Israel knew that wisdom included nights when wisdom did not work. The psalm complains in the most Israelite way possible: it argues with God using temple categories. "Do you show your wonders to the dead? Do those who are dead rise up to praise you? Is your hesed declared in the grave?" (vv10-11). The pre-resurrection Israelite did not yet have a developed theology of life beyond Sheol. So the singer is telling God, in effect: keep me alive, because in the grave my praise stops. The arguments fail. God does not answer in the psalm. And yet the singer keeps praying, every day (v13).

Pastorally, this is one of the most important psalms in the Bible for anyone in the long dark. People in clinical depression, in terminal illness, in bereavement that does not lift, in chronic pain, in the wreckage of trauma, often feel that their experience is not allowed in church, that real Christians always come around to praise within the same prayer. Psalm 88 says no. The God of Israel inspired a prayer that ends in darkness and put it in the hymnbook. The Korahite choirmasters sang it. Sufferers who feel they must perform a turn to praise to be acceptable can put down that performance. The turn may come tomorrow, or in a year, or, for some, only on the other side of death. In the meantime, this psalm is a prayer they can pray with the canon's blessing.

The Christian reader will notice that the only voice in Scripture who fully shared this darkness with no premature resolution is Christ in Gethsemane and on the cross. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" is a different psalm (Psalm 22), but the felt reality of Psalm 88, of God hidden, friends absent, life closing, is the felt reality of Holy Saturday. Some early Christian commentators read Psalm 88 as the prayer of the buried Christ. Modern readers do not have to settle that interpretation to feel the weight: the canon contains a prayer that does not turn, because the Lord himself walked through the unturned valley. If you are praying this psalm tonight, you are not outside the company of Christ. You are with him in the only place he could not be talked out of. The psalm does not promise a sunrise; it promises that prayer in the dark is still prayer, and that the God who inspired this song has not abandoned the singer of it.