The brutal honesty of Psalm 77 has always captured me.
The Psalmist is crying out to God for help. He is distressed. He can not even sleep at night. Whatever pain he was facing, whatever tragedy he was walking through, whatever was breaking his heart, it was causing him to ask the most honest of questions:
"Will the Lord reject forever?
Will he never show his favor again?
Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
Has his promise failed for all time?
Has God forgotten to be merciful?
Has he in anger withheld his compassion?"
Have you been there? When the darkness is so overwhelming that you begin to wonder if God is there? You think that maybe this time he has failed. He has broken his promise. He has overlooked you. He is tardy. He has failed to uphold his end of the bargain. He has disappointed you. He has left you broken. Perhaps he doesn't even exist?
The Psalmist is there.
But suddenly he does something wild. In the middle of the Psalm, he pauses. He begins to run the highlight films in his mind of how God has worked in the past.
"Your path led through the sea,
your way through the mighty waters,
though your footprints were not seen."
It's the story of Moses and the Israelites in the desert with their backs to the sea and the Egyptian army crashing in on them. Everyone thought it was over. They felt that God had betrayed them. (Read the story and hear them cry out in fear!)
Who would have thought that the sea which kept them trapped was about to become their way of escape? You don't look at the ocean and see a way through on foot.
But God did. And he still does today.
It's okay to cry out to God. It's okay to ask him those doubtful questions. It's okay to express what you are truly thinking. But remember the history of your great God. Not just in the life of the Israelites or the stories in the Bible but even in your own life as well.
The Psalmist teaches us here to cry out to God in our pain. To tell all! And then he calls us to look at the history books. To recall the days of old. And then consider our current situation.
While it may not heal us in the moment, can we believe he has a "way through the sea"?
Oftentimes, God will work through our pain to develop amazing passions. One of my favorite quotes still remains, "Through our greatest pains come our greatest passions."
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