Monday August 24 2026
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Psalm 88:14-18-LORD, why do You cast off my soul? Why do You hide Your face from me? 15 I have been afflicted and ready to die from my youth; I suffer Your terrors; I am distraught. 16 Your fierce wrath has gone over me; Your terrors have cut me off. 17 They came around me all day long like water; They engulfed me altogether. 18 Loved one and friend You have put far from me, And my acquaintances into darkness.
One of the powerful lessons that we learn from the Books of Wisdom and Poetry (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon) is that God understands when we bring our doubts, questions, pain, and anguish to Him. The patriarch Job expounds on this theme in so many profound ways. Far from believing that it is wrong to question God, Job voiced his fury and bitterness to the Almighty.
One bold message in the Book of Job is that you can say anything to God. Throw at him your grief, your anger, your doubt, your bitterness, your betrayal, your disappointment—he can absorb them all. As often as not, spiritual giants of the Bible are shown contending with God. They prefer to go away limping, like Jacob, rather than to shut God out. In this respect, the Bible prefigures a tenet of modern psychology: you can’t really deny your feelings or make them disappear, so you might as well express them….He permitted them, yes, but the account of The Wager presents Satan, not God, as the instigator of Job’s suffering. In any event, God was surely not Job’s enemy. Far from being abandoned by God, Job was getting direct, almost microscopic scrutiny from him. At the very moment Job was pleading for a courtroom trial to present his case, he was actually participating in a trial of cosmic significance—not as the prosecuting attorney jabbing his finger at God, but as the main witness in a test of faith….From Job, we can learn that much more is going on out there than we may suspect. Job felt the weight of God’s absence; but a look behind the curtain reveals that in one sense God had never been more present. In the natural world, human beings only receive about 30 percent of the light spectrum. (Honeybees and homing pigeons can, for example, detect ultraviolet light waves invisible to us.) In the supernatural realm, our vision is even more limited, and we get only occasional glimpses of that unseen world….Simply this: the big picture, with the whole universe as a backdrop, includes much activity that we never see. When we stubbornly cling to God in a time of hardship, or when we simply pray, more—much more—may be involved than we ever dream. It requires faith to believe that, and faith to trust that we are never abandoned, no matter how distant God seems. At the end, when he heard the Voice from the whirlwind, Job finally attained that faith. God reeled off natural phenomena—the solar system, constellations, thunderstorms, wild animals—that Job could not begin to explain. If you can’t comprehend the visible world you live in, how dare you expect to comprehend a world you cannot even see! Conscious of the big picture at last, Job repented in dust and ashes. (Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud, 262-266 (Kindle Edition); Grand Rapids, Michigan; Zondervan)
The Book of Psalms also strongly emphasizes this. Most of the Psalms are people crying out to the Lord in sorrow, disappointment, and anger to the Almighty.
The Psalms also help us explore the unthinkable. How can we voice anger, anxiety, our deepest fears and darkest thoughts to God? Psalms drill down into the marrow, getting to the core issues of life. Through the Psalms, God provides therapy for these intense and sometimes painful issues. They help put us in touch with buried issues. I have discovered that the Psalms often surface enormously significant feelings I did not even know were there. Or even more to the point, the Psalms unearth things we desperately need to face—wounds that will not be healed unless they are surfaced and dealt with carefully. We know they are in there somewhere, but we don’t want to deal with them. They seem too painful or too frightening or too threatening to face. As we move through the Psalms, however, some of them take us into that unthinkable emotional geography we might otherwise avoid. They lead us to process painful feelings we might otherwise stuff down inside. This processing releases healing into our souls….The Psalms give us permission to let God know when we feel abandoned or mistreated. Even Jesus himself gives us permission to pour out our grievances to God, to express negative feelings of being abandoned by God. The cross is not the only place we see Jesus praying lament or protest prayers. When Jesus had come back to Jerusalem during the Passover, he went with his disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane, just across from a city gate. In the garden Jesus pleaded with his Father, “Let this cup pass from me.” He was talking about the cup of suffering on the cross. In essence, he was asking God to find another way. He went through the sense of abandonment one feels when our prayers do not seem to be answered. This becomes crystal clear when Jesus, hanging on the cross in the gathering darkness, cries out with a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” At that horrendous moment, Jesus was praying the words from Psalm 22: 1–3…What we are hearing from Jesus is a prayer of deep lament. And in these moments, with these words, Christ did a great service to the world. These words, welling up out of his deepest agony, give us permission to cry out as well. Our “make me happy” culture programs us to avoid painful or negative feelings. But serious downsides come with this kind of avoidance. Mental health professionals have long since discovered that swallowed painful feelings—such as anger, fear, and shame—usually produce even more negative consequences. These feelings frequently come out in some destructive form, such as clinical depression, substance abuse, or sexual acting out. The Psalms are not about stuffing or denying buried issues. Perhaps this is why looking at the Psalms—or any Scripture—from a moralistic or legalistic perspective drains the life and pursuit of God out of those coming from these perspectives. Psalms are not to-do lists or even not-to-do lists for entrance into heaven. Neither are the Psalms pure venting. Venting alone—particularly the kind that diminishes other people or God—can make our problems seem larger than life and spread the stress to others. Rather than stuffing or venting, we’re instructed to pray to God. The Psalms give us a praying voice that is not stuffing, not venting, but something much more. Reading, praying, singing, memorizing, and ministering the Psalms gives us an emotional and spiritual health that helps us deal with the dark side of our hearts. God knew this before the Psalms were ever voiced….Approximately seventy percent of the recorded Psalms in the Old Testament are psalms of complaint, lament, or imprecation, which means vengeance. By praying these Psalms we lay our stuff honestly at God’s feet. God is big enough to let us beat on his chest. We need not pretend we have no negative, angry feelings toward God. In fact, he already knows we have those feelings anyway. Rather, we have both permission and language to open our hearts and show rage, disappointment, and anger at God. (Lynn Anderson, Talking Back To God: Speaking Your Heart To God Through The Psalms, 65-69 (Kindle Edition); Abilene, TX; Leafwood Publishers)
When you have questions and doubts, bring them to the Lord. He understands, and He invites us to Him.
Father, thank You for showing us in Your Word that You love us and welcome our questions. Thank You for sharing in our pain and understanding what we face. Help us to look to You as we continue this journey of life. Walk with us gently. Amen.