Meditation on Psalm 13
Continuing our series on the Psalms at Wednesday Evening Prayer.
Please note: As with many of these meditations on the Psalms, ideas and phrases have been freely borrowed from Luther (various sources), and Patrick Henry Reardon’s Christ in the Psalms.
Tonight’s Psalm, 13, is especially appointed for bedtime. As we go to sleep, we ponder the time that our eyes will close on this life for good, and pray: “Consider and answer me, O LORD my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death.” For, the sleep of death is not merely the last breath of our mortal body, but the endless death of the soul, the outer darkness of judgment, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is also fitting, at the end of the day, to give thanks for the benefits that God has showered upon us: “I will sing to the LORD, because He has dealt bountifully with me.”
But we can see much more in this psalm than a simple bedtime prayer. Since all of the Psalms speak of Christ (as Jesus Himself says in Luke 24), we always do well to consider how a psalm informs us about the work, promises, suffering, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus. With Psalm 13, we can hear in it echoes of our Lord’s passion, His betrayal by enemies in the night.
We heard His prayer in Gethsemane, begging, pleading, imploring that the cup of suffering be removed. “How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide your face from me?” He told His friends that His soul was exceedingly sorrowful, even to death, but they could not stay awake to watch and pray with Him. “How long must I take counsel in My soul and have sorrow in My heart all the day?” And they came, with clubs and swords, as though to apprehend a murderer and insurrectionist, and they took Him away to be falsely accused and beaten. “How long shall my enemy be exalted over Me? Consider and answer Me, O LORD My God!”
Christ was accused for us. He was arrested for us. He was mocked for us. He was spit upon for us. He was crowned with thorns for us. He was whipped for us. He was crucified for us. He was speared for us. All this He did willingly.
But He did not do it easily. I’m never quite sure what to make of that hymn which says, “Yet cheerful He to suffering goes.” Did He go cheerfully? I believe He was glad to suffer for us, and rejoiced at the atonement. Yet there could not have been a moment of His passion that was cheerful. He was sorrowful, and He was afraid. But His chief fear-i.e., reverence-was for God the Father. The agony and fear was born in confidence that God would answer and deliver. Thus our second reading (Heb. 5) says of Jesus, “Who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.” It is that confident obedience, the certainty that He will be delivered, that makes the words of tonight’s Psalm the words of Christ: “But I have trusted in Your steadfast love; My heart shall rejoice in Your salvation.”
And knowing that, irrespective of what this day has brought for us, we can go to sleep in quiet confidence and good cheer. For you are in Christ, and Christ is in you, and through, in, and because of Him, you too can say, “But I have trusted in Your steadfast love; My heart shall rejoice in Your salvation.” And when your last hour comes, your eyes shall be lightened with the gospel of Jesus Christ, His death and resurrection, and your forgiveness in Him, and you will by no means sleep the sleep of death, just as Jesus is risen from the grave, lives and reigns to all eternity. This is most certainly true.
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