Survival Skill 2, Learn to Accept Reality

I was watching a movie a few years ago. It was a great movie. It had a very interesting and twisting plot. It had such a colorful cast of characters. I loved the background music that was playing in scene after scene. I was watching this movie and I was hooked. I thought that I understood it.

But then, suddenly, something shocking happened, and right then, I knew that I didn’t understand what this movie was about at all. I couldn’t wait for the film to be over so I could go back and watch it again.

Sometimes that’s what reading the Bible is like. You think you get it, you think you understand, you think you know exactly what it’s talking about. And then you hit a spot in the Bible and you think, what in the world is this about?

If someone asked you what the darkest, saddest passage in the Bible is, what would you answer? Have you ever been reading the Bible and suddenly you are shocked, embarrassed, or confused by something that you’re reading? What shocks you as you read God’s Word? I want to look with you at the most shocking place in the entire Bible.

Are you ever afraid of a friend or family member discovering a problem you are struggling with, or a situation that you have got yourself into? Perhaps you are in debt and you find it so embarrassing. Or maybe you are struggling with thoughts that you don’t want anyone to know? Or maybe you’re a parent and one of your children is simply out of control? Or maybe you even doubt God, but you’re afraid of what your Christian friends would think if they knew you struggle with believing in God.

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Be honest. Is there some place in life where you’re living but hiding?

Do you know that one of the most comforting messages in all of the Bible is that in all of our sin, in all of our weakness, in all of our failure, in all of our mistakes, in all of our self-imposed difficulty, in all of the places where you and I mess up and act foolishly, or don’t know what to do, in all of the moments where you and I struggle in private, glad that no one knows, we can rest assured that we do not have to hide from God. God will never respond to you or to me in shock or disgust. In fact, if the Bible does anything, it welcomes me out of my self-imposed prison of fear and shame. The Bible welcomes me to step out of the darkness and into the light and to face reality honestly and with hope.

The message of the Bible is that we don’t need to hide anymore, that there’s a God whose grace is so big, so large, so awesome, and so faithful. His grace is bigger and more powerful than anything that we could ever face, than any of our brokenness and our failures.

And so when you read the Bible, you don’t read stories of noble characters, who always did the right thing. No, you actually read the stories of deeply flawed people who struggled with life just as we do. The pages of the Bible are stained with the reality of real life. The story of the Bible is messy and often confusing, and sometimes even shocking; because the message of the Bible is meant to be spoken into the realities of a real world, with real people, with all the struggle and disappointment and darkness that that actually entails.

You see, I don’t have to hide; I don’t have to run; I don’t have to shrink away in shame. The honesty of the Bible welcomes me to be honest. What I want to do with you today is to take you what I think is the most shocking passage in the Bible, and to ask the question: Why is this passage in the Bible? Why is it there?

We have been thinking about survival skills for the fallen world. The first skill was: go back to the beginning. You’ll only ever understand what you’re dealing with now if you look at it from the vantage point of what it was meant to be from the beginning. You need origins to understand the here and now.

The second skill is: accept reality. This dark and shocking passage that I want to look at with you is shocking because it forces you to face reality. It’s Psalm 88.

O LORD, the God who saves me,
day and night I cry out before you.
May my prayer come before you;
turn your ear to my cry.

For my soul is full of trouble
and my life draws near the grave.
I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
I am like a man without strength.
I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.

You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest depths.
Your wrath lies heavily upon me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
You have taken from me my closest friends
and made me repulsive to them.

I am confined and cannot escape;
my eyes are dim with grief.
I call to you, O Lord, every day;
I spread out my hands to you.
Do you show your wonders to the dead?
Do those who are dead rise up and praise you?
Is your love declared in the grave,
Your faithfulness in Destruction?
Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,
or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?
But I cry to you for help, O Lord;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
Why, O Lord, do you reject me
and hide your face from me?

From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death;
I have suffered your terrors and am in despair.
Your wrath has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me.
All day long they surround me like a flood;
they have completely engulfed me.

Now hear the end of this Psalm:
You have taken my companions and my loved ones from me;
the darkness is my closest friend.

Now, why, why would God ever put this utterly depressing, utterly hopeless Psalm in the Bible? This Psalm is like no other Psalm because this Psalm doesn’t end in a note of hope. This Psalm actually ends in deep personal despair. What is it like to look around and say, I’ve got a friend, and his name is Darkness? Darkness is my closest friend. You see, this Psalm is actually an invitation to face reality in its starkest form. Because it’s only when you accept reality, that you can truly become a person of hope. Hope is never found in denying reality. Hope is never found in minimizing how bad it actually is. The fact of the matter is, this darkest of all Psalms is in the Bible because it is a Psalm of tremendous hope. Let me put it this way: this Psalm is hopeful precisely because it has no hope in it!

You begin to understand this Psalm when you look at the title of the Psalm and the directions that are there. It says: “A song. A Psalm of the sons of Korah. For the director of the music.”

Now, who are the sons of Korah? The sons of Korah are the helpers of the ceremonies at the tabernacle and the temple. The sons of Korah would lead the people of Israel as they walk on their way to sacrifice. As they did that, the sons of Korah would lead them in singing Psalms; God authored hymns. One of the songs that they were supposed to sing was Psalm 88. God actually wanted His followers to sing this dark Psalm!

Now, this is not a Psalm that’s made it on the “Top Ten” list of contemporary Christian music. You don’t hear people singing, Darkness is my closest friend! Why? Because we tend to not want to look and consider the world from this vantage point. What was God trying to do as he ordained this Psalm to be written and sung while the children of Israel were going up to worship? Here’s what God’s doing: he’s placing the harshest and darkest of human experiences right next to worship. Why is he doing that? He’s saying: You don’t have to deny reality. You don’t have to clean yourself up to paint your story with different colors in order to be acceptable to me! You can come to me exactly as you are, with all of the fear , with all of the hopelessness, with all of the discouragement, and with all of the despondency.

You see, it’s only when I realize that Psalm 88 exists in the Bible as a loving welcome to be as honest as I need to be about the realities in my life; it’s only then that I can begin to understand how hopeful I can be because I’m in relationship to a God who will never turn his back in disgust! He will never get tired and walk away. He doesn’t demand that I play games in order to achieve his acceptance. He welcomes me to be so deeply and personally honest that I’d have the courage to say to him: I don’t know where you are God. I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know what all of this means. I’m so lost and I’m so confused that it feels that my closest friend in life is Darkness.

You see, there is no human experience that is too dark and too shocking, too difficult or confusing, for God to wrap his arms of grace around. And so this dark, dark Psalm, with no hope in it, is in the Bible precisely to give us hope, to tell us that we can be this honest with God.

Maybe right now you’re looking at your marriage, or you’re considering your life with your children or your relationships to your neighbors, or your places of silent or secret struggle. Maybe you’re tempted to believe that honesty and hope can’t exist together. Maybe because of that you deny, you avoid, you seek to escape, you work really hard at denying reality because you think that it couldn’t be possible for you to be very honest about what is in your life and be hopeful at the same time.

If there’s a powerful message, if there’s an encouraging message in the Word of God, it is this: that honesty and hope can exist together; that dishonesty is never a pathway to hope. It is the message that God’s love is so huge and so magnificent, so far beyond my understanding that there is nothing that I could ever bring to him that could be too large for that love and that grace to embrace. You see, you know you’re not facing reality when honesty and hope are not able to stand together in your life.

Think right now: where is your faith too small to allow you to look at reality honestly in the face? Maybe you’re a man and you’re growing absorbed in a world of lust. It’s beginning to eat you up, but you don’t believe that you can be honest about that. So you live your life in hiding. Maybe you’re a young mother and you’re growing frustrated and angry. You’re saying and doing things to your young children that you shouldn’t say and you shouldn’t do, but you’re convinced that you can’t be honest about it. Maybe you’re a worker, and you’ve actually cheated on your records to make yourself look good in the eyes of your boss; it’s become such a pattern that you don’t know what to do about it, but you are absolutely persuaded that you can’t be honest about it.

The message of the Bible blows that away. What the Bible does is to put the darkness of the darkest of human experiences next to the light of hope, and allows them to exist together because the arms of God are big enough and strong enough to wrap themselves around every human experience.

What we’re discussing here is this welcome to honesty. Real hope of real change always begins with accepting reality. It always begins by my having a willingness to humbly face what is actually going on in my life. Isn’t it nice to know that as you stand before God, you can stand before Him in complete honesty? Isn’t it nice to know that God never looks down on you with disgust; that he’s never turned off or turned away by the reality of your struggles? He’s never embarrassed by your failure. Isn’t it wonderful to know that he not only welcomes you to be honest, but he commits himself to be your helper, not just today, but forever?

God looks at you and he’s not fooled. He knows you exactly as you are. He knows all of those embarrassing things in your life that you would want to hide. Rather than condemning you, rather than turning his back on you, he wraps his arms of grace around you, and he works by that grace to change you at the core of who you are as a human being.

And so, you can look at the darkness, and you can still have hope because in that darkness, you are not alone. God is with you! He is for you! He accepts you! And he has everything that you need.