July 26, 2007
Night
READ: Psalm 42
The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me—a prayer to the God of my life. —Psalm 42:8
In his riveting and unsettling book Night, Elie Wiesel describes his boyhood experiences as one of the countless victims of the Holocaust. Ripped from his home and separated from everyone in his family except his father (who would die in the death camps), Wiesel suffered a dark night of the soul such as few will experience. It challenged his views and beliefs about God. His innocence and faith became sacrifices on the altar of man’s evil and sin’s darkness.
David experienced his own dark night of the soul, which many scholars believe motivated his writing of Psalm 42. Harried and hounded, probably as he was pursued by his rebellious son Absalom (2 Sam. 16–18), David echoed the pain and fear that can be felt in the isolation of night. It’s the place where darkness grips us and forces us to consider the anguish of our heart and ask hard questions of God. The psalmist lamented God’s seeming absence, yet in it all he found a night song (v.8) that gave him peace and confidence for the difficulties ahead.
When we struggle in the night, we can be confident that God is at work in the darkness. We can say with the psalmist, “Hope in God; for I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance and my God” (v.11).
With gloomy strokes that seem to mar the scene,
God’s hand appears and gives to sunless hue
And dreary skies a more majestic sheen. —Gustafson
