¹My voice rises to God, and I will cry aloud; my voice rises to God, and He will hear me. ²In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord; in the night my hand was stretched out without weariness; my soul refused to be comforted. ³When I remember God, then I am disturbed; when I sigh, then my spirit grows faint. Selah … ¹⁰Then I said, “It is my grief, that the right hand of the Most High has changed.”

Who of us hasn’t, in the honesty of our soul, experienced the spiritual agony of feeling abandoned by God? Or thrashed around in doubt at the silence of God when our circumstances require more immediate attention? The writer of Psalm 77 held the same integrity as David, who came to own up to his different, but no more significant or worse, sin against God’s holy and righteous law. He wrote candidly about the core of his relationship with God:

Behold, You [God] desire truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part You will make me know wisdom. (Ps. 51:6)

The writer of our psalm today is not concerned about maintaining a façade of faithfulness; he humbly exposes his struggle of doubt for everyone to read. Let others judge him for doubting God, but he writes truthfully and transparently. Genuine godliness showcases humility and integrity, which God desires above all else. The legalistic Pharisees of Jesus’ day failed to understand that and thus were spiritually powerless and unable to inspire others toward genuine piety. The psalm shows that its writer gets it; he understands this. So God reminds us of the dilemma of faith and how to deal with it by including it as part of the permanent repertoire of worship music for God’s people. It faces us with the question: will we turn our doubt into faith when God doesn’t meet our expectations? The psalm shows us the way.

Verses 1-6 reflect a classical lament, a poetic dwelling on the hardship of life and disappointment of faith. It is a “why me?” introspection or a pity party, essentially a complaint against God. One can rightly call this spiritual depression. He cries out to God and asserts that he knows God will be aware of his concern—that’s a good start, but there is more to the story.

Verse 2 shows that his good start is attenuated by his obsession with his human experience of sleepless nights, emotional turmoil, and the silence of God. He tried meditating on God and His promises, but that no longer works. Instead of producing joy, peace, and calm, all attempts at focusing his thoughts on God have left him agitated and spiritually weak! He faces the quandary of believing in a God whom he cannot see and doubts the promises of God in which he has come to trust. Singing hymns and reciting verses sometimes hits us like heartless taunts. The psalm writer blames God for his restlessness: “You have held my eyelids open” (vs. 4).

He then “ponders” (vs. 6) a quick list of his grievances in the form of judgmental questions. Will God never stop rejecting him? Will He never again show His favor or loving kindness (Heb. “hesed”) to him? Does He not keep His promises? Has He forgotten His grace or compassion toward him? These are all things that have led him to trust God in the first place (see similarly Romans 2:4: “the kindness of God leads you to repentance”). He sums up his concerns as an overwhelming grief: all that he knew about God has now been changed: “The right hand of the Most High has changed” (vs. 10). That’s a terrible thought to think, but it was an honest thought.

Now comes the pivotal point of the psalm, for the writer turns from obsessively dwelling on himself and redirects his thoughts truly to God. The key is remembering what God has done in the past; He has proven His faithfulness, love, and compassion. The trouble is that we insatiably covet new acts of God to bolster our faith, prove His character, and assure us that He has not changed. Yet faith must rest on God for who He is and for what He has already done. The author of this psalm writes from a position of having followed through with the journey from doubt to faith. The psalm reflects, even in the complaint portion, a more profound knowledge of God throughout the psalm. He refers frequently to “God” (Heb. elohim, a generic term for deity). But he also knows Him as “Lord “(Heb, adonai), the Almighty One. And then he knows Adonai as “God” using the variant (“el”) in verse 9 with its frequent companion term “Most High” (Heb. “elyon” vs. 10). Finally, he arrives at the covenantal name of God, “Lord “(Heb. yah, the shortened version of Yahweh in verse 11). His doubt gave way to knowing the promise-keeping, loving, and compassionate God in whom he believed.

So, as a result, we can learn from the psalmist to think back to all the times God has worked in the past (vs. 11), to obsess not on our own doubts and struggles but on all that God has already done (vss. 12-14). God is wholly “other” than all other concepts of deity falsely portrayed in the word as gods. His “otherness” is expressed in the word “holy.” That means he is set apart and entirely outside the box of how we naturally think about things. In particular, we should remind ourselves as a normal course of our daily living that God has redeemed us (vs. 15). For the faithful believers in Old Testament Israel, their anchor and identifying point was with Yahweh God, who brought them through the Exodus. For us today, we look back to the cross, where God redeemed us from the slavery of sin and brought us into a new life through the sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

To the psalmist’s point, the fodder for doubt will not be removed for now; he writes, “Your way was in the sea and Your paths in the mighty waters, and Your footprints may not be known.” In other words, we don’t see God’s physical hand (or foot) but the effects of His work. Like God used the physical, tangible leadership of Moses and Aaron to lead God’s people through the Red Sea and toward the Promised Land, God will also provide us with whatever is necessary to walk the pathway through whatever faces us, wherever He leads us.

Lord, thank You for those who have set the example of authenticity in their spiritual struggles. Just as this psalmist shared his doubts and wrestlings with us from thousands of years ago, help me learn to share my faith struggles and doubts with others so that we would all learn to redirect our focus from ourselves and back onto You.