Psalm 13:1-3
How long will You forget me, O Lord? Forever? How long will You hide Your face from me? How long must I lay up cares within me and have sorrow in my heart day after day? How long shall my enemy exalt himself over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; lighten the eyes [of my faith to behold Your face in the pitch like darkness], lest I sleep the sleep of death.
It is inevitable that our faith in God, that which we say we believe, will be tried while living in this world. When spiritual belief is tested, one or two things will happen. Either our genuine faith will be validated as real, or we will find ourselves being overcome with fear, doubt and unbelief. During times of personal trial, Satan works hard to pull God’s children into darkness in order to squelch our desire to have a loving, dependent, trusting, growing relationship with the Lord. Satan uses the same stratagems over and over, yet it seems we are such spiritual babes we rarely recognize his tactics.
Due to the longevity of King David’s trials, he began to doubt God’s faithful love and to believe Satan’s lie that the Lord was not listening and had forgotten David. This common strategy of the Enemy tears at us when we feel weary and the way seems too long. Satan wants us to doubt God’s goodness. He wants to lead us into the blinding darkness of self-pity: Poor me, poor me, poor me. My life has always been hard and will always be hard. Embracing self-pity leads us into victimization, which sets our MAIN FOCUS on feeling oppressed, ill-treated, or unfairly treated. On this path we will certainly find ourselves blindly wallowing in darkness and feeling spiritually dead.
In spite of King David’s feelings of rejection and self-pity, somewhere deep down in his hurting heart he grasped on to the hope that God’s love was bigger than his weakness. In desperation, David walked past the frustration, fear, and unbelief he was expressing. He cried out to the living God to enlighten his eyes of faith that he might behold God’s face in the pitch-black darkness of his circumstances. David recognized that God’s unconditional love was the only power that could lift him out of spiritual death and bring him back to the place of a growing, steadfast faith. In times of trials and testing, God is only a cry away and will rescue us from our unbelief and reveal His faithfulness as we continue to turn and run to Him.
