Where To Go In Your Suffering - Heman

O LORD, God of my salvation, I cry out to you by day. I come to you at night. Now hear my prayer; listen to my cry.

Psalm 88:1-2

As World War II ended and the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust became more evident, someone found a message scrawled on the cellar wall of a concentration camp in Cologne, Germany: “I believe in the sun when it isn’t shining. I believe in love even when I don’t feel it. I believe in God even when he’s silent.” This writer somehow found hope in the face of unspeakable suffering.

During difficult times, it is easy to wonder if God is listening to you, much less speaking. Samuel’s Levite grandson Heman wondered the same thing.

Heman had a leading role in conducting the sacred service of rededicating the Temple during Hezekiah’s reign. At another time in his life, when he wrote Psalm 88, he offered only words of suffering and doubt, not of praise and thanksgiving.

You won’t be singing this psalm at your Sunday church service!

No one knows the life circumstances that motivated this psalm, but Heman clearly felt distraught and completely abandoned: “O LORD, I cry out to you. I will keep on pleading day by day. O LORD, why do you reject me? Why do you turn your face from me?” (Psalm 88:13-14).

Though Heman suffered tremendously, hope never completely left him. He wrote only one statement of comfort in his entire psalm, but what a powerful one it is! Heman declared that the Lord was the God of his salvation.

Where could Heman turn for comfort and salvation during those dark days? An unnamed prisoner found this same place in a German concentration camp. Like Heman, the prisoner somehow looked past his broken heart and sickly body, past what he perceived as absolute silence on God’s part, and declared that the Lord alone remained the source of everything good.

The times will come when you will wonder where God has gone in the midst of your personal difficulties and suffering. You may find yourself questioning whether he hears you or has anything comforting to say to you. Even when God remains silent, he is still God, and he still loves you!