Scripture Daily

Context No. 3912 of 4322 · Psalms

Context · Reflection

Psalms 38:1-16: in context

1LORD, don’t rebuke me in your wrath, neither chasten me in your hot displeasure. 2For your arrows have pierced me, your hand presses hard on me. 3There is no soundness in my flesh because of your indignation, neither is there any health in my bones because of my sin. 4For my iniquities have gone over my head. As a heavy burden, they are too heavy for me. 5My wounds are loathsome and corrupt because of my foolishness. 6I am in pain and bowed down greatly. I go mourning all day long. 7For my waist is filled with burning. There is no soundness in my flesh. 8I am faint and severely bruised. I have groaned by reason of the anguish of my heart. 9Lord, all my desire is before you. My groaning is not hidden from you. 10My heart throbs. My strength fails me. As for the light of my eyes, it has also left me. 11My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my plague. My kinsmen stand far away. 12They also who seek after my life lay snares. Those who seek my hurt speak mischievous things, and meditate deceits all day long. 13But I, as a deaf man, don’t hear. I am as a mute man who doesn’t open his mouth. 14Yes, I am as a man who doesn’t hear, in whose mouth are no reproofs. 15For I hope in you, LORD. You will answer, Lord my God. 16For I said, “Don’t let them gloat over me, or exalt themselves over me when my foot slips.”

This is a psalm of a soul crushed by the weight of its own sin. The psalmist feels God's hand heavy upon him, his body sick, his wounds festering because of his foolishness; my iniquities have gone over my head, he says, like a burden too heavy to bear. His guilt has become a physical and emotional weight, and his friends have withdrawn, leaving him alone with his misery.

It is an honest picture of what unconfessed and grievous sin can do to a person, pressing down like a load too heavy to carry. But the psalm does not stay only in the misery. In the middle of it, the psalmist turns his eyes upward: for you, O LORD, do I wait; it is you, O Lord my God, who will answer. Crushed by his sin, he does not run from God but toward him, placing his hope in the very God against whom he has sinned. This is the way through the weight of guilt. Not to flee from God or to sink under the load, but to bring the whole heavy burden to him, waiting in hope for the God who alone can lift it.

When the weight of my own sin presses down on me, do I flee from God or turn toward him, bringing the heavy burden to the God I have wronged and waiting in hope for the one who alone can lift it?

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