How long, Lord?

Psalm 13:1-2 (NIV)

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?

Have you not uttered words like these?  How often have you thought these words?  Are you going through a life crisis right now where you are crying out to the Lord for His help and you sense no response?  You ask, “how long” before you receive an answer.  Habakkuk 1:2 asked the same question, “How long, O Lord, must I call for an answer, but You do not listen?”  So does Psalm 69:3 “I am exhausted from crying for help; my throat is parched. My eyes are swollen with weeping, waiting for my God to help me”. To ask the Lord “how long” is, in the Hebrew language, the same question as “have You forgotten me”? (Psalm 10:11-12, 42:9, 44:2-4, 77:9).  It’s a very natural human question to ask the Lord.          

The human mind is a wonderful thing.  It gives humans differentiation from animals.  The human mind can reason, love (or hate), have a sense of morality, process and produce knowledge, comprehend things, desire to worship, and have a capacity for wisdom.  Yet it also has tremendous capacity to think negatively, to remember the past, and to dwell on fear and worry.  That’s why the psalmist writes “how long must I wrestle with my thoughts…….”?  We wrestle with fear and worry over what we know, but more often what we don’t know.

These are pleas from an anguished heart.  How long before I can be relieved of this anguish?  “How long” is repeated at three times (some translations insert “how long” before “will you forget me forever”) so its repetition shows the anguish of David’s heart.  What else does it show?  When you ask “how long O’ Lord” in your prayer requests, what might you be feeling---an intense need for deliverance, impatience, complaining, utter despair?   

Do you really think that God forgets?  It may seem like He forgets and doesn’t care, but God never forgets and always cares.  The Bible does say that God forgets sins and disobedience of those who confess and repent (Heb 8:12, 10:17), but it’s not that He forgets but rather that He no longer hold sins and disobedience against those who confess them.   Isaiah 54:7 has an interesting truth where God says “For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you”.  Of course, a brief moment in God’s view could be decades or more in our view. Moses waited 40 years between his fleeing of Egypt and God’s appearance at the burning bush, then after the Israelites escaped Egypt, it took another 40 years wandering in the wilderness. 

There are many examples of people waiting years and decades for answered prayer.   II Peter 3:8 states that to the Lord a thousand years is the same as one day.  So, in a way, be careful when you ask “how long, O’ Lord” as you might not live long enough to receive/know an answer the side of heaven.  Yet, the Bible also says God is never late and we simply must be patient and wait (Habakkuk 2:3, Psalm 27:14, 40:1).  

Oswald Chambers in his July 6 devotional wrote the following:  “Think of the enormous leisure of God!  He is never in a hurry.  We are always in such a frantic hurry.  In the light of the glory of the vision we go forth to do things, but the vision is not real in us yet; and God has to take us into the valley, and put us through fires and floods to batter us into shape, until we get to the place where He can trust us with the veritable reality.” 

Are you crying “how long” right now?  Do you have any sense that He has heard you?  How can you be sure that He has heard you?  Here’s a comforting passage from Psalm 34:15-19:

“The eyes of the Lord watch over those who do right; His ears are open to their cries for help.

But the Lord turns his face against those who do evil; He will erase their memory from the earth. The Lord hears his people when they call to him for help.
He rescues them from all their troubles.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; He rescues those whose spirits are crushed. The righteous person faces many troubles, but the Lord comes to the rescue each time.” 

God is working with and through you as you cry out and wait for His answer(s).  Do not give up on Him.  Do not give up on yourself.