03/01/2026 - Psalm 77
Scripture: Psalm 77
I will cry aloud to God; I will cry aloud, and God will hear me.
In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord; my hands were stretched out by
night and did not tire; I refused to be comforted.
I think of God, I am restless, I ponder, and my spirit faints.
You will not let my eyelids close; I am troubled and I cannot speak.
I consider the days of old; I remember the years long past;
I commune with my heart in the night; I ponder and search my mind.
Will the Lord cast me off forever and show favor to me no more?
Has the loving-kindness of the LORD come to an end? Has God’s promise
failed for evermore?
Has God forgotten to be gracious, and in anger withheld compassion?
And I said, “My grief is this; the right hand of the Most High has lost its
power.”
I will remember the works of the Lord, and call to mind your wonders of
old time.
I will meditate on all your acts and call to mind your wonders of old time.
I will meditate on all your acts and ponder your mighty deeds.
Your way, O God, is holy; who is so great a god as our God? You are the God who works wonders and have declared your power
among the peoples.
By your strength you have redeemed your people, the children of Jacob
and Joseph.
The waters saw you, O God; the waters saw you and trembled; the very
depths were shaken.
The clouds poured out water; the skies thundered; your arrows flashed to
and fro;
The sound of your thunder was in the whirlwind; your lightnings lit up the
world; the earth trembled and shook.
Your way was in the sea, and your paths in the great waters, yet your
footsteps were not seen.
You led your people like a flock by the hand on Moses and Aaron.
~
If Psalm 23 last week was a psalm of confidence, then that confidence has been shattered at the beginning of Psalm 77.
This is a really difficult Psalm to characterize, mainly because there is a significant tone shift halfway through. But it’s thought that this Psalm was written during the Hebrew people’s time exile in Babylon, making it first and foremost a psalm of exile.
For a quick timeline, after King Solomon died, the united kingdom of Israel was divided into two. The northern kingdom retained the name of Israel, while the southern kingdom became the kingdom of Judah.
The northern kingdom of Israel was first conquered by Assyria. They completely collapsed, with those who survived becoming refugees who fled south into Judah.
Then around a hundred and fifty years later, the kingdom of Babylon conquered Judah. While for the most part ordinary people were able to remain where they were, tending their farms and shops, the nobles and those in the higher classes were taken into captivity in Babylon. And this most likely included people like artists, craftsmen, and musicians.
According to passages in Jeremiah and other prophets, those people were in exile for around 70 years.
That’s long enough for those who were adults when they were taken into captivity to pass away in Babylon.
So as you might imagine, somebody might suddenly realize twenty or thirty years into captivity, that they may never see their home again and be driven to write this Psalm.
This is why Psalm 77 is often talked about as a psalm of exile. But from verses 1-10, it mainly has the hallmarks of a psalm of lament.
Lament psalms are quite prevalent, they make up about a third of the Psalms. There are more of them than any other type.
Their primary hallmark is the writer crying out to God for help or comfort in the midst of a tough situation. There’s a sense that God is not with them in the moment, and they’re asking God to show up.
Psalm 77 begins with, “I will cry aloud to God; I will cry aloud, and God will hear me.”
Will hear me, not has heard me.
So while Psalm 23 talked about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, it’s not seen as a psalm of lament because the focus is on how God is with the psalmist walking through it. There’s already a confidence that God is there.
But in the first ten verses here, the Psalmist goes from crying out to God for help in verse one, to fully asking if God has abandoned them in verses 8 through 10.
And the journey down the mountain into this valley of despair takes an interesting path, because it’s contradictory to how a lot of Psalms go.
In verses 3 and 7, the Psalmist mentions thinking of God and communing with their heart, essentially poetic ways of talking about meditation and prayer.
And most of the time in the Psalms, when somebody talks about praying or meditating, they talk about the comfort it brings, the feeling of the presence of God that it invokes.
But not here. Instead, it seems to spiral the Psalmist down further into the valley.
And I think we all can relate to that. We’ve all had points where we’ve tried to pray and the words just don’t come.
We’ve tried to take a moment to breathe, and the noise and chaos keeps swirling in our minds and in our ears.
We’ve all had sleepless nights where the stress of our families and the fear of the world keeps our eyes wide open, staring at the dark ceiling, wondering if and when we’re going to see the dawn break through.
We’ve watched wars break out on our TVs and social media feeds, watched our loved ones struggle with cancer, watched criminals get away with crimes that are so disturbing we don’t even know how they would be charged in a court of law.
And we wonder where God is in all of it.
And maybe that’s actually comforting for you to hear right now. Sometimes I think we can think of the Bible as this book that only contains stories of how great God is, and if we question the goodness of God, we’re doing something wrong or there’s something wrong with us.
But the Bible isn’t like that. There are plenty of Psalms like this one that give voice to the worries I think we can all hold at times, but dare not talk about.
When we find ourselves in valleys where we fear and doubt and wonder if we’re ever going to see the sun again, we can know that we’re in the company of writers in the Bible who found themselves in the exact same place.
And the Psalmist reaches the depths of their valley in verse 10 when they say “My grief is this; the right hand of the Most High has lost its power.”
The Psalmist seems to switch from wondering if God has abandoned them, to wondering if God doesn’t even have the power to rescue them from exile.
If they are so deep down in the valley, so far away from their home, maybe God can no longer stretch out God’s hand and reach them either.
And again, we’ve all found ourselves in valleys so deep and dark that we just don’t know how we’re ever going to climb out of them.
Maybe it’s despair, maybe it’s fear, or maybe it’s grief.
Maybe it’s a habit that’s hurting you or hurting others that you just can’t seem to break.
Or maybe it’s a cycle of thoughts and beliefs that if you’re not careful can spiral you into exhaustion and despair.
Whatever it is, we can feel so far from God that it almost feels like we’re in exile.
But that is not where the Psalm ends, and it’s not where our story ends either.
Because there is a tone shift in verse 11 that brings Psalm 77 out of a psalm of lament, and into a psalm of confidence.
This time the Psalmist is returning to meditate on the “wonders of old time” and the “mighty deeds” that God has done, but with a different approach.
Instead of wondering why God isn’t doing those things right now, the Psalmist decides to try and think of them as promises that God will show God’s strength, even if the Psalmist isn’t experiencing it right at that moment.
And the way the Psalmist communicates those promises is through a poetic retelling of the Exodus story.
It’s notable that the Psalmist chooses to identify the Hebrew people as the children of Jacob and Joseph. That’s not a normal designation in Scripture; normally it’s just the “children of Jacob.”
Joseph was Jacob’s second youngest son, and he was the reason why the Hebrew people ended up in Egypt. As you might remember from a few weeks ago, when Joseph was young, his dreams ticked off his brothers so much that they sold him as a slave to Midianite traders, who brought him to Egypt.
Then once in Egypt, those same dreams helped the country prepare to withstand a famine that swept through the region. Joseph became second-in-command of the country, putting him in the perfect position to take care of his family when they came to Egypt looking for food because they were starving.
It seemed like God’s providence at the time. God worked through Joseph to save the family line of Jacob, which is who the Hebrew people traced their ancestry back to.
Generations went by, and the Hebrew people grew and prospered in Egypt. But eventually the rulers of the country forgot what Joseph had done for them, and the Egyptians grew scared of how many Hebrew people there were.
They were afraid that the Hebrew people would one day outnumber them and destabilize their nation.
So the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrew people, and for generations, the Hebrew people cried out to God for help.
And for generations, God was mostly silent. Until God called Moses to lead God’s people out of slavery in Egypt and into freedom in the Promised Land.
I think the last verses of Psalm 77 are a poetic, quick overview of the ways God showed up for the Hebrew people as they escaped Egypt and journeyed to their new home.
The waters that trembled and the depths that were shaken bring to mind the parting of the Red Sea, which brought the Hebrew people out of Egypt and into their next chapter in the wilderness.
The rain and thunder, the lightning and the earthquakes might be in reference to the storms and natural phenomena that occurred on Mt. Sinai when Moses was given the law in Exodus 19 through 34.
And finally, while we mainly focus on the parting of the Red Sea, there is another moment in the Bible where the waters stop and the Hebrew people crossed over on dry land.
That occurs in Joshua 3, where the Jordan River stops flowing and the Hebrew people cross over from the wilderness into their new home.
In recounting all of these moments, the Psalmist is reminding themself, and us, that since God has shown up before, God will show up again.
But it’s important to remember that before all of those miracles happened, the Hebrew people were enslaved in exile in Egypt for generations, just like the Psalmist is in exile in Babylon.
It’s no wonder they’re seeing the threads that tie them to what their ancestors went through.
And it’s no wonder that the stories and memories the Psalmist reaches for to reassure themself are the ones that brought their ancestors out of exile, just as they are praying that they will be brought out of exile as well.
Because God had done it before. And God would do it again.
Babylon would ultimately fall to the Persian kingdom. Then not long after, the king of Persia would let the Hebrew people return home and rebuild the destroyed Temple and the city of Jerusalem.
Exile would not last forever, just like the Psalmist believed it wouldn’t.
And our times of exile won’t last forever either.
Just like the Hebrew people, we can follow God to cross the Red Sea, or the Jordan River, or whatever barrier stands in our way.
Psalm 77 is a journey of a Psalm, from the despair of exile and wondering if God is there, to the confident reassurance that God will one day bring God’s people out of that exile.
And today, it stands as a reminder that God can bring us out of whatever exile we find ourselves in as well.