Chapter 2: Waiting in Darkness, We Are Not Lost and Not Alone

Overview

With or without medication, there are things that can be done in prolonged darkness, and this chapter begins to encourage them. First, remember that seasons of darkness are normal in the Christian life. That does not mean we stop trying to live above them; it means that when we do not succeed, we are not lost and we are not alone, as the fragment of our faith cleaves to Christ.

Psalm 40:1–3 is the chapter’s anchor. The king of Israel is in “the pit of destruction” and “the miry bog.” The song of praise is coming, he says, but it is not yet on his lips. Elsewhere David joins the images of mud and flood: “the waters have come up to my neck … I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold” (Psalm 69:1–2). It is good that we do not know exactly what David’s trouble was; that makes it easier to see ourselves in the pit with him—the over-worked businessman at breaking point, the exhausted mother of crying children, the student under impossible expectations, the person ground down by lingering illness. Anything that brings helplessness and desperation and threatens to ruin life—that is the king’s pit.

How Long, O Lord, How Long!

Then comes the king’s cry: “I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry.” One reason God loved David so much, Piper suggests, is that he cried so much—flooding his bed with tears every night (Psalm 6:6), confident that God kept count of his tossings and stored his tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8). “Blessed are those who mourn” (Matthew 5:4). It is a beautiful thing when a broken man cries out to God.

After the cry comes the waiting. Saints who cry for deliverance from pits of darkness must learn to wait patiently. Scripture says nothing about how long David waited. Piper has known believers who walked through eight years of debilitating depression before coming out into glorious light. The prophet Micah sat in darkness “until” the Lord brought him out into the light (Micah 7:8–9). We can set no deadlines for God; he hastens or delays as he sees fit, and his timing is all-loving toward his children. Patience does not mean making peace with the darkness—we fight for joy—but we fight as those who are saved by grace and held by Christ. Paul Gerhardt’s hymn says it: wait his time, and this night shall soon end in joyous day.

The Ground of Our Assurance When We Cannot See Our Faith

In our darkness it is utterly crucial to affirm that God’s wise, strong hand holds us even when we have no strength to hold him. Paul said he pressed on to make the fullness of Christ his own “because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12)—all his striving was secured by Christ’s grip on him. Our security rests on Christ’s faithfulness first.

Our faith rises and falls; it has degrees. Our security does not rise and fall; it has no degrees. There are times when faith is the size of a mustard seed and barely visible—indeed the darkest experience for a child of God is when his faith sinks out of his own sight (not out of God’s sight, but his). It is possible to be so overwhelmed with darkness that you do not know whether you are a Christian, and yet still be one.

All the great doctors of the soul distinguished between faith and its full assurance. The reason is that we are saved by God’s work of causing us to be born again and bringing us to faith (John 3:8); we do not produce faith and then make it the basis of new birth. God is at the bottom of my faith, and when it disappears from my view for a season, he may yet be sustaining its root and protecting the seed. Baxter taught that certainty of our sincerity is not necessary to salvation, though sincerity itself is: “He shall be saved that giveth up himself to Christ, though he know not that he is sincere in doing it. Christ knoweth his own grace, when they that have it know not that it is sound.” The witness of the Spirit (Romans 8:16) may be clear or faint, but the reality is unshakable: “The Lord knows those who are his” (2 Timothy 2:19); “God is faithful, by whom you were called” (1 Corinthians 1:9); “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion” (Philippians 1:6). When the dark night comes—and it comes for almost every Christian—we must wait, cry to the Lord, and remember that our own self-indictment rendered in the darkness is not as sure as God’s Word spoken in the light.

When a Child of God Is Persuaded That He Is Not

Christians in the darkness of depression may ask desperately, “How can I know that I am truly a child of God?” They are not asking to be reminded that salvation is by grace through faith; they know that. They are asking how they can know their faith is real. God must guide us in how we answer, and knowing the person helps. Piper offers four things we might say.

First, perhaps the best thing: “I love you, and I am not letting you go.” In those words a person may feel God’s keeping presence in a way they cannot feel otherwise. Second: “Stop looking at your faith, and rivet your attention on Christ.” Faith is sustained by looking at Christ crucified and risen, not by turning from Christ to analyze faith; so read Luke 22–24 together. Paradoxically, to experience the joy of faith we must not focus much on faith itself, but on the greatness of the Savior.

Third, we can point to evidences of grace in their life—our own experience of being loved by them, and their past affirmations of Christ’s lordship—remembering that “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3). This rarely helps in the short run, because the depressed discount every good assessment of themselves, but it stands as an objective hope over against their subjective darkness. Fourth, we remind the sufferer that demanding absolute, mathematical certainty about one’s standing with God is asking too much. None of us lives with that kind of certainty about any relationship; as Baxter put it, no wife or child is certain that the husband or father will not harm them, yet they live comfortably and do not fear it. There is a kind of certainty we live by, and it is enough—a sweet assurance and a gift of God. So we say: “Don’t demand a certainty about your relationship to God that you don’t require in the other relationships of your life.”

It follows that we should all fortify ourselves, while we have the light, by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism, but the absolute statements of hopelessness we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.