DUNCAN/A prayer in affliction

If you have your Bibles, I’d invite you to turn with me to Psalm 102. Have you known affliction? Deep and intense? Unrelenting affliction? A darkness where there is no light at the end of the tunnel? This Psalm reminds us just what the old Puritan said, that though God hath one Son without sin, He has no sons without affliction. If that one Son without sin was called a “Man of Sorrows,” should it surprise us that the children that He saved would also be acquainted with sorrows? But how do we cope with them? How do we bear up under these afflictions? We pray, hope, and most importantly, look to Christ.

I. Pray 

First, in our affliction we must go to God in prayer. Notice how the psalmist begins: “Hear my prayer, O Lord; let my cry come to you!” The first thing that the psalmist says to us in affliction is to run to God in prayer. And why is that so important? Because in affliction that is very often the last thing that we want to do. And I suspect that for many of us the reason that we do not naturally run to Him in prayer is that the affliction is so overwhelming that we are completely shut down from the inside out. We can’t think straight, we can’t articulate our thoughts, we don’t even know what to say. And here is why what God says is so kind and helpful. Isn’t it interesting that especially, as we see in verses 3 – 11, God provides words to pray to Him when you don’t have words to pray to Him?

When we begin to pray in affliction, we will almost certainly feel as if we are not being heard, because after all the experience of affliction often brings to us the sense that God has turned away from us. So it would be very tempting for us to not feel that we are being heard. But we must follow the advice of the wise old Christians who said, “Pray until you pray.” They acknowledge that sometimes at the beginning of your prayers you don’t feel as if you’re praying, and you may not be. But you keep praying until you pray. Go to God with your problem. Prayer is the first step in dealing with affliction. 

II. Hope 

Next, we see in the Psalm that there’s hope in affliction. In verses 12 – 17, you see that hope comes in three parts. The first part comes from God’s sovereign rule over everything and that it is enduring and eternal. God is always in charge, and so the very first foundation of this believer’s hope in affliction is that God is sovereign forever. 

But notice also that hope is because God has a plan for His people. Verse 13: “You will arise and have pity on Zion”; verse 16: “For the Lord builds up Zion….” In other words, the psalmist is acknowledging, even as he looks on the ruins of Jerusalem and the remnant of Judah, that God has a plan for Jerusalem. And that plan is the people of God brought under the headship of Jesus Christ. And the psalmist is comforted by that fact. In his personal affliction, his eyes are not only lifted up to God, but they’re lifted out to remember that there is a plan for all the people of God.

And then he says in verse 17, “He regards the prayer of the destitute…He does not despise their prayer.” Because God is ruling over everything, because God has a special plan for His people, God will hear His people’s prayer. He will not leave them in destitution. And so there is hope, and what more do we need in affliction than hope? But so often where do we look for that hope? We look for hope in the improvement of our circumstances. And notice that that is not what the psalmist looks at. He looks to God, he looks to God’s plan among His people, and he looks to God’s hearing of his prayers. He does not look at his circumstances getting better. He looks to God. His circumstances may not change, but those realities of God will remain, and those realities will change the way he looks at his circumstances.

III. Look to Christ

Well, one last thing — the most important thing: Christ. One of the things we learn from verse 23 is that, in the end, the prayer of affliction that is being lifted up by this psalmist is in the final analysis Jesus’ prayer, and that the afflictions being described by the psalmist are in the final analysis Jesus’ afflictions. We learn that not only because Hebrews 1:10-12 directly quote verses 25 – 27 and apply them to Jesus Christ, but we learn it from the words of verse 23: “He has broken my strength in midcourse; He has shortened my days.” What’s going on there? The psalmist, without fully understanding it, has said hundreds of years beforehand the words of the Lord Jesus Christ from the cross. This prayer is a Messianic psalm in which Jesus speaks to His Father about the afflictions that He bore for you.

Now what does that mean for you in your affliction? It means that no matter how great your affliction is — and I do not in any way want to take away at all from the weight of your afflictions. I cannot begin to comprehend the weight of those afflictions. But I can say this: That there is no affliction that a believer experiences in this life that can begin to compare in any way with the greatness of the affliction that Jesus has experienced for you, and that means that your greatest affliction is just a shadow of the affliction that He bore for you. No matter when you take up the words of this psalm, you don’t understand an inkling of what Jesus did for you. Because He bore your affliction; not simply with you, but instead of you. And so for every believer, every real experience of affliction in this life, ought to be a reminder that in your place condemned He stood, and that He bore what you ought to have borne, and that what you have borne in no way compares to what He has borne for you. This is Christ’s affliction that is spoken of in this psalm, and this too, gives the greatest encouragement to believers under affliction, for if He was raised to reign, and if He is preparing a world with no affliction for us, then it is certain that we, too, shall be raised with Him and reign in that place where there will be no more tears, and no more sorrows, and no more afflictions, and no more crying. The psalmist tells us how to respond to our affliction. May God by His Spirit enable us to do so.

Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III is Chancellor & CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) in Jackson.