Psalms 28:1 “Unto thee will I cry, O Lord my rock; be not silent to me: lest if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit.”
Like them that go down into the pit. Many commentators feel that this is just a poetic expression for death. In fact some translations just say that if God remains silent to him he would die. Yet, there are some translators who have a different idea.
The word for pit is bore which could mean a well, a prison, or a crypt. A prison in those days was often a pit that someone was just thrown into and you were left there to rot. The only way out would be if someone would throw you a rope. It would be the same case if you fell in a well, in fact old abandoned wells were often used as a prison. Sometimes when a well would dry up it would be abandoned. It was not a well like you see in those phony pictures, a nice brick structure with a crane to lower a bucket. Wells were mainly just holes in the ground. Many times people would dig a well and after going down ten or fifteen feet with no water they will abandon it. Someone not paying attention could fall into the well and if no one comes around to hear your cries for help you are left without hope and become desperate. There are commentators who believe this is the intent of the passage and I agree. David is not saying that if God is silent he will die, but that he will lose all hope and become desperate. A crypt was pretty much the same thing, it is a place you go into and you usually do not come out.
Do you ever feel like David, you have entered a dark place and you just seem separated from God. If you have enjoyed a close walk with God, falling into a spiritual bore or well could prove very terrifying. But what does that mean to call on God and he is silent?
The word silent is karash. It is closely related to the word karas which means to be rough. Maybe it is not so much that God is silent but that David feels God may really being rough with him. In fact taking karash (silent) to its Semitic root we find that is it a word referring to a plow or till which makes an engraving into the ground. In a noun form it is describing a cutting instrument. Rabbi Hirsch indicates that it is related to a similar word with a Sade at the end and means to lacerate, or wound. Karash is also used for an enchanter, magician, or to be artificial. When a husband gets the silent treatment from his wife, he often feels like she is giving him a deep cutting wound. Even though he knows the silence is really artificial, she will eventually talk with him, she is using silence like a magician to get a desired result to convey to him that he has wounded her heart. Silence from God may just be artificial, but like the wife giving her husband the silent treatment she is conveying a message that he has wounded her heart and that knowledge is like the cutting of a deep wound to him if he loves his wife. Silence from God can be a deep cutting wound to us if we love Him and realize we have wounded His heart.
The context would indicate that David is experiencing deep emotional distress from people who are saying things about him that are not true. David is crying to God not so much to be delivered from the problem. The following verses seem to indicate confidence that God has taken care of that, but it is this present emotional stress that he is seeking deliverance from. This would be the worry, the fear, the deep hurt. Do you ever feel this sense of overwhelming oppression? There is no reason for it, after all God is in control, He has never failed. Yet, you are so filled with a sense of fear and dread that you just can not enjoy life itself. You really just wish God would take you home and away from it all. I think that is what David is feeling. He just wants to go out and get drunk, but in this case to get drunk in the Spirit.
Something a little more difficult to explain is the use of the preposition from rather than to. The word silent itself is used as a participle. Hence David is literally saying: “I cry, O Lord my rock and you are being silent from me.” To build on that word silence, it would seem that David is wanting more than deliverance, he just wants to feel the presence of God. Note in the next verse he speaks of his supplications (Heb. “canan”). He is doing this with uplifted hands. Supplication here or canan is to show favor. David is saying that he is showing favor to God. Think about it, when you go to God with a need, who do you want to favor, God or yourself? In verse 5 David is asking that he not be drawn away from God by the intentions of the wicked.
To David the pressures of his job, his relationships, or health, were not that important to him. In fact is did suffer a loss of his job under a broken relationship with his beloved son Absalom. He did suffer a loss of his health. The problem David faced in this verse was not the loss but how that loss affected his relationship with God.
To sum up David’s prayer as I see it here in 98:1, David is praying: “Lord, you are my rock. My rock is not my job, not my relationship, not my health. I may lose my job, my relationships, or my health, and I can handle that, I will go on living, but Lord, if lose you, I can’t handle that, I will go into a dark pit of hopeless and despair. O my God, don’t leave me.”
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