Psalm 77:9

9 Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has He in anger withdrawn His compassion?

There are seasons in life when the soul asks questions it never expected to ask. Asaph, the gifted musician during David and Solomon’s day, found himself in exactly that place. His distress was so deep that every normal avenue of comfort had failed him. He prayed and found no relief. He remembered better days and found no peace. He searched his own heart for answers and came up empty. By the time we reach verse 9, his grief has forced him into a terrifying question: has God forgotten how to be gracious?

Maybe you have asked that same question in your own dark night. Maybe you have stretched out hands in prayer and felt only silence. Maybe you have remembered better days and felt the ache of their absence rather than comfort in their memory. If so, you are in good company. Scripture doesn’t hide this kind of honest despair; inspired by the Holy Spirit, it records it in the songbook of God’s own people. But notice what happens next in Asaph’s psalm. He doesn’t stay trapped in his questions. He makes a decision. He says, “I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember Your wonders of old” (Psalm 77:11). He stops searching his own feelings for comfort and starts searching God’s track record for truth. He moves his gaze from what he can do to what God has already done. And what did he remember? He remembered the Red Sea. He remembered Israel, trapped between Pharaoh’s army and an impassable sea with absolutely no human way forward. No bridge. No ships. No escape route visible to the eye. And yet Asaph writes, “Your way was in the sea and Your paths in the mighty waters, and Your footprints may not be known” (Psalm 77:19). God’s way was in the sea. Not around it. Not instead of it. Through it. And His footprints were invisible even as He walked ahead of His people, because His ways are simply higher than ours. That is the testimony that steadied Asaph’s heart, and it is the testimony we need today. When your circumstances feel like a sea with no way through, remember: God’s way has always been through impossible places. He didn’t abandon Israel in the wilderness, and He has not abandoned you in yours. Maybe you have wondered where God was when your health failed, when your marriage fractured, when grief came crashing in, when your children walked away from the faith, when your job disappeared, or when tragedy struck without warning or explanation. Those questions are not evidence of weak faith; they are evidence of an honest heart wrestling with a real and present God who’s way forward seems invisible in the moment of pain. But the answer to those questions is not found by staring harder at our circumstances. The answer is found by remembering who God has already proven Himself to be. 

There is a story of a little girl in a kindergarten class who was drawing with great concentration. Her teacher walked by and asked what she was drawing. “I’m drawing God,” the girl said. The teacher smiled gently and said, “But no one knows what God looks like.” Without even looking up from her paper, the girl replied, “They will in a minute.” That little girl had more confidence in her portrait than we often have in our praying, but her sincerity reminds us of something important: we are not left guessing about the heart of God. He has shown us exactly what He looks like. Not in crayon, but in the cross. Not in a drawing, but in His Son. And what we see is not a God who is reluctantly waiting to punish us, withholding His mercy and eager for His wrath. We see a God who, as Pastor John Piper has said, keeps His anger behind a stiff safety lock while His mercy operates on a hair trigger. We see a God who doesn’t merely let goodness and mercy follow us through life, but actively pursues us with them, every single day. This is the God who led Israel through the sea. This is the God who has carried you through every impossible place you have already survived. This is the God who has not changed, even if your circumstances have. If you are His child through faith in Jesus Christ, He has not forgotten to be gracious. He has not, in anger, withdrawn His compassion. He is for you, not against you. His plan is unfolding even when His footprints are invisible to you. So when the enemy whispers that God has abandoned you, that your prayers are going nowhere, that you have been forgotten in your suffering, remember the sea. Remember that God’s way has always run straight through the places that looked impassable. And take Him at His word when He says, “Surely I will be with you.” Even when His way is through the sea.

Yours in Christ, 

Pastor John