Psalms 88:3

For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.

Heman: a child of light walking in darkness

(with 1 Chronicles 25:5):--A seer is just a man who sees. Other men also have eyes indeed, but, then, they do not see with their eyes as a seer sees. Now, Heman was a seer. Heman saw constantly a sight that to most men even in Israel was absolutely invisible. Heman saw, and saw nothing else, but his own soul.

1. “My soul is full of troubles,” says this great seer, speaking about himself. What led Heman to speak and to publish abroad this most melancholy of all the psalms we are not told. It was not Heman’s actual sin, like David’s. Neither was this terrible trouble, like David’s, among his large family of sons and daughters. Heman had brought up his sons and daughters more successfully than David had done. For all Heman’s children assisted their father in sacred song in the house of the Lord. At the same time Heman cannot take a happy father’s full joy cut of his talented and dutiful children because of the overwhelming trouble of his own soul. It is a terrible baptism into the matters of God to have a soul from his youth up so full of inconsolable troubles as that.

2. “My soul is full of troubles,” says Heman, “till I am driven distracted.” Every day we hear of men and women being driven distracted through love, and through fear, and through poverty, and through pain, and sometimes through ever-joy, and sometimes, it is said, through religion. It was thought by some that the Apostle Paul was quite distracted in his day through his too much thought and occupation about Divine things. But be not too much cast down. Comfort My people. Say to them, and assure them, that this is the beginning in them of the wisdom, and the truth, and the love, and the salvation of their God and Saviour Jesus Christ.

3. Now, with all that, this is not to be wondered at that Heman says next (Psalms 88:18). Anything else but this is not to be expected from Heman. Heman makes it an additional complaint, but it is a simple and a necessary consequence of his troubled and distracted soul. Friends and lovers, the oldest, and the warmest, and the bests--they all have their several limits. Most men are made with little heart themselves, and they are not at home where there is much heart, and much exercise of heart. They flee in a fright from the heights and the depths of the high and deep heart. It needs a friend that sticketh closer than a brother to keep true to a man who has much heart, and who sees and feels with all his heart. Heman, besides being the King’s seer, was also an eminent type of Christ, both in the distracting troubles of his soul, and in the fewness and in the infidelity of his friends.

4. Now, all that, bad as it is, would have been easily borne had it been a sudden stroke and then for ever over. Had it been a great temptation, a great fall, a great repentance, a great forgiveness, and then the light of God’s countenance brighter than ever all Heman’s after days. But Heman’s yoke from his youth up has been of that terrible kind that it has eaten into his soul deeper and deeper with every advancing year. Had Heman lived after Paul’s day he would have described himself in Paul’s way. He would have said that the two-edged sword had become every year more and more spiritual, till it entered more and more deep every year into his soul.

5. There are these four uses out of all that.

(1) The first is to justify such a proceeding as to take a text like this for a Communion evening. What could be more comely in a worthy” communicant, who has been stayed with flagons and comforted with apples all day than to say to the outcasts of Israel ere this day closes (Isaiah 43:1; Isaiah 43:25).

(2) And then for the use of all Heman-like, all distracted communicants--do not despair. Do not give way to distraction.

(3) Are you quite sure that this deep darkness of yours is quite unaccountable to you short of God’s sovereignty--short of His deep, hidden, Divine will? I doubt it, and I would have you doubt it. I would have you make sure that there is no other possible explanation of this darkness of His face. All the chances are that it is not God’s ways that are so distractingly dark, but your own.

(4) There is a singular use in Heman for ministers. When God is to make a very sinful man into a very able, and skilful, and experimental minister, He sends that man to the same school to which He sent Heman. Now, who can tell what God has laid up for you to do for Him and for men’s souls when you are out of your probationer-ship of trouble and distraction, and are promoted to be a comforter of God’s troubled and distracted saints? He may have a second David, and far more, to comfort and to sanctify in the generation to come; and you may be ordained to be the King’s seer in the matters of God. Who can tell? Only, be you ready, for the stone that is fit for the wall is not left to lie in the ditch. (A. Whyte, D. D.)

Heman’s elegy

Two Hemans attained eminence in Israel. One was a singer, the other was a sage (1 Chronicles 15:16; 1 Chronicles 25:5; 1 Kings 4:31). The two facts which filled Heman’s soul with trouble were by no means unusual facts. They were--

1. The growing infirmities, the frailties and Sicknesses, of age (verse7); and--

2. The loss of friends, or the supposed alienation of friends, which often accompanies age, especially when it is sick and weary of the world (Psalms 88:8). These are common facts, but they are none the more welcome for being common when they come home to us personally. Our sage broods over them, resents them, as we all do at times, and laments his feebleness and isolation. Nay, as he traces all the facts and events of human life to the hand of God, he charges God with all the responsibility, all the pains and bitterness of them, and concludes that even this great Friend has forgotten him; or has turned against him. With all his wisdom he has been, as he confesses (Psalms 88:5). Of a sceptical and misgiving temperament from his youth up. Two ways in which we may view the contents of the psalm--either making the best of them, or making the worst of them, in so far at least as they bear on the character and aim of the author of the psalm. We are not bound to adopt Heman’s views, or even to sympathize with them. Much in the Bible was written for our warning and admonition. If we bring a generous spirit to the interpretation of this song, or elegy, we may recall the familiar maxim: “In much wisdom is much sorrow.” A thoughtful mind is a pensive mind. The more a man sees of human life, the more he feels how much there is in it which is wrong, foolish, base, disappointing, if not hopelessly corrupt and bad. So we shall begin to make excuse for Heman. Let us remember also that in much sorrow there is much discipline, and discipline by which a wise man should profit. Do you, do all men, resent the wrongs of time? Remember that resentment, then, as well as the wrongs which provoke it; and consider what a happy omen lies in the fact that men do hate and resent that which is wrong, and both love and demand that which is just and right. Those who decry “mere human wisdom” are very likely to conclude that Heman the sage was punished for his largeness and freedom of thought, that he was abandoned to the guidance of his own wisdom in order that he might learn how little it could do for him in the greatest emergencies of life, how little, therefore, it was worth. I see no reason to judge him thus harshly. I find much in this psalm to lead us to a more kindly judgment. But, doubtless, there are many among us to whom such a description would apply. (Samuel Cox, D. D.)