Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 4 · January 4
My God, My God
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”
We do not say this line out loud. We read it in church in a calm, level voice on our way to the part about the crucifixion. Then we go home and pray something more polite about our own hard season.
David says it straight to God: "My God, my God." He says it twice, the way a person does when they are still holding on to someone who has stopped answering. The second half of the verse is harder still: "why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?" Roaring is an animal word, and the same Hebrew word is used of a lion's roar. This is the noise a creature makes in pain, and David's complaint is that no one answered it.
The next verse takes away the last excuse anyone might make for God's silence: "O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent." David has not been neglecting prayer. He has prayed day and night, and nothing has come back.
Jesus said this line from the cross. He cried it with a loud voice, and some of the people standing there misheard Him and thought He was calling for Elijah. He knew the psalm, and what He quoted was its opening. Most of the time we do something else with it. We hurry down to verse twenty-two, where the psalm turns and the praise begins, and we explain that He had the ending in mind. Yet verse twenty-two is twenty-one verses away, and He said the first verse. The first verse is Scripture too, and God put it in the Bible so that people could say it.
That leaves a question, and it is not the one you wanted answered. The psalm never explains why God is silent, and no reason is coming to you today either. What the psalm does give you is permission. David never stops saying "my God," even while he tells God He is far away, and Jesus prayed these same words. So ask yourself what you have been saying to God instead of verse one, and who taught you that the level voice was the more respectful one. Then say the first verse in your own words. The same psalm, much later, says of the God who seemed so far away, "when he cried unto him, he heard."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 4 is The Same Hands (Psalm 29:11).