The Songs of AscentSample

From the Depths

Psalm 130

“Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord” (Psalm 130:1). Except for deep-sea divers, submariners, and the prophet Jonah, most of us don’t know what it means to cry out to God from the depths—at least not the actual depths of the ocean. When we read these words, our first and natural instinct is to translate them as metaphors without another thought.

Before we do that, it might be worth pausing to consider the scene the psalmist has given us. The Hebrew word rendered “depths” normally refers to the salty, blue deep of the ocean. For the people of ancient Israel, it was a place of utter despair. For any poor soul trapped in the grasp of the sea, there was no hope. They were as good as dead. There was no coming back from that.

I mentioned Jonah as an example of one who prayed from beneath the sea. He did so from inside “a huge fish” (Jonah 1:17). To be eaten by a great beast of the sea like this was death. Perhaps that’s why Jonah prayed, “From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry” (2:2). Of course, in the end, the mega-fish lost its lunch. Jonah washed up on the shore, no doubt soggy and needing a serious bath. The mercy and kindness of God gave him a new life.

In Psalm 130, “the depths” are a lot dryer than what Jonah experienced. Still, the imagery of being lost at sea, with all the hopelessness of going under, is a vivid picture of the psalmist’s emotional state. He’s writing what he feels. Like Jonah before him, he looks to God for mercy: “If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you” (vv. 3–4). Unlike Jonah, however, the psalmist’s experience in the depths seems to last more than three days. He says, “I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope” (v. 5).

When Jesus was asked for a sign, he said, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:39–40). The people listening should have connected the dots. They knew after three days inside the fish, the Lord delivered Jonah from the depths. He walked away, alive and well. Jesus, too, would be delivered, not merely from his tomb but from death itself.

We celebrate Easter—Resurrection Sunday—as the most important day in history. Everything changed at Easter.

For those who know Jesus, there has been another resurrection as well; we were dead in our sins, but now we’ve been given new life in his name (Romans 6:4). That doesn’t mean we’ll never again feel the depths of despair in this world. Still, it does mean that, like the psalmist before us, we can have confidence that our story will not end there.

To modern readers, the book of Jonah can seem too fanciful to be true. Some Bible scholars speculate that perhaps we should read it as more of a parable than an account of actual events. While we should strive to read any given text the way its original audience would have, we should never declare a passage of the Bible too miraculous to be true. Nothing is impossible for God!

In the depths, remember this: hope lives because Jesus lives. Rescue is coming.