The Wilderness

1 Samuel 16:13 → 1 Samuel 27:1 → 1 Samuel 30:6

Samuel poured oil on David’s head as a teenager. David didn’t sit on the throne until he was thirty.

In between:

• Running,
• Caves,
• Ziklag,
• Culminating at 1 Samuel 27:1 where David says in his heartthat one day he’ll die by Saul’s hand.

That’s Psalm 13, a long, grinding stretch where God’s promise and David’s experience doesn’t line up.

Quick side note: The psalm is structured in six verses, three movements, two verses each.

• Complaint (1–2),
• Cry (3–4),
• There’s a hinge is verse 5: but.
• Confidence (5–6).

Psalm 13:1–2

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
² How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

I. HOW LONG?

David’s frustrations radiate through this text:  

Four “how longs” (Heb. ʿad-ānāh) stacked back to back — and they move in a deliberate order:

A: Upward — toward God

Daivid doesn’t work up to the hard question — he leads with it.

  

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

David starts with God, not with the enemy.

David uses the word forever” in verse 1:

• That’s the tempting lie waiting inside every long wait.
• Either that God is late, or that God has stopped.

 

The use of the phrase “hide your face” (sātar pānîm) is covenant language.

• Numbers 6:25 is the blessing — the LORD makes His face shine on you.
• David is saying: I was promised the shining face, and I’m getting the hidden one.

 

The truth is that God is working in his own time for a much bigger purpose, and often in the wilderness we begin to deal with our own shortcomings, hurts, and struggles and develop the necessary skills needed to flourish in the future.

This is a cry of almost every person God uses throughout scripture:

Habakkuk:

Habakkuk 1:2

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
    and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
    and you will not save?

Throughout the book of Psalms:

Psalm 74:10; 79:5; 90:13 — “how long” is a standing vocabulary word in Israel’s prayer book, not an outlier.

The Martyrs in Revelation:

Revelation 6:10 — the martyrs under the altar, already in glory, already safe, still asking how long.

• If the redeemed in the presence of God are still asking it, the question is not a symptom of weak faith.
• It’s the sound of faith that hasn’t gotten what it was promised yet.

B: Inward — toward himself

How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?

The first “how long” was aimed at God; this one lands on David himself.

• “Take counsel in my soul”  is boardroom language, the word for deliberate strategy and the counsel of advisors a strategy session convened inside himself, daily.
• The meeting produces: not a plan but sorrow all the day.
• Every session adjourns without a decision, and the only thing that accumulates is grief.

 

Until one day it does adjourn with a decision:

1 Samuel 27:1 — “David said in his heart, ‘Now I shall perish one day by the hand of Saul.'” Notice the absence of God from the deliberation.

• That one verse takes him: To Gath → sixteen months among the Philistines → nearly marching against Israel → home to a Ziklag burned to the ground.
• The chapter that begins “David said in his heart” ends in ashes. Self-counsel doesn’t stay in your head — eventually it walks out of your head and buys a ticket.

Underneath the verse is one simple urge: I want this over, I want it over now, and I am willing to end it myself.

We’re the first generation trained by everything we touch to treat the gap between wanting and having as a defect to be engineered away.

• So when God leaves a gap open, we don’t experience it as formation — we experience it as malfunction.
• And when He won’t close it, we reach for the only lever we still control:

We are not alone in this flawed way of thinking:

 

Abraham & Sarah — Gen. 16:1–4

A promised son, no timeline  Hagar. A reasonable, culturally normal shortcut. Thirteen years of silence follow, and a family fracture we’re still reading about in the news.

Esau — Gen. 25:29–34; Heb. 12:16

One meal   The birthright, for stew Hebrews calls it unholy — he sold the permanent for the immediate.

Saul — 1 Sam. 13:8–14

Waits Seven days for Samuel, The sacrifice, offered himself “You have done foolishly… your kingdom shall not continue.” He waited almost the whole way. He couldn’t do the last hour.

Israel — Ex. 32:1

Moses on the mountain, A calf they could see today “As for this Moses… we do not know what has become of him.” The delay didn’t produce doubt; it produced an idol.

Even Jesus (Matt. 4:1–10) — bread now, kingdoms now, proof now. Satan never offered Him anything He wasn’t going to get eventually; he offered it early, by another road.

That’s what instant gratification always is: the right thing, the wrong way, the wrong time.

 

 

So what do you do with the committee meeting?

1: Stop listening to your soul; start talking to it.

• “Why are you cast down, O my soul? Hope in God”(Ps. 42:5).
• “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence”(Ps. 62:5).
• David interrogates his soul instead of consulting it — because the soul is a terrible advisor and a decent listener, and most of us have that backward.

2: Get it out of your head and into the open air.

• A loop is never audited until somebody else hears it.
• Jonathan found David in the woods and “strengthened his hand in God”(1 Sam. 23:16)
• David couldn’t do for himself in months what one friend did in an afternoon.

3. Take the wait as the curriculum, not the interruption.

• Steadfastness must have its full effect so that you may be complete, lacking nothing(James 1:2–4).
• You can’t microwave a person.
• God isn’t withholding the thing from you; He’s producing something in you that only arrives on this road.

C: Outward — toward the enemy

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

The word is a worship word. Exalted is rûm — to be lifted high, raised up. It’s the verb used of God being exalted above the heavens (Ps. 57:5, 11).

• David isn’t just complaining that the enemy is winning. He’s complaining that the enemy is occupying the high place — the position that belongs to God and to the man God anointed.
• And notice the two words that carry the sting: over me. The wound isn’t only that they’re up; it’s that they’re up while I’m down. That moment is where a private wait becomes a public humiliation.

 

Jesus points us in a completely different direction:

• John 12:32 — “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
• On Friday it looked like the enemy had finally been exalted for good. The mocking, the sign over His head, the sealed tomb. The enemy’s greatest moment of exaltation was the exact moment of his defeat.
• Colossians 2:15 — God disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, triumphing over them in the cross. The public humiliation ran the other direction.
• Philippians 2:9 — therefore God highly exalted Him. The high place eventually goes to the right person. It just isn’t awarded on our schedule.
• 1 Corinthians 15:25–26 — He must reign until every enemy is under His feet; the last one has a date already fixed.

How do we deal with the enemy?

Name the enemy honestly — it’s usually not a person. 

• For most people in the room, it’s a diagnosis, a debt, an addiction, an accusation, a season of drought.
• Ephesians 6:12 — our struggle is not against flesh and blood. Misidentify the enemy and you’ll spend your strength on the wrong front.

Remember your Place!

• Romans 12:19 — vengeance belongs to God;
• Matthew 5:44 — love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
• David had two clean shots and took neither (1 Sam. 24:6; 26:11),
• When Saul finally fell, David wrote an elegy, not a victory song (2 Sam. 1:17–27).

That’s what waiting well produces in a man.

 

Change your altitude

• Asaph’s cure was the sanctuary.
• Get in the room where God is exalted, and the thing exalted over you gets resized on the way in

Stop worrying about the halftime score. 

• Every “they’re winning” verdict is a judgment rendered before the final whistle.
• Psalm 37:1–2 — fret not; they’ll fade like the grass.

The temptation in a long wait isn’t usually to curse God. It’s to go quiet — to keep praying the polite prayers while the real ones stay unsaid.

David models the opposite: the complaint is addressed to God, not muttered about Him.

• That’s the difference between lament and cynicism.
• Lament walks toward God with the ugly question in hand;
• Cynicism walks away with it.

What’s the prayer you’ve stopped praying because you got tired of hearing yourself pray it?

Psalm 13:3–4

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
    light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
⁴ lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”
    lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

II. A PRAYER FOR PERSPECTIVE

 

Three imperatives, rapid-fire

• Consider(look at me),
• Answer me,
• Light up my eyes.

He does not ask, “explain this.”

He does not ask, “tell me how long.”

He asks for light in his eyes — enough strength to keep standing.

 

 

In Hebrew, bright eyes = life and strength; dim eyes = exhaustion and death.

1 Samuel 14:27 — Jonathan, worn out from battle, tastes honey, “and his eyes brightened.” Same picture. David is asking for the spiritual equivalent of Jonathan’s honey: not a resolution, a rally.

• 1 Samuel 30:6 — Ziklag burned, family gone, his own men talking about stoning him — and David strengthened himself in the LORD his God. This is Psalm 13:3 in narrative form.
• Ephesians 1:18 — Paul prays that the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened. Same request, this side of the cross.
• 2 Corinthians 4:6, 16 — God shines light in our hearts through the face of Christ; the outer self wastes away, the inner self is renewed day by day. Daily light, not one-time answers.
• Psalm 27:13 — “unless I had believed I would see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.”

 

Most of us pray for the situation to change and treat anything less as an unanswered prayer.

Psalm 13 challenges us to pray a more honest prayer: God, I don’t need the whole answer today — I need enough light to get through today.

 

• The diagnosis that hasn’t come back.
• The child who hasn’t come home.
• The marriage in year three of the same argument.
• The year the rain didn’t come.

In every one of them, “light up my eyes” is a prayer you can pray today and see answers to immediately.

Psalm 13:5–6

But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
⁶ I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.

III. A TURN TO TRUST

But I have trusted in your steadfast love.

• Saul is not dead.
• The enemy has not fallen.
• Nothing in verses 5–6 says the circumstances changed.

What changed is what David is focused on.

The psalm doesn’t resolve because the wait ended; it resolves because David reached back and grabbed hold of something that was already true.

 

David can’t yet sing about what God will do, so he sings about what God has already done.

 

Trust in a long wait doesn’t run on optimism about the future; it runs on evidence from the past.

 

Verse 5 begins with a decision, not a feeling. David chooses where to focus.

• Keep the receipts.Write down what God has already done — dated, specific. Verse 6 is only singable by someone who remembered. Most of us are not faithless; we’re just forgetful.
• Sing before you feel it.The order in the psalm is trust → rejoice → Worship in the wait isn’t dishonesty; it’s the will leading the emotions instead of following them.
• Don’t wait alone.David had Jonathan (1 Sam 23:16 — he “strengthened his hand in God”). Somebody in this church family has been where you are.

Conclusion

Psalm 13 is six verses long.

• Four of them are hard.
• Two of them are hope.

David wrote it somewhere in the gap between the oil and the crown.

You may be reading it somewhere in the gap between the promise and the fulfillment.

David doesn’t promise the gap will close tomorrow.

He promises that the God on the other side of it has already dealt bountifully with you — and He proved it on a Friday, in the dark, with His face turned away from His own Son so that it would never turn away from you.

  

Closing question: Not how long will you wait? — but what will you look at while you do?

Every “how long” in verses 1–2 has an answer, and the answer isn’t a date on a calendar. It’s a hill outside Jerusalem.

• Will you forget me forever? — Isaiah 49:15–16: engraved on the palms of His hands.
• How long will you hide your face? — Matthew 27:45–46: the face was hidden from the Son, in darkness, so it would never be hidden from us. Jesus prayed the lament David only felt.
• How long will my enemy be exalted? — 1 Corinthians 15:26, 54–57: the last enemy has a date, and it’s already fixed.
• How do I know His ḥesed is real? — Romans 5:6–8: God demonstrated His love toward us while we were still waiting, still sinners, still nowhere near deserving it. Romans 5:6–8; 8:32 — the argument from the greater to the lesser: He gave the Son, so what would He now withhold?