Psalm 13 Wholly in Two Houses

Psalm 13 and the Experience of Lament

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan.

Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church. As Juliet said, I'm Don Felsick. I'm the lead pastor here, and I am really excited for the summer series in the Psalms. I encourage you all to read what you can as you get an opportunity to go through that.

It's not gonna be graded, so don't worry if you miss a day here or there. Just pick right back up where we're at. You don't have to do makeup time, okay? You can if you want to, but you don't have to.

Like I said, it's not graded by me. Your progress isn't graded by God. It's between you and him, and I actually believe that the more that you engage with his word, the more you will be built up and strengthened and encouraged and convicted and reminded of the glorious gospel by which we are justified and being sanctified.

And so our hope and our rest and our trust is all found in the pages of Scripture, and that's where our strength comes from. So we're gonna be diving into these Psalms, and the Psalms are meant to be felt.

They are meant to be felt, and many of us don't do, some of us in the room don't do very well with feelings. Some of us do really well and maybe over well with feelings. So the Psalms, I'm gonna be honest, were not always my favorite.

I've grown into them as I've lived a bit and as I've aged a bit and as I've been around the Son a few times. And it's not to say that the Psalms, the fact that they're felt doesn't mean that they don't have anything to teach.

They do teach us, but what they teach us is set into the poetry and song in a way that's meant to capture real human emotions and real human feelings. And I would go so far as to say we're missing the point of a Psalm if we feel nothing when we read it.

We're missing the point of it if we feel nothing when we read it. The author had something in their head, yes, but they also had something in their heart that they desired to express in their writings.

Our text this morning is gonna take on an obvious tone right out of the gate. When I read it, you're gonna go like, oh, I get where he's going with this. David is wearing his heart on his sleeve and despite the fact that he was a valiant man of courage on the battlefield and fought the giants and did all of this amazing stuff, he was also a man of poetry.

And he wears his heart on his sleeve and it shows in a lot of his Psalms and a lot of his writings. We catch David in a moment of despair with a pen in his hand here in the text that we're gonna be looking at.

And our text is gonna dive deep into sorrow and frustration and internal struggle and even fear of enemies. What we're gonna be looking at this morning is a lament. And as a matter of fact, I chose this Psalm particularly because it is identified by many scholars as the quintessential lament from the Psalms.

It's short, it's brief, it's compact, it contains the basic elements of an ancient lament and it actually is kind of the one that the scholars point to is like, if you wanna understand lament, study Psalm 13 to get the overall feel of ancient lament.

But I didn't choose this Psalm as an academic venture to teach us about the genre of lament or to understand it and dissect it. I chose it because I'm convinced that many of us are in a season where this is an amazing message for our hearts.

It's something that's beneficial for us to hear. And even, I confess I didn't choose it because it's graduation Sunday, but man do I think this is a good message for graduates to hear. Man do I think that this is a good message for those who are taking the next step in life to understand that there is hardship, there is pain, and there is also great glory.

This lament reminds us that sorrow is a distinct reality in the world, even as David never loses sight of the hope that he has in the world of God's covenant of love and salvation. And so he holds on and gives us something firm to hold on to in the storms of life.

How many of you think that's a good message? You lived enough to know that's a good message that we need to hear. That there is something stable, there is something rock solid in a world where everything else around us feels like it is shifting.

Well David here has real sorrows, he has real worries, and real world problems while he keeps a grip on the objective covenant love of God in the midst of those storms. And the Psalms should lead us all to consider what it looks like to have our feet firmly planted in two worlds.

This is a message of living in two places at the same time, and we have a very good understanding that you can't be in two places at once except in the Christian life you are. And you're gonna see that as we go through this text.

We are those who can both say at the same time, how long will you hide your face, oh Lord, and you have dealt bountifully with me. Same song, same author, same time, sitting down and writing these words, how long will you hide your face, you have dealt bountifully with me.

The Christian can say both of these things because we live in this fallen, sin-cursed world while we've been brought into newness of life through the hope of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We do indeed have a real participation in this life of heartache and pain, and a real inheritance in the life to come.

Troubled and secure, crushed but not destroyed, dying but raising to new life. All of our days lived in the valley of the shadow of death while walking moment by moment in his spirit. The psalm of lament makes sense of what we all feel as those being redeemed in a fallen world.

So listen to David say how long, oh Lord, and you have dealt bountifully with me. Let's open our Bibles or your devices or your scripture journals to Psalm 13 to take in this first psalm that we're gonna be hearing from over the course of this summer.

We cast God's holy word, which might be shocking to hear the way that David just emphatically pours his heart out and almost kind of vomits his frustration out onto the page for us, and yet this is God's holy word.

Psalm 13. How long, oh Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? 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?

Consider and answer me, oh Lord, my God. Light up my eyes lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest the enemy say I have prevailed over him, lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken. But I have trusted in your steadfast love.

My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. Let's pray. Father, the Psalms give us words in the darkness of our lives, in the frustration, in the moments.

They give us words to speak into the delights and joys and every emotion in between. I thank you that your word revealed to us is not some sanitized, unattainable speech that is high and lofty and above us and doesn't relate to us and something that we just are trying constantly our entire lives to strive after, but rather we see guys like David at wit's end, frustrated, spending long nights of counsel in their hearts, trying to solve their own problems and figure things out and turning to you in prayer and crying out.

Father, I pray that as we have an opportunity to go through the Psalms this summer that you would meet us in this book. You would meet us here in these raw and real words, real words of praise, real words of frustration, real words of angst that express from the soul of a person just how hard it can be to live in a sin-cursed, fallen place.

But we thank you that these Psalms also give us something stable to hold on to. When all else fails, we trust in your steadfast love. We have an anchor for our souls that is Jesus Christ, our Lord. Father, I pray that even in the midst of the hardships that are represented in this room, we could get up and spend an entire hour just testifying of the hard things in our lives.

But Father, I pray that you would allow those things to fade into the background as we contemplate and consider the gospel, the hope that we have in Christ, the salvation that's been given to us, the covenant love that you have expressed to your people and that that would fuel our praise, that we would indeed now sing songs of genuine praise to you from the place of hardship, from the place of difficult week and difficult things that we're facing.

Father, that you would meet us here and receive these songs as genuine praise to you, that we would see you high and exalted and lifted up and that we would rejoice in your Son who has granted us salvation through his sacrifice for us on the cross.

And it's in the name of Jesus that I pray these things. Amen. Yeah, you can go to be seated and refine your place in Psalm 13. If you got those scripture journals, open those up to be able to take notes or open your devices.

And if at any time during the message you need more coffee or juice or donut holes, take advantage of that back there. When it comes to Psalms, it's kind of like a little bit like the story of the butterfly.

You can, you know, it's a beautiful thing and then you can dissect it, but then it's not a beautiful thing, right? Like, I mean, the more you dissect it, the more you take it apart, the less beautiful it is.

And so Psalms are kind of that way. They're meant to be read in whole. They're meant to be felt. And then there's all kinds of technical ways that people kind of, scholars really have poured over the Psalms for centuries and centuries and centuries.

And there's all kinds of technical outlines and all kinds of even technical words surrounding the study of a Psalm. And so, you know, you can outline this in a very technical way and it factors in really well.

Six verses and it could be three points. I'm gonna only have two points this morning because I'm gonna go with an emotional outline, not a technical outline. A technical outline would be the first two verses are the lament, the second two verses are the petition, the last two verses are the praise.

But there's a division in the text that has been on my heart and mind since I started reading this in preparation for preaching it. And there's a division in the text. It's radical and it draws my attention.

It keeps me thinking. It's kept me thinking throughout the week. In the evenings, it's been on my mind. While I'm riding my bike, it's been on my mind. While I'm walking, it's on my mind. And my outline is just simply this.

I'm calling it, verses one through four, the house of pain. And verses five and six, the house of love. Now some of you just thought in your mind and we'll get it out of the way, jump around, right? And the house of pain, let's get that out of your way, out of your mind, and then we'll just be able to move on because I'm gonna say house of pain several times and you guys can go ahead and just say jump around if you want.

But some of you have no idea what I'm talking about. Artists back in the, was it 90s? 90s, there was a band called the House of Pain. They sang a very popular song called Jump Around. So there you go.

That's not in my notes. None of that's in there. And it actually didn't strike me until this morning that that was gonna be an issue standing up here. And I saw some smiles right away when I said it. I was like, eh, some people are catching on to that right away, so.

But let's begin with some observations about what it's like to live in the house of pain. And of course that's a metaphor, right? Well I'm using that as a metaphor for life in this fallen and broken world.

And there are some observations that the psalmist, David, I should say, David, writes for us right away from the house of pain. He's giving us some observations. The house of pain, first of all, we identify is full of questions.

Where we live here in this place is full of questions. And some of them come at us unanswered. The first two verses amount to four rhetorical, really five rhetorical questions, beginning, four of them beginning with the simple phrase, how long?

How long? Do you see it in your text there in the Bible? We start with a time question. And isn't that appropriate? We begin with a question of time. Far from being merely a technical question, the question how long, it unveils our heart in a fallen world.

Because time is not our friend. Have you noticed that? Time is not our friend. But time is an incessant enemy. Because, for one primary reason, we have fallen and death and sin are real. Without death, without decay, without pain, without the fear that we live under, time would be a welcomed friend.

And that's what eternity is all about, is a place without sin and corruption and death and decay and all of those things. And so that's what turns time into a friend. And we want all of it. We want eternity in a place like that.

But man, if eternity was just this forever, eh. You guys know what I'm talking about? Eh. Not so good. And if you can't get your mind beyond this life being eternal, then you're gonna just go like, man, how much boredom can I take in eternity, right?

But it's not gonna be like this. And what I'm saying is, in the house of pain, when we ask the question how long, there are days of work that seem super long. Like, they seem longer than they are, right?

There are dark nights that seem to stretch on for days in this life. There are seasons of grief and pain. There are losses that seem to knock the wind out of us. How can we take another breath with this hardship that we're facing?

There are depressions that often strike us that make it hard to get out of bed at all. So how long is a question that could rightly ask, we could all rightly ask to God regarding any broken and uncomfortable situation in our lives, how long?

And I think many of us have asked it. How long is this gonna go on? And I love how the Psalms are written in a way that are not too specific. Some of them identify some specific context, but most of them don't.

And just as a course of kind of introducing this series and trying to think this through, the more specific a Psalm is, the less it feels like it applies to me. David starts talking about swinging a sword.

I've never done that. You know what I mean? Just play with my neighbor friends in the backyard when I was a kid or something like that. And then somebody, you know, then I hit Jimmy with a stick and then it's all over and he was crying to mom and all that stuff.

But you guys know what I'm saying. Like, I mean, the more specific it is, the less it applies to my situation. And so too often, to be quite honest, we desire the context of a specific Psalm. We're like, when did David write this?

Where was he at in his life? As if that's gonna give us better application or better understanding. But it's good that we don't always have the context. It's good that we don't always have the context because the Psalms are meant to be sung and quoted and memorized and cherished by a wide variety of people, even the people in this room.

Not just soldiers, not just shepherds, not just kings, not just mothers, but all of us. So despite the fact that we don't know exactly what David was facing and what he was going through and where he was living and was he king, was he not king, was he a shepherd, was he young, was he old?

His questions here identify for us three general things that he has experienced as problems in the house of pain. And I think we faced them or we will. These three things can relate to us in quite direct application in our experiences of this life here in 2024.

It's beautiful that the very things that David struggled with way back when can summarize so well our pains and our struggles and our hurts in the here and now. So first and foremost, first and most important, and it is foremost important to David, is the line of questioning that we see in verse one.

There's a line of questioning here. The first three questions, two of them are how questions, they all surround one primary area, a source of pain in the house of pain. And it is the rift he feels between himself and God.

One commentary on this passage said that all trouble is theological trouble. All trouble is theological trouble, and I agree with that at a very basic level. I think that's absolutely true. All hardship, all pain, all sufferings are theological problems.

They're problems in regard to our relationship with God. They all point to some distance from God's blessing. Any time that you're hurting, any time that there's hardship, any time there's pain, it highlights for us our distance from God's blessing because every single hardship you've ever faced has come about due to the separation that sin has brought into the world, and I don't even wanna breathe in between this because I'm not saying that all hardship, suffering, and turmoil is the result of your specific sin, not at all, but all pain and suffering and death can be tracked back to its source in the garden of Eden.

All suffering that you have ever experienced can be tracked back to one woman holding a fruit with a bite out of it, and one man holding a fruit with a bite out of it. All of the suffering you've ever experienced and will ever experience goes back to that point, a rift in our relationship corporately to our God.

There in that place in Eden, there in that place, hardship and pain and death began as a curse to our race's rebellion against our creator. It all began there. So when David is asking this line of questioning, how long, oh Lord, will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me? When David is asking God why he has hidden his face and why he has forgotten him, David, hear me carefully, church, David is barking up the right tree. He's got the right tree.

My sinful, broken condition has created a separation between me and my creator, and Adam and Eve's broken and sinful relationship with God has separated us all from our creator. But I wanna point out something that isn't so obvious here and something that needs to be stated, and it is simply that all true prayer, all true prayer springs from faith, and this is a prayer.

This song is to God. Do you see him talking to God? Do you see him addressing the Lord? David's concern over God ignoring him is addressed to whom? God, the Lord, Yahweh, he uses God's personal name, revealed to Moses, and when you tell God that you hate your life and wish you had never been born, like Job, you are at least doing one thing well in the house of pain.

You're at least doing one thing well, and yeah, as stark and as shocking as those words can be, I hate my life, I wish I wasn't born. Job said it, and it says he didn't sin in it. What are you doing right?

What are you getting right in the house of pain when you address God that way? You're getting one thing right, you're talking to the owner. You're talking to management. You're talking to the director.

You're talking to the one in charge when you address him. You're going to the one. All true prayer is faith, because it assumes what? That somebody's listening. It assumes that somebody's listening. David is feeling here the distance of God, and that is the ultimate source of his suffering in this world, and he identifies it right out of the gate.

He comes to God to talk about their relationship. Now, whatever hardship he's going through, whatever the specifics of the day in and day out grind that David is going through in this circumstance matters little, it is simply that he is suffering, and he identifies that the ultimate source of that suffering is a rift in relationship with God.

So he comes to talk about their relationship, and I would suggest to you that we all would do well to do more of that in prayer. Talk to God about our relationship with him. Talk to him about how we're feeling.

I feel like we're distant right now. I feel like you've turned your face from me, and everything that I touch seems to be going bad. You have seasons like that? Or, to talk with him about, wow, you have lavish bounty on me, you have blessed me so much, right?

Right now, things seem to be going well, and talk about his relationship then and say, I don't know why, but you have drawn near to me in blessing, and I thank you for that. But talk about that relationship.

To talk to God about how we feel about him is all fair game, and I love the reason why it's fair game to talk about our relationship with him in regard to our suffering, because he entered this house of pain with us.

He knows what it's like to deal with this kind of stuff. Jesus himself felt suffering, and he himself cried out to his father in anguish. Our rift from God is our most fundamental source of pain, and that's identified in verse one.

But there's a second area of pain that we experience in this place, and it's the internal struggle that David feels in his own mind and heart, starting in verse two. How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day long?

It's the third how long question. How long must I take counsel in my soul? The internal struggle of David with himself is coming out here. We all know what it's like to feel distance from God, but I also believe we all know what it's like to have turmoil and upheaval in our own hearts and minds.

I can get up, I can get caught up in internal meetings discussing with myself everything from the future, present options, and past mistakes. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Do you ever hold counsel with yourself?

You ever have a meeting with yourself, me, myself, and I just over here having a meeting? That's what David says he did. He says, I know what it's like to be you. I know that you have these conversations in your mind.

I know that there's not just like bluh-bluh-bluh-bluh going on in your brain. There are conversations that you have with yourself, just hopefully not out loud, right? People assume that when I pull up at the stoplight and I'm talking, I'm talking to somebody on the phone.

You get a free pass now, right? You didn't back in the 90s, but you do now. So now I get a free pass, but having that conversation with myself out loud, I do that sometimes. But I think all of us know we have seasons of soul counsel, and a season of soul counsel is a season of fretting and worrying over a problem, trying to solve it.

And how many of you have ever had a one-issue season? A one-issue season. What I mean by that is, there's the big thing going on in your life. And whether you're at work, or you're at home, or you're at play, or it's a weekend, or it's a vacation, that thing is on your mind.

Do you guys know what I'm talking about? You have those one-issue seasons, and then, God forbid, but I know it hits us many times, and that some of you here are going through multiple-issue seasons, lots of things.

It seems like it's more than you can handle, one thing after another after another, and you're up at night thinking through, how am I gonna solve this, and this, and this, and how is it all gonna come together?

We have those seasons where the one big thing is always before us, and we have other seasons where there's some issues, and we have a few hard things that are taking up your bandwidth. You're not much help at work anymore.

You're not much help at home anymore, because your mind is consumed by problems, and you're awake at night wondering how to fix it, and David is tired of trying to fix the problems in his own head. How long am I gonna have to keep this up?

How long is this gonna be plaguing me? How long is it gonna be on my mind, God? It's obvious that he isn't getting anywhere, and he knows it. In the house of pain, we don't only go through seasons of feeling separated from God, but we also go through seasons of inner turmoil as we seek to find solutions to our own complicated and very complex problems.

And then lastly, the line of questions moves to the struggle David has with other people, who he summarizes here with the word enemies. He is under the thumb of others. He feels like those who oppose him are always getting ahead.

Anybody know what I'm talking about there? Feels like those in opposition are always just one step ahead of him, always a little more blessed, always a little more resources, and we might not immediately assume that we can relate to this idea of enemies.

It depends on our lives, but I mean, it might be hard to identify. What's a real enemy? David had pretty well-defined lines, right? He had the Philistines, he had the Moabites, the Edomites, and all those other ites.

But I would suggest to you that we do too. They don't take the shape of national armies lining up against our forces, but they are no less real. I don't think it's misapplying this poetry to consider a neighbor who despises you for your faith or a coworker who's constantly badgering you and trying to tear you down in front of your boss.

But I also think a prayer of how long can accompany our reading of the headlines or watching the news or watching this election year unfold. How long, O Lord, will you allow wicked leaders to prevail?

Can you imagine a prayer like that today? Might need to be on many of our lips. Many of those, Father, who are exalted over us are in opposition to you, O Lord. How long? How long until you send forth your Son to make it right?

From the vantage point of the house of pain, David is concerned for his relationship with God. He's concerned for his relationship internally to turmoil and his broken relationship with others. Isn't this a pretty good summary of life in a fallen world?

Broken relationship with God, broken relationship with self, and broken relationship with others. Do you see David's turmoil? Do you relate to it? Can you understand it? And here God is giving us a license to come to him with a wide variety of concerns through prayer.

The house of pain is indeed a place of painful questions, but the house of pain is also a place of fear. David turns from rhetorical questions in the first two verses to petitioning God to act in the second two.

He issues three prayers, and we're still in the house of pain, but he issues three prayers that we ought to pray often. Hear me, help me, shine on me. Hear me, help me, shine on me. The two opening words of verse three amount to the phrase that I'm translating, hear me and help me.

Addressed to his God, and then the metaphor of lighting up my eyes is one of shining the light of blessing upon us. That's an Old Testament metaphor that's used commonly so that I can say pretty confidently that the idea of him lightening up our eyes is shining his light on us in a way that results in his blessing and benefit and help to us.

I'll give you an example, number 625. You can jot that reference down and look it up later. It's the priestly covenantal prayer to be prayed over the people, and it says this. I think it's gonna be up on the screen, but the Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Note the phrase, the Lord make his face shine upon you, and the Lord lift up his countenance.

That's his face, the way he looks. Let it all be upon you for peace, for grace, for his kindness. For God to make his face shine upon a person is for that person to receive his favor and his blessing, and that's what David wants.

David is asking God to hear his cries from the house of pain. David is asking for God to give answer in the form of help, and David is asking God to send forth his blessings to rescue him. But not a lot of that looks like fear, except here, here as we get near the end of verse three.

This is where the fear comes in. David believes that death is looming. Since we have absolutely zero context given for this, and since it is meant to be meaningful to us and the congregation of Israel at large who would sing this song together, I think this death is not meant to be understood too narrowly, as if he's on the battlefield and being pressed and about to lose and fearful for his life.

The psalm applies more broadly than to only people on their deathbed or a soldier on a battlefield fearing that this is the day he goes. The dramatic use of language and poetry and song is likely at play here in this understanding of I think I'm about to die.

Was David going to literally die when he wrote this? I dare say no. There were plenty of circumstances in his life where David was close to death. He was a soldier with like that kind of warfare, like I would imagine that sometimes the swords came close.

Sometimes the arrows narrowly missed. But his concerns, and hear me carefully, despite the fact that he was literally at risk of death, his concerns were over-exaggerated. You say, really? Well, it's evidenced by his death in a bed surrounded by people he loved.

That's how David dies. Many times he cried out, I'm about to die. My enemies surround me. How am I gonna make it out of this one? And God rescues him and he ends up dying at a ripe old age. You see what I'm saying?

I got a little bit like, not necessarily overblown in the risk, but a bit dramatic. My point is that we often feel like we just can't go on another day when God has a plan to preserve us for many years to come and use us.

I would suggest to you that it is fully appropriate to express even the silliest of fears to God. Even the silliest of fears to God. Panic attacks are on the rise in America. Many of us have at times felt the psychosomatic effects of stress that push us into fight or flight.

I can tell you personally, a panic attack makes you think you're having a heart attack. In times of deep duress or stress, we may feel just like David here and want to say something like, God, if you don't hear, if you don't provide an answer, if you don't show up with a basket full of miracles right now, I'm gonna die.

You guys know what I'm talking about? That feeling, that pressure, that stress, that worry, that concern, maybe over-exaggerated at times, but feels very real in the moment. And my point is, regardless of whether you are prone to panic attacks or whether you're pretty easygoing and don't even know what I'm talking about right now, because you're just like, Jill, however you're put together, fear will stalk us in this house of pain, will it not?

Fear stalks us. In this world, we will have troubles. One day, we will see all of this, all of this, all of it, as light and momentary afflictions. But we still live in a world, currently, with afflictions.

And the last observation in the house of pain is that it often feels like enemies are given the upper hand. We hear the gloating as the media tells us that we are on the wrong side of history, which is another way of saying, their way has prevailed over our way.

We live in a world where enemies of God seem to sit in high positions, and our media rejoices over every painful failing of a religious leader, right? They rejoice when the church of our Lord is shaken.

They gloat when Christ and his followers are brought low. We live in a world of real pain and real suffering. There is a genuine sense of separation from our God. There are genuine seasons of internal strife.

There are seasons of indecision. There are seasons of motivational paralysis where it's hard to get out of bed, and holding what seems to be endless counsels in our mind. And there are real enemies who would love to see us fail, falter, and fall.

And so, in faith, David shows us what to do in those moments. Cry out to God. Cry out to God with honest frustration. Let him know when you feel forsaken. Let him know when you're exhausted with attempts to solve your own problems.

Let him know your fears that your enemies might prevail. And then remember that you do not only live in one house. You don't only live in the house of pain. But for those of us who belong to Jesus Christ by faith and his redeeming work on the cross, we have dual citizenship.

We can be in two places at once. We know the house of pain, but we also live and move within the house of love. Not the love shack. Not the B -52s here. But the place of stability and hope in the love that God has already granted us.

The Steadfast Love of God as Covenant Anchor

Verse five takes such a radical shift in tone that some scholars have actually invented a context for this to be read. Out of whole cloth, they've invented a context and a scenario in which this would have been read in the synagogues, and they've invented it.

There's no evidence for it. They literally say, oh, verses one through four would be read by the congregation. Then the priest would stand forth and issue a declaration. The Lord hath granted our prayer.

And then the congregation would read verses five and six, and they would finish it. As if the answer has to be provided in order for us to bless the Lord. Do you get what I'm saying there? But that's not, there's no evidence that that actually is the context.

As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to say that if this was God's intention in reading this, then between verses four and five, there would be something that says something like, and then God heard my plea from on high and granted my request, which some psalms do say.

So there are some psalms that indicate the answer of God over the request, and therefore I rejoice, or whatever. But here in this lament, in this quintessential lament, we don't see him answering the prayer of David.

We don't know whether or not his enemy was destroyed, whether or not he got the solution so he didn't have to spend all night considering it in his mind. We don't know whether David suddenly felt God's presence close to him and was suddenly like, all that was solved.