When was the last time you went to bed at 7, 8, or 9 PM?
If you’re a young adult, chances are that it’s been years. While we take our phones to bed, even at midnight, businesses are making sales, and journalists are queuing up notifications for the second you wake up.
Servers hum all night and some group chats never close, so we’ve trained our nervous systems to believe that closing our eyes is a huge risk. To stay up all night? It’s hard to argue against that because if you snooze, you’ll spend the next day trying to catch up with your competition.
And to be fair, we’ve become richer than we’ve ever been partly because of it, so ours is a great civilization today, but one that can not, sadly, afford to sleep well.
That’s why we’ve invented a sleep-support industry with products like sleep trackers, weighted blankets, magnesium gummies, blue-light glasses, and so on. Whereas all our forebears needed to do was strip themselves off of heavy objects, close their eyes, and wake up with a song.
Again, to be fair, insomnia (stress-induced or not) seems to be an ageless problem. Thousands of years ago, David observed this among soldiers who stood awake helplessly while the Philistines pranced around, and he fought many wars, even after he became King, to usher in a long peaceful reign for his successor son, Solomon.
For such a man, whose life was marked by blood, wars, victories, and controversy, insomnia was no doubt a familiar experience. Yet he wrote evergreen meditations that, long after his generations have passed, soothe me to bed.
I’m not talking about Psalm 23. Before that, King David wrote Psalm 4:8 while the most wicked men of his day hunted after him. It’s quite unbelievable if you think about it. Either he was nonchalant or absolute in his belief, because he said, “I will both lie down in peace, and sleep.”
The Hebrew word for lie down, eshkevah, is about total physical exposure, which explains why David caught King Saul unguarded twice. You went to bed without a weapon or watchman posted to your bedside. You can imagine that such a posture would get you killed if you’re a wanted man.
Yet he went to bed anyway, and it worked every time because he was never caught. The Bible says that the King died at a ripe old age. Because every time he went to bed, he had only one thing in his favor: “You alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”
God was the only reason a man with so many powerful enemies slept exposed every day of his life, yet he was never caught and never killed.
In using the word labetach (safety), King David was referring to the mighty hand of God. His security, his safety, was guaranteed, and he was certain of this in God alone — levadad. Yes, alone!
Recall all that you know about this great man; there are so many details about his life, yet God paid all the attention to protect David so that the man slept safe and sound.
Now, this is no small feat because the world is a very vast place.
Prophet Isaiah knew much of this world, so he put it this way: “The everlasting God, the LORD, The Creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable.”
This same God, with all the power and interest in one man’s sleep, is more than a trillion times capable of sustaining the whole wide world and paying far greater attention (than we can describe) to it.
So, neither the details of your life or mine nor the magnificence of the galaxies can exhaust the LORD.
So it’s baffling that we Christians spend all day thinking and working and attempt to spend all night doing the same, as though we could sustain ourselves if God left us to it.
If the same God who made King David lie down in peace and sleep while watching over the rest of the world is your God, you too can get a good night’s sleep every day, starting tonight.
Here’s a prayer I’ve written for this meditation:
“Lord, You alone make me dwell in safety. You do not grow weary, so I don’t have to stay awake pretending I can catch the things you miss. This I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
Now, if you want to take it further, with a chant or tongues, I have been chanting these Hebrew lines the past few days myself:
Adonai,
le-va-dad
la-ve-tach
to-shee-vay-nee
It means, “O Lord, You alone make me dwell in safety.”
It's no coincidence that we've been learning about David in midweek class, the Psalms in Sunday class, and now I'm reading about him on your page. Thanks.
Wow. Y'all are learning great things, my brother. Thanks for reading.