Walking the Dark Valley (Part 1)

Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
—Psalm 23:4

I remember the impression I had as a child when I first heard the words “the valley of the shadow of death.” I conjured up a mental picture of a storm-shrouded landscape, a yawning abyss at my feet, broken crags, precipitous cliffs, and a narrow, twisting footpath along narrow ledges, leading inexorably into thickening gloom below. The picture is locked in my mind.

The phrase shadow of death is actually one word in Hebrew meaning “deep darkness.” It’s a dreary word, used elsewhere in the Bible to describe the impenetrable darkness before creation (Amos 5:8), the thick darkness of a mine shaft (Job 28:3), and the black hole that is the abode of the dead (Job 10:21; 38:17). It’s a word associated with anxiety and unfocused dread.

In The Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan captured something of the terror of the place when he described it as “dark as pitch,” inhabited by “hobgoblins, satyrs, dragons of the pit and fiends.” A way “set full of pits, pitfalls, deep holes and shelvings.” In the midst of the valley was “the mouth of hell.”

The valley of the shadow of death is usually associated with the end of life, but Bunyan places it in the middle, where it rightly belongs. In fact there is not one valley; there are many, falling between the pastures where we find intermittent rest. There’s no way around them. “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God,” Paul insisted (Acts 14:22). The desolate places are an inevitable and necessary part of the journey.

The valleys bring to mind the day an employer said “clean out your desk”; when a doctor said “your baby will never be normal”; when you found the stash in your son’s closet; when your teenage daughter told you she was pregnant; when the doctor said you had cancer; when your spouse said he or she had no energy left to put into the relationship. Those are the dark days when we lose all perspective, when we say in despair, “It’s no use; I can’t go on.”

The valleys are emblematic of periods of prolonged failure when we’re shamed and broken by the full weight of the darkness within us; when we experience the isolation of despair, the exhausted aftermath of self-gratification and spent vice; when we feel unalterably defiled and wonder if we will ever regain our sense of worth.

The valleys symbolize those dreary days of deep loneliness when we say with David,

No one is concerned for me.
I have no refuge;
no one cares for my life (Psalm 142:4).

Even God seems aloof and remote; there’s an unaccountable chill in the air. We cry out with David,

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer (Psalm 22:1–2).

I used to think that life was mostly green pasture with an occasional dark valley along the way, but now I realize it’s the other way around. There are days of surprising joy, but much of life is a vale of tears. Every year confirms my belief that life is indeed difficult and demanding. Any other view of life is escapist.

The path by which God takes us often seems to lead away from our good, causing us to believe we’ve missed a turn and taken the wrong road. That’s because most of us have been taught to believe that if we’re on the right track, God’s goodness will always translate into earthly good: that He’ll heal, deliver, and exempt us from disease and pain; that we’ll have money in the bank, kids who turn out well, nice clothes, a comfortable living, and a leisurely retirement. In that version of life everyone turns out to be a winner; nobody loses a business, fails in marriage, or lives in poverty.

But that’s a pipe dream far removed from the biblical perspective that God’s love often leads us down roads where earthly comforts fail us so He can give us eternal consolation (2 Thessalonians 2:16). “Suffering ripens our souls,” said Aleksander Solzhenitsyn.

God doesn’t cushion the journey; He lets life jolt us. As F. B. Meyer said, if we’ve been told that we’re supposed to be on a bumpy track, every jolt along the way simply confirms the fact that we’re still on the right road. When we come to the end of all valleys, we’ll understand that every path has been selected out of all possible options for our ultimate good. God, in fact, could not have taken us by any other way. No other route would have been as safe and as certain as the one by which we came. And if only we could see the path as God has always seen it, we would select it as well.

Taken from Seeing God, © 2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids MI 49501. All rights reserved.