As I read the Bible, I find love to be the supreme and dominant attribute of God. Because of His holiness, God cannot condone or countenance sin, but He loves the sinner. Because He is just, He cannot excuse sin. But since His love goes hand in hand with His justice, He has made provision to forgive sin through the atonement of His Son. “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”

(Romans 5:8).

Psalm 77 is a psalm of lament. There are more of these psalms than of any other type. Maybe this is because, as Walter Brueggeman writes, life is often savagely marked by disequilibrium, incoherence and hard-lived asymmetry. He finds it strange that the church today often opts for upbeat songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented. But we cannot stay on the street called lament for in the middle of darkness of all these readings there shines a beam of light. From verses 11-20 the psalmist moves from a time of stress much like ours to the strange hopeful world of the Bible.