Psalms 74:13

Psalm 74 is a communal prayer — an entire people crying out to God during a time of national catastrophe, likely when Jerusalem and the temple had been destroyed by enemies. The writer is reminding God of what he has done before, hoping he will act again. 'Splitting open the sea' refers to the Exodus — the moment God parted the Red Sea to rescue the Hebrew slaves from Egypt, one of the most defining events in Israel's history. The 'monster in the waters' draws on an ancient Near Eastern image of a chaos serpent — sometimes called Rahab or Leviathan — representing disorder and destruction, which God defeats at creation and again in moments of miraculous rescue. The psalmist isn't reciting history for its own sake. He is praying: you have broken the unbreakable before. Do it again.

God, I'm standing in something broken right now, and I don't have easy words. But you split seas. You broke chaos that seemed unbreakable. Do it again — in me, in my circumstances, in the places I cannot fix on my own. I'm bringing you the ruins and asking you to remember. Amen.

The people who wrote this psalm had watched their sacred city burn. The temple — the place where God was said to dwell among them — had been torn apart stone by stone. And in the middle of that devastation, someone sat down and wrote: 'But remember what you did to the sea?' That's not denial. That's the most desperate and honest kind of faith — the kind that looks straight at ruins and still reaches back for evidence. You don't have to pretend things aren't terrible to hold onto what God has done. The psalmist doesn't say 'everything is fine.' He says: you split the sea. You broke the monster. You've done the impossible before. If you're standing in rubble today — in a relationship, a diagnosis, a grief that won't lift — you are allowed to be honest about the rubble and still pray: God, remember what you did? That's not weak faith. That's the ancient kind. The kind that survives.