You may have noticed in your study of the psalms that at different places in the psalter we find increasing intensity and even apparent desperation as we move along. We find this movement as we pass from Psalm 12 to Psalm 13.
In Psalm 12 David feels himself to be alone in the sense that godly or faithful persons seem to have disappeared from around him. Instead of upright persons, he is surrounded by "people of the lie." This is bad enough, of course. If we feel alone in any trying situation, we feel desperate. But when we come to Psalm 13, we find that David feels abandoned now, not only by godly or faithful men, but by even God himself. Can anything be worse than that? It is hard to think so. When Jonah was trying to get away from God, he thought that being abandoned by God would be desirable. But when he was thrown into the sea, was swallowed by the great fish and finally did sense himself to be abandoned by God, he found that he did not like the feeling at all. He compared his state of abandonment to Sheol or Hell and cried out in distress, asking God to save him (cf. Jonah 2).
Psalm 12 is said to have been written by David, and there were surely many times in his life when David felt like this. But it is striking that the psalm contains nothing of a strictly personal note. There is no first person language, no "I," "me" or "my." The late Lutheran commentator Herbert Carl Leupold says, "This is one of the many instances when the psalms rise above the purely personal and local and look to the later needs of the church of God." In other words, we can identify easily with what it describes.