Psalm 42-43

To the choirmaster. A Maskil of the Sons of Korah. 

1 As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.

2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

These words introduce the second Book of Psalms. The first psalm of Book 1 describes the blessed life with the metaphor of a tree planted by streams of water, flourishing and fruitful, unwithering in the heat. The first psalm of Book 2 paints a different picture, a deer that is panting for streams of water, a soul that is thirsting for God. It is the absence of water that is striking, and this theme of God’s absence will be striking in the first three psalms of Book 2. The doxology that was still fresh on our lips (Psalm 41:13) quickly turns to lament in Psalm 42. The deer is likely suffering from thirst for one of two reasons -- he is being pursued by a predator and is in a struggle for his very existence or he is living in a barren wilderness, a wasteland with nothing to refresh and sustain life. This desire for water, for life itself whether in the midst of an immediate crisis or a long-term struggle, is related to one’s need for God himself. God is life, or as the text says, “the living God”. The psalmist says his soul thirsts for God. The word for “soul” is nephesh and it is related to the throat, the body part through which all nourishment passes, and one of the places we first feel our thirst, a dry mouth and throat. “My throat pants, my throat thirsts for God”. My very life is dependent upon God’s presence. How much do you desire God’s presence in your life? Is it something that you occasionally think about? Is it satisfied in a church-going habit? Is it something that is only sought when a crisis comes upon you? Our most intense longings for God often come not in the daily ebb and flow of life but in moments of crisis, when we are frightened, alone, and in need beyond our ability to supply. When we have nowhere else to turn, no one else to speak to, no other hope for survival. Perhaps the reason we rarely find ourselves in such a desperate situation is that we aren’t aware of spiritual reality. There is an existential threat to our soul that we face every day. Sin and the Tempter are crouching like a lion, relentlessly stalking us until it has us in his mouth. Like the deer, may we run to the source of life, to the One who saves, to the One who satisfies, to the living God. Let us not be satisfied with the dead gods that offer false life and strength -- the gods of money, pleasure, and power. 

When shall I come and appear before God? [Revocalization yields and see the face of God]

3 My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”

4 These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.

In the first two verses the psalmist confesses his thirst for the presence of God. Like an animal pursued in the desert, his thirst demands to be satisfied or he will die. So food is provided in the form of his tears. They have become his daily bread. He doesn’t eat. He just weeps all day and night, his salty tears the only sustenance that he can find. So it is with grief that overwhelms us, robbing us of an appetite and even at times a will to live. The psalmist’s lament is made worse by his own memory. Alone with his thoughts, he recalls better days, how he would lead worshipers in joyful procession at the festivals. He is identified as one of the “sons of Korah”, a guild of priests who served in the temple. He was in fact, a worship leader, a song leader, a creative arts director (to use the most contemporary term). Remembering the joy of those moments only compounded his immediate grief. In his remembering, two questions plague him. First, “when can I come and appear before God?”  It is a “how long” question. How long is this grief going to endure? How long am I going to be pursued, distraught, and thirsty? When is my life going to look more like Psalm 1 and less like Psalm 42? It is the question that every grieving person asks, “When will this end?” I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, his reflections following the death of his wife Joy. The answer of course, is that the grief never ends, we just get better at coping with it over time. The second question of the psalmist by others, but it is really his own question as well, “Where is your God?” It’s a question that God gets asked a lot -- “Where are you?” It feels that God abandons us in our greatest moments of crisis. “If only you had been there, this terrible thing would not have happened!” It’s the question that Martha asked of Jesus when he arrived late to Lazarus’ sickbed. It’s a natural question. We interpret God’s apparent inaction to be his inability or unwillingness to act. But this is not so. Yet we cannot deny our feelings. If we were God, we would have been there and prevented that thing. The psalmist will discover that in the act of praying there is comfort for his grief. The metaphor of water flows through this psalm (thirsting, drinking tears, waves and breakers), so here the language of “pouring out” seems appropriate. The good news of the psalm at this point is that we can pour out our souls to God. We can gush out everything inside of us before him and he can handle it. In fact, this is how we can make it through grief -- keep talking, keep asking questions. You are not alone and one day you will join the victory parade again with Jesus leading the way.  

5 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation [Hebrew the salvation of my face; also verse 11 and 43:5]

6 and my God. My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.

The psalmist turns from questioning God to questioning himself. From “When can I meet with God” and “Where are you God” to “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” This is an example of what is referred to as “self-talk”. The psalmist addresses his own soul, the one that is thirsting for God, the one that is being poured out before God. While acknowledging the turmoil within him, the psalmist tells himself to “hope in God”. It is something that we will do twice more in this psalm (Psalms 42 and 43 are one psalm that has been divided into two). This suggests that grief is not something that we get over with once and for all. We will likely find ourselves thirsty for more than our tears again and again. Each time, we can turn our thoughts toward our God, our salvation and place our hope, our future in Him. The psalmist who once was a worship leader, organizing and heading up the festival parades through the streets of Jerusalem to the temple, remembers God and those former days from the land of Jordan, from Hermon and Mt. Mizar. This suggests that the psalmist is living in exile. In the ancient world, conquering armies often carried away the citizens of the conquered nation to become slaves in their realm. There were incursions into Israel by Syria, Assyria, and later Babylon that may account for the psalmist’s exile. He may be remembering Jerusalem from the land of modern Lebanon, the northernmost region of Israel, from the location of the 9,000 foot high Mt. Hermon and its snow-covered majesty. The location of Mt. Mizar is unknown but its meaning is “little hill”. Perhaps it was another mountain in Lebanon or perhaps the psalmist is comparing Zion to Hermon, and Hermon comes up short -- merely a little hill compared to Zion. Archaeologists have discovered the remains of 20 different temples on Hermon as mountains were favorite locations for ancient temples. This remembering of Zion is echoed in Psalm 137 as the psalmist recalls Jerusalem from the perspective of his exile in Babylon. Even though we may feel far from God, far from home, and far from our community, there is a goodness and a healing in remembering. The psalmist writes, “therefore, I remember you” to suggest this, “I’m discouraged, therefore I remember you.” When we are downcast and discouraged, it is good to remember God and put our hope in Him, to reflect on his goodness in the past as a reminder of his essential nature and the goodness that we will ultimately experience when we are with him in glory. He has gone to prepare a place for us so that where he is, we will also be. 

7 Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.

The psalmist has taken us from the absence of water to its abundance, from a deer longing to sate its thirst from a desert stream to the pounding of a waterfall and the crashing of the surf. There are many wildly different interpretations of this verse, but it’s important to keep the immediate context in mind. The psalmist is remembering Mt. Zion as he observes the majestic Mt. Hermon, and Hermon feels small by comparison to the mountain on which he had met with God. The psalmist is in exile, far from the streams of living water that nourished him in the temple and its environs. And so he describes in this verse with dramatic metaphor the sense of being overwhelmed, first by the waterfall and then by the waves, both of which are ways in which water can overpower us. First there is the roaring of the waterfall as deep (the waters above the falls) calls out to deep (the waters below the falls) -- two bodies of water that are connected by a cataclysm of power that cannot be stopped. (Remember trying to dam up streams with rocks when you were a kid -- it takes a lot of engineering to hold back water moving under the power of gravity. Then there is the metaphor of waves and breakers going over the psalmist as we imagine him standing on the shore, wading out a little too far and being pummelled by wave after wave. (Remember as a child standing in the surf with your arms outstretched, legs spread to withstand the power. You’d survive one wave and then take another step forward, taking each wave upon your body until you had moved so far into the ocean that you couldn’t resist when the swell came your way). So the metaphor is most likely about this experience of being overwhelmed and overpowered. The question is -- what about the Lord is overpowering him? It is the Lord’s waterfall and the Lord’s waves that we are talking about here. The following verse is an overwhelmingly positive verse about God’s steadfast love. Is the psalmist overwhelmed by love or overwhelmed by grief? Or is it both? Is this the place where his deepest pain and his deepest joy call out to one another? Is it the place where he stands before the vast ocean of God’s love, spreads his arms out and invites it to envelope him? I can’t say for sure, but there seems to be little doubt that the turmoil of the waters is a reflection of the turmoil within the psalmist. Emotions and memories flooding and overwhelming his heart like the waterfall and the waves. Perhaps it is in these moments where our questions (When can I meet with God? Where is he?) are answered.

8 By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.

This verse marks a turning point in the psalm, (or perhaps just a moment where the psalmist’s head is above water because it’s going to take a darker turn in the next verse). It is the only verse in the psalm that uses the divine name, YHWH, a rarity in these psalms of the Sons of Korah and of many psalms in the elohistic Book 2. The reference to “day and night” reflects back to verse 3 where the psalm fed on tears day and night. Now he is experiencing God’s steadfast love throughout the day and is singing as he falls asleep. The previous verse describing waterfalls and waves reflects the turmoil the psalmist feels and here in this verse there is a strong sense that God is in control. In fact, God was in control of the waterfall and the waves. These are both controlled by the laws of physics that God ordained and while they are both powerful, they have boundaries, they have limits. In the same way, God has placed limits on the turmoil in our lives, as 1 Corinthians 10:13 suggests, “God will not allow you to be tempted (tried) beyond what you are able to endure.” Just as God is in control of the forces of nature and the trials that are allowed to come into our lives, he also commands his steadfast love. We experience this in our waking moments throughout the day as we see examples of his goodness, both his common grace (the good things that all humanity experiences) and his grace toward each of us individually. We experience this in our “going to sleep” moments in the form of a song. The question in the text is “who is singing?” Is the Lord singing over us (as Zephaniah 3:17 suggests)? Is he surrounding us with songs of deliverance (Psalm 32:7)? Are we going to sleep with melodies in our mind, lyrics that comfort and bring about rest? Again, the poetry is ambiguous so perhaps it is both. The Lord sings over us as a parent over a child, and we sing to ourselves the songs of Zion (Psalm 137:3). This latter meaning is more likely given the phrase that follows, “a prayer to the God of my life”. The phrase “God of my life” is also an echo of verse 2, “the living God”. The psalmist goes to sleep praying as he reflects on the steadfast love of the LORD that he has experienced throughout the day. One of the ways that we cope with grief is to express gratitude. Turning our grief to gratitude changes our perspective and in doing so we begin to hear God’s voice again, singing truth over us, reminding us what is real and eternal. Before you know it, we have prayed ourselves to sleep.

9 I say to God, my rock: “Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”

10 As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”

The psalmist wakes from his prayerful sleep to once again ask questions of God, even as he declares Him to be his Rock. These then are not the questions of an unbeliever who is walking away from God, but rather honest concerns of one who has experienced the goodness of God and now finds himself in distress. “Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of enemy oppression? Why am I taunted by adversaries saying all day long, ‘Where is your God?” Forgotten, grieving, and abandoned -- these are the honest feelings of one in exile. There are highs and lows, swings from one extreme to another in this process of grieving, and one might even see this language as evidence of clinical depression. Verse 10 contains the fourth reference to “days” in the psalm: my tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all day long, by day the LORD commands his love, and they say to me all day long (the complaint repeated from verse 3). The passage of time doesn’t seem to change his circumstance, and the markers of time only seem to serve as measures of his suffering. The wound is felt deep in his bones, his innermost being, and the text is absent of friends who are walking with him through this season. He is utterly alone with the exception of the taunts of his enemies. In a culture where every god was represented by an idol, it was an easy criticism of Jewish religion -- they had no god that could be seen. The hills of Mt. Hermon were filled with idols and shrines, but none to YHWH. This is the taunt of our Enemy today: “Where is your God?” The atheist and unbeliever would tell us that we are child-like in our innocence and stupidity for believing in that which we cannot see. Carl Sagan said we look in vain for help from outside ourselves. To believe the atheist is to say that we are truly alone in the deepest sense of what it means to be alone. The human race could be wiped out in a moment and it wouldn’t matter one bit to the cold universe. No thanks. God is here. He has not forgotten us. He is with us most when we are suffering. Just look at Jesus for proof of that. 

11 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.

The psalmist returns to his refrain from verse 5, identical in its language of self-talk and future-orientation. This is the hallmark of faith and hope. It is rooted in real life pain and struggle and doesn’t downplay those. The psalmist admits a cast down soul and an inner being that is in turmoil, questioning God and grieving over what has been lost and will never be returned. The psalmist has asked hard questions of God, the primary one being, “Where are you?”, and now he asks a question of himself: “Why are you discouraged and distraught?” You believe in a God whose presence you once experienced, whose worship you shared with a joyful procession of believers, whose salvation you had known and celebrated. Even as you recall what you have lost, you remember what you still have. God has not changed, just your circumstances. He is still the God of your salvation. He is still your God. He is still the ultimate repository of hope. Years ago I heard a sermon about love. The preacher described a woman who was married to an alcoholic, a man who was difficult to love, a man whom she could justify divorcing. Yet the command from God is to love as He loves, to forgive as He forgives, and so she did. As counterintuitive as it seems, she came to love him more through the act of serving him, through seeking his good. The point of the message was “do what’s right and the feelings will follow.” I think that same sentiment holds true for this text as well. Three times the psalmist tells himself to place his hope in God and envision future worship. The grieving process is a cycle of pain and relief, and it requires an act of the will to move forward. The psalmist wills himself to rethink his situation and live as if the future were the present. Living in the future doesn’t mean a pie in the sky denial of reality, rather it is a bringing of ultimate reality into the present. 

1 Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people, from the deceitful and unjust man deliver me!

2 For you are the God in whom I take refuge; why have you rejected me? Why do I go about mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

The psalmist appeals to the justice of God to intervene on his behalf. He is literally saying, “Judge me and defend my cause”. He is absolutely certain that he is in the right and he has been unfairly treated by a deceitful and unjust man (or people). He asserts his confidence in God as his refuge while at the same time doubting God’s concern for him -- “Why have you rejected me? Why am I crying all the time?” He moves quickly from request to confidence to complaint. Of course this is a poetic summary of his feelings, but it’s quite accurate in revealing the state of mind when experiencing loss. These prayers are not nice and neat, logical syllogisms but the raw emotions of a soul in agony, struggling to reconcile the world that he believes in with the world that he lives in. He appeals to God’s justice and goodness rather than taking matters into his own hands. He doesn’t go after his enemies himself. Instead he appeals to the God of justice to intervene on his behalf, to show himself to be just by ensuring that justice is done on the earth. This should be our approach today when dealing with ungodly people, deceitful and unjust men. We appeal to the ultimate judge when human judges show themselves to be corrupt. Those in civil authority over us and human beings who are vulnerable to corruption just as we are. The only perfect judge is God. He is the chief justice of the supreme court and his opinion is the only one that really matters. His justice may seem slow in coming, but it is sure. In times of national and political turmoil, the psalmist reminds us to take refuge in God himself. If you are fortunate enough to live in a time and place where justice is more common than injustice, consider yourself blessed and be grateful for your good fortune. This has not been true for the vast majority of humans throughout history. The psalmist was likely carried away as a slave by foreigners who had invaded Israel. There’s nothing fair about that, and he is not in any position to do anything about it. The only one to whom he can appeal is God himself. Rather than abandoning faith in God, he chooses to express confidence that despite all odds, God will judge this situation and bring restitution. 

3 Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling!

4 Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, and I will praise you with the lyre, O God, my God.

5 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.

The psalmist returns to a series of requests and statements of hope as he envisions God’s salvation. He asks that God send his light and his truth to lead him, directing him to God’s holy mountain, to his dwelling place, to his altar. This sounds like a prayer for a return from his exile. As unlikely as it seems, the psalmist believes that he will return to Jerusalem. This is unlikely because it’s not something that ancient peoples did. When they captured slaves in battle, they were slaves for life. They were property, part of your estate, your wealth, so the chances of a slave being freed were slim to none. Is he planning to escape? Does he believe his captor will have a change of heart? Will he be set free through a military engagement? It seems like a hope against all hope, but he is confident nonetheless. Perhaps he has resigned himself to his situation and yet in his heart he now understands that God is with him and that God can be worshiped even in exile. In his mind, in his memories he can still walk the courts of the temple and smell the fragrances of worship. God’s light and truth which are expressed in his word lead us to his presence regardless of where we might be physically. In this way, even in his suffering and separation, the psalmist can honestly declare that God is his highest joy -- literally, his joy of joys! He vows to praise God with music, to write and sing songs and to continue to tell himself to turn his despair into worship. It is God’s light and truth that leads us forward in this dark world. Light is a frequent metaphor for God (Psalm 27:1) and for his word (Psalm 119:105). God guides our steps as we submit to his word, the truth that sets us free, even when we are living in exile in a foreign land, even when that might be our own country. The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn that shines brighter until the full day. Even though the psalmist couldn’t experience worship in the temple, perhaps he has come to the important understanding that he doesn’t need to be in the temple to experience God. God is with us at all times, and his initial question, “When can I meet with God?” has been answered. Of course, for the believer, the answer is clearly that God has come to meet us in Christ. He is the light and the truth of God made flesh. He is our exceeding joy that is the answer to the psalmist’s prayer and to the desires of every human being.