As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember
as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go to the house of God
under the protection of the Mighty One[d]
with shouts of joy and praise
among the festive throng.
5 Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
6 My soul is downcast within me;
therefore I will remember you
from the land of the Jordan,
the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.
8 By day the Lord directs his love,
at night his song is with me—
a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I say to God my Rock,
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I go about mourning,
oppressed by the enemy?”
10 My bones suffer mortal agony
as my foes taunt me,
saying to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
11 Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
As we have seen time and time again, the Psalter provides us with a transcript of the believer’s life, its high points and its low points. We find in the psalms the joys and victories of faith as well as the sorrows, frustrations, and heartbreaks of a godly life, and even the ties where there is no resolve…we have a couple of psalms that end as they begin, in turmoil with no seeming answer…and that is because life sometimes feels that way. And yet, all of that, confusion, lament, dealing with enemies, trust and thankfulness turned into prayer and into worship.
It is this kind of honesty about life that we find again in Psalms 42 and 43 which are, in fact, a single psalm, not two. Somehow it was accidentally divided, but it was originally a single psalm as is very easy to see. Notice that the second one, Psalm 43, has no title, in a section of the Psalter in which all the psalms have titles. It has no title because its title is at the top of Psalm 42.
What is more, you see the refrain that appears twice in Psalm 42 – “Why are you downcast, O my soul…” – also in Psalm 43 and in precisely the right place: separated from the previous one in Ps. 42:11 by the same distance that separates 42:11 from 42:5. What is more, the complaint heard in 42:9 – “Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?” – is also found again in 43:2.
Finally, without Ps. 43, the lament psalm that began at Ps. 42:1 would be lacking one of its central, characteristic features, namely, the petition itself. We have the lament in Ps. 42, and we have the expression of confidence in God, but only in Ps. 43 do we find the petition itself: “Vindicate me, O God…”
This man, whose private struggle with God has been immortalized as a hymn for the church’s worship, has given wonderful expression to the all too human and Christian experience of loneliness. This man feels as if he is alone. And, to be sure, he is alone in some objective ways:
He is far from home, from his loved ones, apparently. He is far from those gatherings at the temple that were the joy of his life, from the congregation of the saints with whom he went to worship Sabbath by Sabbath. But, still more, he feels himself away from God, at a distance from the Lord, and that is the worst loneliness of all. And that sense of loneliness can make you lonely even in a crowd: lonely in your marriage, in your family, in the congregation of the saints.
There are many reasons we might feel this way: Unrepentant sin, lack of faith, or just the Lord’s mysterious way of growing us up. The wisest and most valuable of Christian counselors through the ages have often dealt with this problem. Some of them even gave it a name. They called it “divine desertion.” They didn’t mean that God had actually deserted one of his children; only that it seemed to his child as if he had. Samuel Rutherford spoke frequently in his letters and sermons about the “desertions” and “withdrawals” of Christ.
The Lord’s absence, the psalmist’s loneliness, has put an edge on this man’s hunger and furnished a dilemma for him to assert his faith and to exercise his hands in taking hold of what he does not see. I am not saying this is easy or pleasant, and we certainly must never sentimentalize what is being described here. Knowing that God may have uses for it does not make loneliness a burden easy to bear. Some of us know this very well…it is almost impossible to even explain to someone…this overwhelming sense of despair.
And so the question: How should I assert my faith in such times such as these? What practice would help me? Two things:
Pray to God, and talk to yourself!
Yes, we talk to the Lord and I recommend doing so OUT LOUD: “I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me?’” That is prayer and that is what every Christian must do if he feels at a distance from God. He, she must ask God to draw near and continue to ask him. We know that. We know our lives will ebb and flow in relation to our life of prayer…well, I trust you know that.
But I want to concentrate on the other method, the other means of asserting one’s faith: viz. talking to oneself. “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” That is a man talking to himself. We call that soliloquy, a conversation with oneself. And spiritual authorities have long recommended the practice that you find here and in other psalms.
“I will praise the Lord who counsels me,” says David in Psalm 16:7. He is talking to himself; putting himself on notice as to what he must and will do. “Then I thought, ‘To this I will appeal: the years of the right hand of the Most High.’ I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes I will remember your miracles of long ago.”
There is this soliloquy again, this time in Ps. 77:10-11 in a psalm of Asaph. “I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’” There again a faithful man is talking to himself and reminding himself of why he must put his trust in God. (Ps. 91:2)
The entirety of Psalm 103 is a soliloquy: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name.” In that psalm David is making an argument and making it to himself. He is making a case for praise and worship; talking himself into a thankful state of mind. You have the same again in Psalm 104.
In Hab. 3:16, almost overcome by his fears, the prophet tells himself, “Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity to come on the nation invading us.” That is, the Lord had made a promise and he told himself that he would count on it coming to pass as God said.
“By soliloquy, or pleading the case with thyself, thou must in thy meditation quicken thy own heart. Enter into a serious debate with it. Plead with it in the most moving and affecting language, and urge it with the most powerful and weighty arguments. It is what holy men of God have practiced in all ages…. It is a preaching to one’s self…every good Christian is a good preacher to his own soul; if thou can’t talk of divine things to others, why not also to thine own heart?”
Martin Lloyd-Jones, the great London preacher, put it still more emphatically. “The whole art of Christian living is to know how to talk to yourself.” [in Murray, ii, 410]
You see what this speaking to oneself assumes. That you know the truth. Your problem is not that you don’t know it, but that you don’t feel its force. It needs to be argued and pressed home. What is more, the practice of talking to yourself presupposes that there are, as it were, two selves within you – spirit and flesh; the new man and the old; that part of you that very much wants to do the will of God, is certain of the truth of his Word, certain of his love, that desires to honor him, to enjoy his blessing above all other things and…on the other hand, that part of you that is still drawn to the world, still weak in your grasp of unseen things, still easily beguiled by what you see and hear. But there is this further assumption.
The real you, the authentic you is the new creation, the believing man or woman, the follower of Christ. The other is but the withering vestiges of what once you were. When did you yourself last have such a conversation with yourself? When did you last sit yourself down and give yourself a talking to: your wiser, better nature, giving a stern lecture to your weak and foolish flesh?
When was the last time you marshaled arguments and brought your unbelief and your sinful desires to heel? That is what this man did. That is what wise and godly Christians have done through the ages. I would commend the practice to you as well!
Prayer: Father, in Your mercy hear my prayer, open my lips and my heart that I might know that my help comes from You the maker of heaven and earth. Help me to speak what is true to others and to myself. May I recount the goodness of my God to my own soul, calling myself to faithfulness, joy and peace that I might honor my King and Savior through Jesus Christ my Lord, Amen.
