Psalms for Turbulent Times - Psalm 42-43: My soul longs for you, O God

Psalm 42[1]

¹    As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.
²     My soul thirsts for God,  for the living God.
       When shall I come and behold the face of God?
³     My tears have been my food day and night,
       while people say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’

⁴    These things I remember, as I pour out my soul:
       how I went with the throng,^[a]
       and led them in procession to the house of God,
       with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving,       a multitude keeping festival.
⁵     Why are you cast down, O my soul,

       and why are you disquieted within me?
       Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help 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.
⁷     Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts;
       all your waves and your billows have gone over me.
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.

⁹      I say to God, my rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me?
        Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?’
¹⁰    As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me,
        while they say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’

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



Psalm 43

¹      Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people;
        from those who are deceitful and unjust deliver me!
²      For you are the God in whom I take refuge; why have you cast me off?
        Why must I walk about mournfully because of the oppression of the enemy?

³     O 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 harp, O God, my God.

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



We all have watery beginnings. Whether th

rough natural child birth. Or, in faith terms, through the waters of baptism which prefigure our spiritual birth into the death and resurrection of Jesus.



These two psalms exploit the imagery of water to takes us on a rollercoaster journey of faith.



When I was a boy of eight or nine, I remember being bowled off my feet by huge waves and thrown around like I was inside a washing machine. It was exhilarating and terrifying. ‘All your waves and your billows have gone over me,’ writes the psalmist (vs7). It’s a description at once so vivid and so powerful, perhaps it was one rooted in experience similar to my own. The power of the sea or of water cascading down a steep cliff – so elemental, so chaotic, so disruptively destructive; ‘Deep calls to deep in the thunder of your cataracts.’ These extraordinary word pictures fire up our imaginations and tell us of the psalmist’s deep conviction that God is in every situation – whether terror or beauty.



This is a prayer-poem whose meditation on a stirred up heart finds inspiration through different explorations of water. Water as source of life (vs1) and God’s presence (v s2), as a tributary of tears (vs3), as a description of a person pouring out their thoughts and emotions or whose lack prompts thirst for fellowship (vs4), as waves and cataracts (vs7) and as river (Jordan) whose crossing marked the arrival in the Promised Land (vs6) – all these watery images flow through Psalm 42.



When we are longing for change, we might describe ourselves as thirsty for a new future.



When we are churned up and disturbed, we might talk about tears flowing as if constantly through day and night.



When we are so low as to be cast down, we can say our life has been poured out of us.



The psalmist seems to float and be chucked around on an ever rising and dipping rollercoaster of despair and hope in these two interwoven and related psalms. We are well into the psalter by now. This is the beginning of the second book. And placed here at the start of this book is a pair of psalms which reflect on the reality of a disquieted soul, a dislocated life and yet with a disarming sense of hope.



This socially-distanced person seems often overwhelmed by a sense of being cut off from God and the sources of hope – whether it is from friends thronging together in worship or from a familiar landscape. This cast down person seems to also be suffering deeply from a sense of isolation and loneliness brought on by a deadly illness or oppressive enemies who taunt continually with the question ‘where is your God?’



It seems to be a psalm for our day, doesn’t it?



As we begin to get our heads around the continuing rising death toll (nearly 30,000 on May 5^th) and the tears that must be flowing day and night in so many households; as we consider how many must feel ‘where is now my God?’; as we in our prayers we also pour out our soul and long for a future which has God’s revitalising touch which refreshes our souls like a deer is refreshed by a flowing stream: so we also discover that hope makes us face forward.



Even when at the lowest ebb, hope will not die.



Three times in sixteen verses the psalmist cries out in hope. He or she puts a stop to tears and backward looking joyful memories and the sense of abandonment or being surrounded by enemies – all these painful truths – by willing, it seems, a different outlook.



Each time, the psalmist asks the question: ‘Why are you cast down, O my soul and why are you so disquieted within me?’ And three times the psalmist finds an answer: ‘Hope in God; for I shall yet praise him, my help and my God.’  (42.5, 42.11 & 43.5)



How is this positive wilfulness accomplished? I think there is a clue in vs8. The psalmist acknowledges that even as they are overwhelmed by the powerful waters – cataracts and waves – they know that God’s steadfast love is unbroken. And it is God who puts a song deep within the person, The thrice repeated defiant cry of hope is born out of a song planted in the soul, a song of God which is the prayer of the psalmist’s life. That vs8 lies at the very numerical centre of these two psalms seems to be significant.



Many centuries after this psalm was composed and collected into its life-giving form, a Christian writer encouraged his church members to be ready, always, to give an explanation for the hope that lies deep within. That writer was Peter, the disciple who knew about water and sea – for before he followed Jesus, he made his living as a fisherman on the sometimes choppy waters of Galilee. He who had been in the wave-tossed boat fearing for his life in the eye of a fierce storm with Jesus asleep in the bows. He who had walked on the waters to reach his Lord until he doubted and fell through those waters. In the third chapter of his first letter to Christians he had inspired to follow Jesus, he wrote these words: ‘Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.’ (1 Peter 13.15) I’d like to think Peter had meditated upon Psalm 42 and 43 and knew, from experience about the song of hope. Perhaps it first truly rose out of him when Jesus restored him on the beach at Galilee after the resurrection (John 21.15-20). For the rest of his life the song of hope sang through him and still inspires us today. 

May you sing the song of hope today.

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[1] Footnotes:
Psalm 42:4 Meaning of Heb uncertain
New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised (NRSVA)
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.