Psalms 42

The psalm begins with a picture before it begins with a thought, and the picture does all the work: As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. A hart is a deer, and the verb - panteth - tells you everything about its state. This is not an animal grazing in a meadow; it is an animal in distress, perhaps hunted, perhaps caught in a drought, its sides heaving, straining toward the sound of running water because without it it will die. The thirst is not a preference. It is a matter of survival. And that, the psalmist says, is the exact shape of his longing for God: so panteth my soul after thee. Mark how high the bar is set. He does not say his soul prefers God, or is interested in God, or would like to feel closer to God when convenient. He says his soul pants - that the need is total, bodily, urgent, a craving on which his whole life depends. There is a kind of comfortable religion that never gets near this verse. The psalmist is nowhere near comfortable. He is parched, and he knows that the only water that will reach his particular thirst is God Himself.³

Notice the careful phrasing of the thirst: not merely for God, but for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God? The repetition is deliberate, and the addition of that one word - living - carries weight. The psalmist is not parched for a concept, an idea, a distant first cause, a principle to be reasoned about. He is parched for a God who is alive: who hears, who moves, who acts, who can be met and appeared before and known. His grief is not philosophical doubt about whether God exists; it is the agony of separation from a God he is sure is real and longs to be near. That is why the cry that follows is so poignant: when shall I come and appear before God? To appear before God was, for an Israelite, to go up to the house of God among the worshipping crowds - and the psalmist, as the next verses make plain, is cut off from exactly that. So his thirst has a location and a hope built into it. He is not asking does God exist; he is asking when can I get to Him. The living God is somewhere the psalmist cannot presently reach, and the whole of his soul is leaning toward the day he can.

Two things press the thirst into outright anguish, and the psalmist names them in a single verse: My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God? First, the tears. His weeping has become his food - my meat day and night - as though grief were the only thing nourishing him, the thing he takes in morning and evening in place of bread. It is a picture of sorrow so constant it has become his diet. And second, the taunt, which is somehow worse: they continually say unto me, Where is thy God? This is the cruelest possible word to a man in his condition. The mockers point at his suffering and draw the obvious, devastating conclusion - if your God were real, if He cared, you would not be in this state; your misery is the proof He is not there. And note the word continually. It is not a single cutting remark but a relentless drip, day after day, the same question used as a weapon against a heart already breaking. The terrible thing is how plausible the taunt can sound from inside the pain. When God feels absent and the tears will not stop, Where is thy God? is not only what the enemies are asking. It is the question the sufferer is fighting, with everything he has, not to ask himself.

Against the taunt, the psalmist does something that will become the strategy of the whole psalm: he remembers. When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holyday. He calls up a specific memory - not a vague sense that better days existed, but a vivid scene: walking in the festival crowd, swept along with a whole company of worshippers, the air full of the voice of joy and praise, the whole multitude keeping the holy day together. He has known the joy of God's presence among God's people, and he reaches for that memory now. But notice that the remembering cuts both ways. It comforts - here is proof that the living God was real and near, that the joy was not imagined - and at the very same time it deepens the grief, because the contrast with his present isolation is so sharp. I pour out my soul in me. The memory of the crowd makes the present loneliness ache all the more. This is the honest texture of a faith under strain: the same memory that steadies you can also make you weep, because you remember exactly what you are missing.

The second half of the psalm opens by naming the trouble without disguise: O my God, my soul is cast down within me. There is no pretending here, no forced smile. He says it straight to God - I am cast down - and then, in the same breath, he reaches again for his one tested remedy: therefore will I remember thee from the land of Jordan, and of the Hermonites, from the hill Mizar. The geography matters. These are northern places, near the headwaters of the Jordan and the slopes of Mount Hermon - far from Jerusalem and the house of God he longs for. Whether these were places of past encounter or simply the far country of his present exile, the point is the same: from wherever he is, however distant, he will remember. Mark the small but mighty word that opens the line - therefore. It is precisely because his soul is cast down that he resolves to remember God. He does not wait until he feels better to turn his mind toward God; he turns his mind toward God as the very thing he does when he feels worst. The casting-down becomes the reason for the remembering, not an excuse to stop. That is faith working in the dark: not the absence of the downcast feeling, but the decision, in the middle of it, to set the mind deliberately on God.³

The image of verse 7 does not soften; it crashes: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. This is the language of drowning - not standing at the water's edge but submerged, the surf breaking overhead, wave after wave rolling over a person who can no longer find the surface. All thy waves - not one, but the whole sea of them, relentless, each one followed by another. Anyone who has been through a season where the troubles seemed to arrive in sets, one grief barely past before the next struck, knows the feeling exactly: the sense of being pounded, of going under, of no longer being able to tell which way is up. And yet, even here, the same astonishing thread runs through: thy waves, thy billows. The psalmist does not say the waves are an accident, or that the universe is simply cruel and indifferent. He keeps addressing them to God. This does not make the drowning hurt less - the psalm never pretends the pain away - but it changes the meaning of the pain. He is not lost in a chaos that no one rules. He is being carried, however terribly, through waters that belong to the God he is calling on. Lament that keeps speaking to God, even to accuse and to cry out, is still a form of faith - it has not let go of the One it is shouting at.

And then, breaking through the drowning, a single defiant word: Yet. Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life. Everything turns on that small word. The waves have gone over him - yet. Despite the flood, despite the taunting, despite the cast-down soul, the psalmist declares what the LORD will do: He will command his lovingkindness, as a king issues an order that cannot be revoked, summoning His covenant love to its post like a soldier reporting for duty. And mark the beautiful turn from day to night: in the daytime God commands His lovingkindness, and in the night his song shall be with me. The darkness does not silence the music. Even when the sun is down and the comfort of the day is gone, there is a song - God's song - and a prayer that goes up to the God of my life. This is the hope the psalm keeps reaching for: not a promise that the waters will recede tomorrow, but a confidence that the lovingkindness of the LORD is on its way, and that even the night has a song in it. The man drowning in verse 7 is, by verse 8, singing in the dark.

The honesty of the psalm runs all the way to the end. Having just declared God's lovingkindness, the psalmist does not therefore stop hurting, and he does not hide it: I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? As with a sword in my bones, mine enemies reproach me; while they say daily unto me, Where is thy God? Look at the two things held together here, both at once. He calls God my rock - his solid ground, his stronghold, the firm thing he stands on - and in the very same sentence he asks, Why hast thou forgotten me? This is not a contradiction the psalm needs to resolve; it is the actual texture of faith in pain. He clings to God as his rock and complains to God that he feels forgotten, in one breath, to the same Person. And the enemies' taunt returns, sharper than before: their reproach is as with a sword in my bones - not a surface wound but a blade driven deep into the marrow - and again it is that same relentless question, Where is thy God?, now said daily. The psalm circles back to its wound on purpose. It will not let us imagine that one good resolution makes the pain disappear. The taunt is still landing. The sorrow is still real. And still he addresses it all to his rock.