When the Soul Is Thirsty

We have spent four days with praise, and praise is real and necessary and true. Today we change register entirely. Today we enter the territory that makes up a significant portion of the Psalter and that most modern churches would rather not spend much time in: lament.

Psalm 42 opens with one of the most beautiful images in Scripture, and underneath the beauty is a kind of longing that you will recognise if you have ever gone through a season when God felt very far away.

The Person Behind the Psalm

We do not know exactly who wrote this Psalm or what their circumstances were. But from the text we can gather some things. They are in exile, or at least far from Jerusalem and the temple. They remember going to the house of God with shouts of joy. Now they are somewhere else, somewhere hard, surrounded by people who ask them tauntingly: where is your God?

And they are honest about what that has done to them. Their tears have been their food day and night. Their soul is downcast. They are disturbed, unsettled, unable to find the footing they had before. This is not a small spiritual inconvenience. This is a genuine crisis of faith that is also a crisis of grief.

And they bring it to God exactly as it is.

The Most Useful Thing in This Psalm

Three times in this Psalm (and its companion, Psalm 43, which was originally one poem), the writer addresses their own soul. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?

This is one of the most practically useful things in the entire Psalter. The Psalmist is not passive about what is happening inside them. They notice it, name it, and then address it. They interrogate the downcast feeling: why are you like this? What are you actually afraid of? What have you forgotten?

And then they preach to themselves: put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

Notice: not "I feel praising Him right now." Not "the feeling has returned." I will yet praise him. Future tense. A commitment made from the middle of the desert to the God who is on the other side of it. The hope is not in present circumstances. It is in a God whose character has not changed even though the experience of His presence has changed.

The Memory of Better Days

There is something else worth noting here. The Psalmist does not suppress the memory of better days. They lean into it. I remember how I used to go to the house of God with shouts of joy and thanksgiving. They let themselves feel the contrast between then and now, rather than pretending the then was not real.

That is part of what makes this lament honest. They are not performing contentment in the hard season. They are saying: I remember what it was like when the presence of God was palpable and near, and I miss it, and I am telling You so.

That is allowed. God is not fragile. He is not threatened by your honest grief about a dry season. The thirst itself is evidence of something: the deer does not pant for water in a well-watered place. The very intensity of the longing points to the reality of the thing longed for.