"To the choirmaster. A Maskil of the Sons of Korah.
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.
When shall I come and appear before 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.
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.
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 roar of your waterfalls;
all your breakers and your waves
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 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?”
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."
Psalm 42
This Psalm and the next belong in thought together, and some manuscripts combine them as one Psalm. Whether they were originally one or not, it is clear that they share a common theme. There are two stanzas in this Psalm, one of five verses and one of six, while Psalm 43 has one stanza of five verses; and each of the three stanzas ends with the same refrain, 'Why art thou cast down, O my soul...?' If we take the two Psalms as a unit, they record a remarkable outpouring of heart, echoing so much in our own experience - the yearning and longing for God, the distress at the pressures from the enemy, the darkness, the misery, the tendency to self-pity, the struggle and the battle, the light seeming to break, followed by darkness - all before the final peace comes. And, of course, this is its message for us, in the unfolding of the drama of life. We can learn so much from it. The picture in the opening verses is a very moving one. The scholars tell us that the Psalmist is probably living in exile, and compelled to sojourn far away from Jerusalem and its Temple. And he pines and longs. The important thing for us in this is the parallel it can afford us in our own circumstances. One thinks of the believer who is now permanently hospitalised, or through frailty and advancing years confined to home, who deeply grieves of his inability to get to church, and who can only think about the fellowship of the saints, and be present with them in spirit. Or, one may think of the missionary, far from home and in certain circumstances deeply conscious of the desolation and isolation he experiences, and sometimes well nigh torn apart by the intensity and agony of such loneliness. Such are the spiritual parallels - and there are surely others, not excluding the sense of having lost contact with God and now at a distance from Him, and seemingly unable to get through to Him - in which we are able to apply the message of the Psalm.