"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
In the first stanza (1-5), the mood is one of gloom and distress (a fruitful way of interpreting this is to take the 'enemy' as the enemy of souls himself, on the attack against the believer). The agony of longing is expressed in a wonderfully moving and beautiful picture in 1, and it is made all the more poignant and painful with the enemy whispering all the day, 'Where is thy God?' In this agony the Psalmist remembers the old days, recalling how it once was with him in the fellowship of God's people. This, of course, puts him on the horns of a dilemma, for to remember these things is in one sense a comfort, yet in another, their remembrance, in contrast with his present distress, makes that distress worse. And his soul pours itself out in bitter-sweet desire. But now (5) it is almost as if another voice had broken into his pained soliloquy (as in one sense is the case), for he tries to take himself in hand. He speaks to himself, and gives himself a talking-to. One old puritan writer says, 'David chideth David out of the dumps' (Trapp). Here, then, are two Davids, one the victim of dark and terrible moods, the other the spiritual and rational self, and the one is summoned to give an account of itself to the other. This is always the beginning of victory: it does not come yet, at this point, nor indeed till some time later, but it is the introduction of a principle, a consideration which ultimately makes victory certain and inevitable. We should note, it is not somebody else saying this to us: it has to be ourselves saying it to ourselves. And, when 'we' take 'ourselves' in hand things begin to happen.