He Said It Again

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why the unease within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him for the salvation of His presence.

Most psalms speak to God. A few speak to the congregation. This one keeps turning around to speak to the man’s own soul, and it uses almost the same sentence every time. The refrain comes in Psalm 42:5, again in 42:11, and once more at the end of Psalm 43. Psalm 43 has no heading of its own and closes with the identical words, which is why many readers, and a number of Hebrew manuscripts, treat the two as a single poem.

In most songs a refrain means we have arrived somewhere. In this one it means the opposite.

It did not hold

Read verse 5 and then keep going. “Put your hope in God.” Next line: “O my God, my soul despairs within me.”

In Hebrew, “downcast” and “despairs” are the same verb. He told his soul to stop sinking, and in the very next breath he reports to God that it is sinking. The sermon he preached to himself lasted exactly one verse.

I find that enormously comforting. Scripture could have given us a man who talks himself out of the pit with one good sentence. Instead it gives us a man who says the right thing, watches it fail to take, and has to say it again.

Where he was

He remembers better days. He used to go up to the house of God with the crowd, “leading the festive procession” with shouts of joy. Now he is somewhere else: “the land of Jordan and the peaks of Hermon,” and a Mount Mizar that nobody today can locate. That is the far north, a long way from Jerusalem.

Then comes the line about water. “Deep calls to deep in the roar of Your waterfalls; all Your breakers and waves have rolled over me.” The springs of the Jordan rise in that northern country below Hermon, and it is possible he was hearing real water as he wrote. We cannot know. Either way, the psalm has turned on itself. It opened with a deer panting for streams. Now the man who was dying of thirst is going under.

Notice whose waterfalls they are. Your waterfalls. Your breakers. Even the flood has God’s name on it. He does not pretend the waves are gentle, and he does not pretend they are somebody else’s.

Talking instead of listening

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, preaching on this psalm in the sermons later published as Spiritual Depression, made a point many have found freeing: much of our misery comes from listening to ourselves when we should be talking to ourselves. The psalmist does not let his mood have the last word. He questions it. Why are you downcast?

But he is not doing positive thinking. In the same poem he asks God, “Why have You forgotten me?” He hears his enemies say “Where is your God?” twice, all day long. The refrain does not silence the complaint. The two take turns, stanza after stanza, and the psalm lets both of them stand.

Why it comes back

By the end of Psalm 43 he has still not reached the altar. He is asking God to send out light and truth to lead him there. Nothing in the text says the darkness lifted. And the poem closes with the refrain a third time, word for word as in 42:11.

That is how hope actually behaves for a great many believers. It is not a feeling that arrives and stays. It is a sentence you say to yourself on Tuesday, and again on Thursday when Tuesday’s has worn off. The repetition is not evidence that his faith failed. It is the shape his faith took in a long season.

There is one small word worth holding onto. “I will yet praise Him.” Not now, perhaps. Yet.

For today

If you told yourself something true about God and it did not seem to work, you are standing in Psalm 42. That is not a sign you did it wrong. Say it again.

Tell God plainly where you are, too. The psalmist does not hide his despair from God in order to preach hope to himself. He does both, often in adjoining lines, and verse 8 lets you overhear what carried him through the night: “at night His song is with me as a prayer to the God of my life.”

The poem ends with the same question it asked the first time. He still does not know why his soul is downcast. He has only decided, again, which voice gets to speak last.