Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-november-6-2025
Psalm 42
1 As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember
as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go to the house of God
under the protection of the Mighty One
with shouts of joy and praise
among the festive throng.
5 Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
6 My soul is downcast within me;
therefore I will remember you
from the land of the Jordan,
the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.
8 By day the Lord directs his love,
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 must I go about mourning,
oppressed by the enemy?”
10 My bones suffer mortal agony
as my foes taunt me,
saying to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
11 Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
You might have noticed that it’s pretty rare for us to base our daily Reflections on readings from the psalms. And the truth is that I’m a little hesitant about the way the psalms are sometimes used. For one thing, the psalms communicate an ancient vision of the life of faith that says if you’re a virtuous person, God is going to bless you with worldly prosperity. So if you buy into that vision, you’re likely to conclude that a person living in poverty just isn’t a virtuous person. I think that’s inconsistent with what the Bible teaches us overall about God’s concern for the poor and the needy.
Some people also quote lines from the psalms in support of their own theological positions. But not everything found in the psalms seems to line up with the teachings of Jesus. For instance, Psalm 137 says, “Happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us — he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.” And anyone who claims that God blesses blood vengeance against the children of our enemies is obviously reading a different Bible than I am.
But that doesn’t mean the psalms don’t have great value to us in our lives of faith. It seems to me they just need to be regarded as what they were intended to be: a sort of combination hymnal and prayer book. In the Book of Psalms, you’ll find texts that express just about all the emotions of human life — joy and sorrow, fear and courage, anger and appreciation. It seems to me that the psalms demonstrate that God is willing to hear everything that spills out of us as we struggle through the challenges of life.
I think that points to a basic difference between Hebrew spirituality and Christian spirituality. Christians think we should never say an angry word to God, no matter what pain or misfortune we might encounter. But Hebrew spirituality seems to take seriously the origin of the name Israel – ‘those who wrestle with God.’ The psalms show how freely the Hebrew tradition is willing to express anger and impatience with God. You get the sense that there’s a more personal relationship at work.
So once in a while, it seems appropriate to devote a day’s Reflection to one of the Psalms. One of my favorites is Psalm 42. There are several things about this psalm that I find especially engaging.
First of all, Psalm 42 expresses the emotional side of the faith that’s easy for Protestant Christians to miss out on – and that’s especially true of Presbyterians. We tend to focus on having the right knowledge about God, and on accepting the right doctrines about God. There’s nothing wrong with knowledge or doctrines. But they’re things of the mind, and we’re commanded to ‘love God with all our hearts and all our souls and all our strength,’ too. So being completely focused on the mental side of our relationship with God leaves out a lot of important aspects of that relationship. And Psalm 42 speaks of the hunger in our hearts and souls for a personal and emotional relationship with God.
And by the way, we tend to think of our soul as an immaterial thing inside us somewhere, a thing that escapes and floats up to heaven when we die. But that’s a concept of the soul that really comes from Greek philosophy, not from the Bible. The Bible usually expresses the idea that the soul is a capability that God has placed in each of us – an ability to relate to him and to other people. So the opening verses of this Psalm 42 talk about workings of that soul – about the profound longing of a believer to experience the presence of God and to be in relationship with him.
Lots of American mainline Protestants are uncomfortable with things of faith that express a profound longing for deeper relationship with God. But that’s a shame. Clearly, some of our fellow believers are more willing to open themselves to that deeper relationship. The beautiful meditative contemporary song Breathe has the chant-like refrain, “And I, I’m desperate for you. And I, I’m lost without you.”
Psalm 42 says, “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls.” These words express the idea that the deepest part of God’s own heart is always calling out to the deepest part of our hearts. God’s desire is not for the superficial relationships that lots of us seem to be willing to accept as the meaning of faith. It’s not enough just to say that we accept what the theologians tell us about the doctrines of the faith. Instead, God wants the deepest part of our hearts to be linked to the deepest part of his own.
The great theologian Augustine of Hippo wrote in the fifth century that there is a ‘God-shaped hole in our hearts,’ and our hearts can never be completely at rest until they rest in God. This psalm seems to express that thought very poetically.
It seems to me that if we’re satisfied to engage God only with our minds, we’re missing out on the most powerful aspects of the life of faith. Really knowing the joy of deep relationship with God, it seems to me, can only happen when we’re willing to open our hearts and souls to allow God to pour out that presence we thirst for as followers of his Son.
Let’s pray. Lord, we want to connect with you on a deeper level than we have in the past. Let your Spirit open our hearts, and let us experience the depth of your love in ways we never have before. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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