The Soul’s longing for God

The Soul’s longing for God

As the deer pants for the water brooks, So my soul pants for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night, While they say to me all day long, "Where is your God?" These things I remember and I pour out my soul within me. For I used to go along with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God, With the voice of joy and thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him For the help of His presence. O my God, my soul is in despair within me; Therefore I remember You from the land of the Jordan And the peaks of Hermon, from Mount Mizar. Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls; All Your breakers and Your waves have rolled over me. The LORD will command His lovingkindness in the daytime; And His song will be with me in the night, A prayer to the God of my life. I will say to God my rock, "Why have You forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?" As a shattering of my bones, my adversaries revile me, While they say to me all day long, "Where is your God?" Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him, The help of my countenance and my God.   Psalms 42

Many, many years ago King David sat upon the lopes of Mount Hermon on the eastern side of the Jordan River, as he sat there a deer with open mouth and heaving flanks slowly passed by eagerly seeking in dry pools for a drop of water to cool her outstretched tongue. In this physical longing of the beast of the forest he beheld a picture of his spiritual longing; “As the heat panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee O God.”

David is far from home. He is separated by time and distance from his family and loved ones; from the King’s palace and from the tabernacle of the Lord his God. This separation is not of his choosing. David, the King of Israel is fleeing for his life. Do you recall that after David’s sin with Bathsheba against God, Nathan the prophet said, “Thus saith the Lord, Behold I will rise up evil against thee out of thine own house.” (2 Samuel 12:11) “Whatsoever, a man soweth that shall he also reap.” David had sown the seed of inequity and he is now reaping the consequences. Absalom has risen in revolt against his father and is attempting to wrest the kingdom out of the hands of David. There were more with Absalom than there were with David. David had a small band of loyal followers and they had to flee before Absalom and we read: “Then David arose and all the people that were with him, and they passed over Jordan; by the morning light there not lacked one of them that were not gone over Jordan.” (2 Samuel 17:22)

On the far side of the Jordan, looking across the waters toward the city of Jerusalem, he lamented: “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?” This is the cry of a man who is “heartsick and homesick, longing for a deeper experience of God, yearning for friendship with Him, for companionship without which his life is empty, wretched and starved.”

In this first verse of the psalm, David has given expression not only of his own need but also to the hunger and thirst of all men. Man’s soul is athirst for God.

            “Far and wide though all unknowing, Pants for thee each human breast.

            Human tears for thee are flowing; Human hearts in thee would rest.”

Since the beginning of time men have searched for God. The millions of idols of wood and stone, of brass and of gold that man has erected by his own hands, is evidence of man’ thirst after the living God. From the earliest ages man began “to call upon the name of the Lord.” The ritual of prayer is the oldest religious rite. There has never been a tribe or people who did not pray. In all ages men motivated by the deep thirst of the human soul lifted their eyes heavenward and called upon the name of their god.

Oftentimes this need for God is not recognized. Often the souls of men are hungry and what they hunger after they do not know. The hunger and thirst in some is exceedingly intense and in others it is repressed. Whether it is expressed or whether it is repressed, it is still there. The plain truth about man is that God has made us, each one of us, in His own image. Sin marred that image but did not destroy it. Sin created a block in the line of man’s fellowship with God, but it did not destroy man’s kinship with God. In man who is created in the image of his creator there is a longing to know God. Augustine expressed in his confession when he prayed: “O God, thou hast made us for Thyself, and our souls are restless until we find our rest in Thee.”

Very often this longing becomes most intense in the hour of tribulation. Many a man who has lived his life as if there was no God in the heavens above has in the hour of tribulation prayed, “I need Thee, Oh I need Thee….stay Thou near by.” There have been those who have spent a life time destroying man’s faith in God, denying man’s need of God and have come to the hour of death crying aloud for God. Voltaire on his death bed said, “I am abandoned by God and man! I shall go to hell! O Christ! O Jesus Christ!” Tom Paine from his death bed said; “I would give worlds if I had not, if the Age of Reason had never been published. O Lord, help me! Christ help me! Stay with me! It is hell to be left alone!” “As the heart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.” This was the need of David. This is your need. This is the need of all men.

At this particular period in David’s life this need was particularly intense. It is intensified by his separation from the house of worship. “When shall I come and appear before God? When I remember these things I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holyday.” David has been so accustomed to going to Church, he has been so helped by the services of worship and inspired by them that he feels lost without them. He cries, “When will I be able to go to Church again, to join with others in the service of worship?” the psalmist longs for his Church, and this desire increases his sense of loneliness for God

Sometime ago a man of national reputation suggested that there be declared a moratorium on preaching. Sometimes I have felt that might be a good idea and even go so far as close the Churches. Maybe if the privilege of corporate worship was denied to people, we would appreciate more fully the valuable part the Church and her services play in our individual and community life. Shut-ins have so often said to me, “Oh, if I could go just once more unto the house of God.”

The psalmist longing for God is accentuated by those things that people are saying about him and doing to him. “My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is my God? As with a sword in my bones my enemies reproach me; while they say daily unto me, Where is thy God” (verses 3,10) When David was fleeing from Absalom, Shimei, who was a relative of King Saul came out and threw stones at David and his followers and cursed at him saying: "Get out, get out, you man of bloodshed, and worthless fellow! "The LORD has returned upon you all the bloodshed of the house of Saul, in whose place you have reigned; and the LORD has given the kingdom into the hand of your son Absalom. And behold, you are taken in your own evil, for you are a man of bloodshed!" (2 Samuel 16:7-8) These taunts creates within David an intense longing for the living God. He longs to be drawn closer to God, the friend who is closer than a brother; the friend who understands him and all that is happening to him; this friend who continues to love him and has forgiven his sin, even he suffers the awful consequences of sin. When he forgets, when the world misunderstands, when the world casts its taunts at us then is when we need God.

The psalmist longing for God is intensified by his own personal troubles. “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” Sorrow and trouble have rolled over him like the waves of the ocean. In Hamlet the king described the troubles that threaten to engulf Ophelia in these words:

            “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”

This is what has happened to David and trouble is drawing him closer to God and intensifying his thirst for the living God. This is one of the blessings of personal difficulty. It makes us more aware of our need for God. In the broad light of the noon tide sun the small child runs ahead of his daddy and plays along the street almost forgetful of his daddy’s presence. But when the shadows of night fall and the darkness of night engulfs him, he draws close to his daddy’s side and places his little hand in the big protective, guiding hand of his father. For David and for us the tears of life are but links in a chain that bind us closer to the living God.

David’s longing for God is increased by fluctuating moods. Twice he cries: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance and my God.” John Calvin says that here in the forty-second psalm the writer “presents himself to us divided into two parts.” The struggle is between despondency and hope, dejection and faith, disquietude and poise.” We see here the picture of one who is in the dumps and who is struggling to rise to the heights of hope. “Who has not known the devilishness of moods in his own experience. The ‘ups and downs,’ these unstable and unreliable feelings and moods – what havoc they can work!” How they whet the longing of the devout man for his God!

When a man seeks God, he finds God. The Lord is nigh unto all those who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth. As we draw nigh unto God, He draws nigh unto us. The soul of David was a thirst for the living God; not for god of wood or stone, brass or gold, not for a god who was the figment of someone’s imagination but for the living God. The living God, satisfied his trust. He said, “O my God, my soul is cast down within me: therefore will I remember thee.” In the hour of distress he drew nearer to God.

David had assurance that God had remembered him. Although his enemies had come upon him and his foes sought to destroy him, his God had not forsaken him. He testified: “The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.” (Verse 8) Here is one who “believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living;” who believed that God would never leave him nor forsake him; that God was not confined within the sacred precincts of the tabernacle but that God was ever with His own.

David believed that God’s purpose would be accomplished. He said, “I shall yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance and my God.” He believed that God is greater then man; that God can cause even the wrath of men to praise Him, that God is greater than man’s sin and that God can over come the evil of men with good and bring His eternal purpose to pass, David believed that he would eventually see the eternal purpose of God accomplished and would sing his praises.

The psalmist began his song a thirst for God and he ends with his thirst satisfied. This is ever the experience of those who sincerely seek the Lord. It matters not the circumstances in which we find ourselves, the universal testimony is

            “Where’re they seek Thee, Thou art found.”

Dr. Robert W Kirkpatrick

First Presbyterian Church, Charleston W Va. August 16, 1961