So, we are starting our semester on Loving God, and loving others; what the relationship between you and God looks like, and what the relationships between you and other people looks like. And we’re starting the semester technically on the idea of loving God. To start, I get to talk about what happens when that relationship doesn’t seem to be there. Even if we maintain, intellectually that God exists, that God cares for us, sometimes the intellectual ascent is all we have. We know all of this, we just don’t really feel it. These thoughts, as we will see, and as perhaps we have experienced may cause anxiety about our relationship with God, or at the very least it can be extremely uncomfortable. The passage we have for tonight, gets at this distance, from God, and from people. So we’ll read Psalm 42 and then actually get into our study.
As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul 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 the day long, “Where is your God?” 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.
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. Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me. By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. I say to God, my rock: “Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? 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?”
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. (ESV)
So, what I have for you tonight actually stems from something I wrote about eight years ago. I have almost reached the age where I start counting major events in how many decades have passed since they occurred. It wasn’t a sermon focused on passage but rather it was more about once we understand that God loves, we explore why God loves. We looked at Psalm 8 “who is man that you are mindful of him”, and how it means that we are these finite creatures and yet God cares for us so deeply. We closed on Romans 8:39: “neither height nor depth, nor anything else can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” We came to the conclusion “God loves, because, essentially, He just does.” There’s nothing we can do to earn it or justify it, it is simply a bare fact, as true as gravity. So, if it is beautiful and it’s true, what we’re going to do tonight is look at what happens when we can have this firm rational grounding and still come to a point where we feel extremely distant from God. Whether we call it spiritual dryness or depression, or what have you. What do we do when we know God exists but we are in a state where that connection has lost its relational, emotional aspect?
There are four themes that I would like to observe in this passage. The first is spiritual depression, and dryness. The second is the rational understanding of God despite the lack of any felt connection, the third is how that rational understanding is what leads to the hope for the future, and the fourth is seeing God in His gifts to us, if we cannot yet see Him directly, and after that, we’ll look at what a “restored” relationship actually looks like.
The first theme is this sense of intense spiritual depression and dryness. The Pslamist says his soul “thirsts for God” as a deer pants for flowing streams. He says tears have been his food day and night, as his thoughts taunt him asking where the God he has loved and sought truly is. Later he will say that “his adversaries” taunt him with the same question, as they see him in this pain. On that first point, if you’ve ever been in a particularly negative thought spiral, I’m pretty sure you know this feeling. And as the thought spiral continues, the thought that inflicts this pain gets bigger and seems to grow this distance between you and God. Whether it’s school, midterms, relationships, family dynamics or something, there is something that becomes larger in the mind than God. This is not to say those things are not important and I am not trying to guilt people for “thinking too negatively” or whatever, I’m the last person that should make that accusation. But I am saying that one’s circumstances can make them feel distant from God.
We see in this theme that the taunts come from within and without. This is the question that is kind of at the center of tonight, “what is keeping you” from receiving God’s love, which we can talk about in small groups. Additionally, who are your adversaries in your faith? Are you the only Christian in your family and your family thinks you’re nuts? Is there something that you think defines you, apart from God and that aspect of your life isn’t turning out how you planned?
We are often slaves to our immediate circumstances, and if something is very wrong, it can be hard to see or trust in God in the moment as the situation unfolds. I can tell you that I’ve broken before and just decided to white knuckle a situation and hope it works. I’d be leaning on some platitude like “everything will be fine” or “what’s the worst that could happen” only to very much find out what the worst could be. So what can we use to ground ourselves through this storm if we cannot see what God is doing or where God is? Simply put, we can use what we know of God independent of the more intimate details of how He relates to us.
This leads to our second observation: While the Psalmist has lost sight of God, he has not lost sight of who God is. The Psalm opens up with a call that “my soul thirsts for you, O God”. He is “the living God”, “my salvation and my God”, “the God of my life” and “God, my rock”. Verse 7’s dramatic metaphor says even in this despair, God is very real to the psalmist. In the same way, we can say we don’t know where God is, but we know He is there. This is kind of a matter of, for lack of a better word, grounding; why do you believe what you believe? If our relationship with God is purely emotional, frankly, it’s pretty vulnerable. Remember as Paul writes, if Christ has not been raised, if the resurrection is not a fact, we are most to be pitied. Our faith is based in part on historical fact.
I had a student at Duquesne years ago who had been through hell over the last few years, having lost a brother and a dear friend. He relayed to me that someone in his circle had said that his faith was a crutch and that he wouldn’t be able to explain how this figured into what God was doing. After a while, we realized that the crutch argument, frankly, sucked. While you can’t overstate how tragic this turn of events is, it hinged his faith entirely on these two tragedies in his life.
What we know about God being the creator of the universe, the one in control of everything, John 16’s reminder that we are not promised a safe flight but have been secured a safe landing, all of that disappears in the face of tragedy. Except it doesn’t. What we know foundationally becomes all the more important when life throws a brutal punch. For example, because of what Christ has done for us, we will be with our departed loved ones again, death does not have the final say. When these are secure in our hearts and minds, it does not make what we are facing “good”. It makes them easier to bear. It is because of this that, as we read in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 as Paul writes that we “may not grieve as those who have no hope, for since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.” We have this hope, grounded in the reality of the resurrection of Christ and the saving grace of God. And the bigger picture, even in the face of tragedy, points us back to God. Notice, for example in verse 8. “By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his sone is with me”.
That leads us to the third observation, this understanding that God is still God in our weakness gives us hope for us relocating Him at the center of our world. Verses 5 and 11 look forward to this with “Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him”. We’ll talk more about that later, but I do want to point out that “Why are you cast down, O my soul”, is not a self-hating question. The psalmist is not spiritualizing “what is wrong with me”. Tim Keller, in a sermon this passage noted that Psalm 42 is kind of unique in a way as we would normally hear the psalmist talk about being under siege by his enemies or afflicted by something outside of himself, and that’s not apparent here. This wave of spiritual depression simply came over him.
What can we take from this? Well, first and most important thing whatever the cause of your moment or even season of spiritual dryness or depression, it doesn’t need to be something grand for it to be a valid concern. What is being said here is not “I’m not a good believer, I should have more faith, I should pray more” or anything we might have as a Christian checklist to kind of work our way back into a relationship with God. Instead, what is being said here is “I know God is real, I know I still have a relationship with Him and perhaps most importantly for the moment, I know God still cares. So where’s the disconnect? Why is my soul in turmoil within me.”
Second, “hope in God for I shall again praise Him”. The rational understanding of who God is, what we know foundationally, is what will sustain us as we seek to feel that love and that connection again.
This actually leads me to my fourth and final observation, and then I’ll conclude with application and we can go to small groups: If you can’t see God directly, look around at what he has given you and remember Him through those things and people. Verse 4 “These things I remember as I pour out my soul and lead them in the procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise”.
The psalmist is remembering, we could say, going to church, with his people. The Matthew Henry commentary calls this verse “the remembrance of former enjoyments”, which aggravates his current condition. In the same Keller sermon I mentioned earlier, he observes that the disconnect between the Psalmist and God and the Psalmist and people are not necessarily separate issues. Spiritual depression is a deep darkness, an attack of the enemy, that isolates the believer, and leaves him to these thoughts; “where is your God”, hell “where are your people?”. “Your people” are a reflection of God for when you can’t see Him. They can be that reflection because they stay with you when you don’t know what’s going on, when you need someone to talk to, when you just want to be with someone.
Therefore, remember the former enjoyments, with the understanding that you can have that again. If we remember that part of “Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him”. That hope for the future applies to your church as well. You can find those people who can build you up if you’re away from your home church. That is, frankly, part of what we’re here for. We are here to be that Christian community on campus. We are here to worship God together, to strengthen each other through teaching and study and, indeed, fellowship. And we are not a replacement for a real church. I would encourage you to talk to Ben and Julianna especially as Common Table is in this neck of the woods. If you have questions, if you want to talk with us about anything, we’d love to talk and it’s all between you, us and God, but there needs to be a broader community, you need as many as you can, to be that reflection of God in your life.
And I will close with application. I do not wish to say, if you are in this darkness, “you should pray more” or “read more” or “you should just have more faith” though I would certainly never dissuade anyone from praying or reading their Bible more. In fact, we see in this passage that the problem is not a lack of faith. It’s a lack of felt connection. Despite that, notice that the Psalmist does not end where he began. He ends in the middle. “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God”. There is no resolution here, there’s no “why is my soul downcast, oh, that’s why, I’m fine now.” There’s nothing that neat and tidy, but there is still a lot of hope. And it’s not blind optimism, either. It is a true hope in God that is grounded in what we know about who God is and what He’s done for us in the past and what He continues to do for us now.
With all of this in mind, we can ask “ok, what does a ‘restored connection with God looks like?” And I think that depends on where and who you are. For example. I have been in a kind of unpleasant headspace for the last long while that is so familiar, that I don’t know what “truly joyful” actually looks like. If a restored relationship looks for you, as it does for me, that you wake up able to feel better or even pray on some mornings as opposed to none, that counts. If you find joy in a stressful time that you can’t explain, that counts. In the same way that the reason for your spiritual darkness doesn’t need to be grand to be a valid concern, you don’t need daily epiphany to feel a closer relationship with God.
I don’t know what you’re going through, you may not be in that dark place now. I pray that your relationship with God is wonderful. Whenever darkness comes, in whatever form it takes, keep in mind what you know to be true about God, let the people He has put in your life sustain you emotionally and be a reflection of His care, and continue to seek Him. Not in the frantic sense of “if I just do more ‘Christian things’ then it’s just going to click”, But rather do all of this in the manner of someone who knows that the darkness doesn’t change the relationship, it changes how the relationship feels. And alongside that, approach it as someone who knows they will again praise Him, even if for now, you’re just holding on to what you know.
