July 30 Sermon: My Salvation, My God
A few questions to consider as we look at Psalm 42:
1. How does Pastor Mark highlight the significance of desires and their potential impact on one's life and actions? What caution does he give offer regarding the nature of these desires?
2. In Psalm 42, how does the psalmist vividly express their longing for a connection and intimacy with God? What imagery and analogies does the psalmist employ to convey the depth of their need for God?
3. How does the context of the Old Covenant and the centrality of the temple help us understand the psalmist's longing in Psalm 42? What elements of worship and community are they being kept from, and how does this intensify their sense of separation and grief?
Transcript:
We’ve all desired something and desired it deeply. These longings that we have can often end up consuming our thoughts and become our focus. Often this goes beyond just what we think about, these desires can often end up directing our lives, even without us even realizing it. It frames not only how we think but it can cause us to act in different ways. These yearnings often also shape our loves and the path of our lives soon follow. This is why it is so important that we are mindful of our thoughts. This has been true in any time but as I was pondering this concept the past week I was once again drawn to the affluence of our time. Very rarely are the things that you and I end up aspiring to are things that are necessities. We rarely find people in our culture longing for their next meal or for simple shelter. Not all, but many of our longings are for things that we don’t need but that we want and while there is nothing inherently wrong with desiring something other than three square meals and a non-leaking roof over our head, it can do something to us that is not productive. We can easily think that whatever it is that we desire is all that we need to be truly happy. That’s what I mean when I say these desires can shape our loves. We end up direct towards something that cannot fulfill us, that can never truly satisfy.
As we continue looking at different psalms this summer we find ourselves in Psalm 42. Now earlier, we looked at this psalm a little bit when we were in Psalm 43 because the two are deeply connected. This week as we look at Psalm 42, our emphasis is going to be the desire the psalmist has for a connection and intimacy with God and how he realizes that this is a necessary desire. I have drawn out in the psalms most weeks that in the midst of the struggles that the psalmists have they turn to God because they know that he is the only remedy for the problems that plague them.
And so, lets dig into the longing of the psalmist here in chapter 42 this morning.
This first verse that we see here today is one that we are likely familiar with. A popular praise chorus from several years back started out with these same words. In fact, I bet a significant portion of you are not only remembering the lyrics right now but can hear the tune in your head. This is truly a powerful imagery and as we slow down and think about the image being painted for us it is one of necessity. A deer is desperately in need of water. And we see here that the deer pants. It is more than a desire, it is a desperate need. The longing for God here is a deeply necessity. This isn’t a deer that hasn’t had a drink in an hour or so and so it is going to track down a stream to wet their whistle. This is a panting and you can picture it. An animal clearly in need of water wandering about and nearly stumbling because it so badly needs life sustaining water. This longing expressed as thirst is a poetic device that is very helpful and super easy to understand. You may have experience an extreme need for thirst in just the past week with the extreme heat that we had. If you spent any time outside doing any type of activity it would have led you to thirst. Even if this didn’t happen to you in the past week, thirst is something that you have experienced at some point in your life. I’m guessing most of us have never been to the point where was it was life threatening but we have all been thirsty enough that we have had a glimpse of what it would be like to have thirst be life threatening.
The image here for us isn’t hey, you know God, I need a little bit of you to give me a little boost or like getting a pop at a convenience store on a long trip for something to drink, just because or in case you get thirsty down the road. The idea here is a desperate need that the psalmist has for God and we see this with the repetition of this idea in verse two.
It is driven home for us by the repetition of not only the idea of thirst but who he thirsts for. He thirsts for the living God. Again, we see that the psalmist is desiring the God who is the only one who can provide help. The living God. Not the idols of their pagan neighbors who thirst but never find water through their idolatry. The living God is the Yahweh, the LORD, the giver of life. Israel worshiped him and it was important and in this last half of verse two we get a glimpse of the problem here and the thirst imagery gets illumined a little bit better for us. The psalmist is asking when he shall come and appear before God. The idea here is that something has been keeping the writer of this psalm from Jerusalem and from worship in the temple.
Like I said, this expands the imagery of the panting deer. It gives us the idea that there is a drought and they are in need of these flowing streams and there haven’t been any. We’ve already seen that the situation is desperate but this idea of prolonged absence from worship in the temple helps us understand the depth of this.
You and I naturally read this in our context, right? We have access to the Bible in a moment. Even if we don’t have an app on our phone to read the Bible we know where we can find one pretty easily and we can find a church without any really effort at all. You might not even need Google Maps to pull it off. You and I read this statement with a new covenant, Christ as our mediator bias but we’re not going understand the desperation and the drought idea unless we remember the centrality of the temple in the Old Covenant. The temple was where the glory of God resided. The psalmist is kept from that and longs to return. And we see how much this is a longing for him when we see him say that his tears have been his food day and night.
Now, obviously this phrase my tears have been my food is poetic language and hyperbolic, right? But it helps us to understand just how much grief he is experiencing being away from Jerusalem, the temple, and the presence of the LORD. I’m drawn to this image not just because it’s vivid and I think that we have all been to the point where we have been crying and the saltiness of our tears surprises us. We not only feel this image in our being we can feel it on our face and taste it in our mouths, right?
And the psalmist lets us know that this is all amplified by the oppression of those who oppose him. They are mocking him. Clearly this is a problem for the psalmist that is known publicly and to multiply his grief people are asking him why God isn’t rescuing him from this situation in which he has been exiled from God and in the midst of this oppression he remembers his involvement in the worship of God.
And it is clear from this that the one who wrote this psalm had involvement in the worship in Jerusalem and during this time of being separated from where this took place he recalls it. He would lead the throngs of people in procession to the house of God and this would be filled with glad shouting and the singing of praise to almighty God. And notice that what he longs for is not just an individual thing. He is leading throngs and the multitudes are keeping festival. Remember, being kept from Jerusalem not only keeps him from access to the temple but from the festivals and the community of believers there. I believe that people in our time have a very individualistic idea of faith. We read the groanings of the psalmist here and assume it’s all about himself and the individual feeling he has in being separated from God but it’s also about the community of faith that he is separated from. Not just that he isn’t around other people but that they aren’t participating as the community of faith in the worship of the God who has called them by name.
And we see his response in verse 5.
And this is essentially the chorus of both Psalm 42 and Psalm 43. It appears a total of three times in the two chapters.
Why are you cast down is an interesting question for the psalmist to ask here. He has given us plenty of reasons to be cast down. He thirsts for God. He is being kept from Jerusalem and from the worship and festivals that take place there. He is not able to participate in these things with the community of faith either. Then, on top of it all, those around him aren’t sympathetic at all about it. They mockingly ask where God is in the midst of all this. He’s lined out many reasons for his soul to be cast down and to be in turmoil within him.
But yet, there is an acknowledgment of the truth that God is faithful and that there is a reason for hope. That hope is in God and the truth that Yahweh shows steadfast love to his people and he is their salvation.
This is the psalmists source of peace in the midst of longing for God and in the face of the depression that is clearly affecting his life as he is absent from Jerusalem and absent from worship with the people of God. He has seen the faithfulness of God and he knows that he will continue to be faithful to him into the future.
We are stopping at this verse today because we have looked at this previously when we were looking at Psalm 43. I want our emphasis here to be on the longing for God and the answer to those longings as we think about that theme that comes out from the beginning of this passage.
As I dwelled upon this passage and let it ruminate on me over the course of the week, I came away significantly convicted because of the longing that the psalmist had for God. As I talked about as I opened this morning, when we live in a time of unparalleled affluence, we tend to long after things that we really don’t need and we find ourselves thinking that we can find our satisfaction in those pursuits but we cannot. Our quest for happiness and to be fulfilled will only continue the drought that we feel. We may get a short cloud burst here and there where it seems like we’ve found joy but those longings for the things of this world will never satisfy what we are truly longing for.
And as we consider this passage we have a great blessing as the people of God in Christ Jesus. The psalmist here in chapter 42 is longing to go before God and to return to Jerusalem and the temple. We don’t have to go to a place to go before the presence of God because we have the Lord Jesus Christ interceding for us right now at the right hand of the Father. In Christ, we have access to God and we have the indwelling Holy Spirit. When we feel as though we are in a season of drought we know that we have the living water that is Jesus. He truly unlocks the this psalm for us because we can go to him. The reason we can do this is because when our souls are cast down or in turmoil we know that we have hope because God has brought us to himself and he is our salvation.
And so, in the things that we face in this life, may we long for the living water of Christ instead of the things that will never satisfy. He is what our souls truly pant for and he is the one who brings us true joy. May his word and Spirit spring up these waters within in us that we might testify to his steadfast love and faithfulness to his people.
