“From Soliloquy to Prayer -
God, our Hope”
Psalms 42 & 43
Dr. Jerry Nelson
August 13, 2006
He was a well-known author and Christian leader in Oregon.
But over several months, an internal struggle intensified until feelings of inadequacy and even thoughts of self-destruction resulted in a total collapse one Sunday morning when he was supposed to speak.
He admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital where they asked:
“How do you feel? Do you sleep well? How do you feel about your work? Do you have difficulty making decisions? Are you often angry? Ever thought of suicide?
His answers confirmed the depth of
his depression, his hopelessness. Leslie Flynn, The
Sustaining Power of Hope, 12
I want you to imagine the weeks and probably months that preceded that Sunday morning collapse.
· What must the emotional struggle have been like?
· Were there days when he felt fine and then days when all seemed hopeless?
· Might there have been other times when hope and hopelessness battled each other in his mind?
· Can you imagine him pumping himself up to be positive and hopeful about life and then seconds later crashing down in negative thoughts and feelings?
Maybe we haven’t admitted ourselves to a psychiatric facility, but certainly most of us have experienced periods of deep discouragement.
And such times seem even more debilitating when you can’t connect the feelings to any specific cause that you can correct.
Instead there arises within a general malaise – that vague, indefinite feeling that things are not right.
And then grayness begins to color all of life: work, relationships, hobbies, and especially your relationship with God.
Maybe for you it has never developed into full-blown despondency but for you it is just an occasional or maybe frequent battle with doubt.
I
want to believe I’m not alone in my struggle with doubt from time to time –
sometimes intense and prolonged doubt.
It
seems that too often doubt dances around the fringes of my thinking, only
occasionally overwhelming but always lingering and pestering.
And the temptation to doubt and
even despair intensifies when we are afflicted by prolonged illness, by the
hostility of others or even afflicted by our own sin.
Sometimes doubt or depression lie hidden beneath the surface, but sometimes they flare up into a battle royal in our minds.
I want you to listen to one of those battles of the mind written by the Psalmist.
I want you to hear him vacillating between drowning in discouragement and trying to find hope.
For several minutes you will hear him talking to himself – a soliloquy.
And then, and I will point it out; you will hear him begin to talk to God.
Psalms 42 and 43 were probably originally one Psalm.
Please stand in honor of God’s word.
From
soliloquy to prayer:
As the deer pants
for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
PS 42:2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living
God.
When can I go and meet with God?
PS 42:3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while men say to me all day long,
"Where is your God?"
PS 42:4 These things I remember
as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go with the multitude,
leading the procession to the house of
God,
with shouts of joy and thanksgiving
among the festive throng.
PS 42:5 Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and 6 my God.
My soul is downcast within me;
therefore I will remember you
from the land of the Jordan,
the heights of Hermon--from Mount Mizar.
PS 42:7 Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.
PS 42:8 By day the LORD directs his love,
at night his song is with me--
a prayer to the God of my life.
PS 42:9 I say to God my Rock,
"Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I go about mourning,
oppressed by the enemy?"
PS 42:10 My bones suffer mortal agony
as my foes taunt me,
saying to me all day long,
"Where is your God?"
PS 42:11 Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
Psalm 43
At this point the
Psalmist turns from talking to himself to talking to God.
PS 43:1 Vindicate me, O God,
and plead my cause against an ungodly
nation;
rescue me from deceitful and wicked men.
PS 43:2 You are God my stronghold.
Why have you rejected me?
Why must I go about mourning,
oppressed by the enemy?
PS 43:3 Send forth your light and your truth,
let them guide me;
let them bring me to your holy mountain,
to the place where you dwell.
PS 43:4 Then will I go to the altar of God,
to God, my joy and my delight.
I will praise you with the harp,
O God, my God.
PS 43:5 Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
Prayer
Earlier, I spoke of the Psalmist’ vacillation between thoughts of despair and hope.
I want you to watch it in your own Bible.
The Psalmist begins chapter 42 with a cry from the soul.
He longs for God, for peace.
He wants to know when it will come.
Like the intense craving of a deer thirsting for water, he longs to know once again the joy of relationship with God.
In verse 3, others suggest to him that God isn’t there and I think he too begins to wonder.
The discouragement, the doubts, won’t go away – they are with him night and day.
In verse 4 he remembers what peace and joy were like; he recalls times going to worship, but remembering only intensifies his sense of what is now missing.
One man wrote, “To a person in misery it only increases misery to have
once been happy.” Timothy Rogers in Spurgeon TTOD 279
Another wrote, “A forced nostalgia is no substitute for reality…” (Peter
Craigie, Psalms, 326)
So in verse 5 he tries to talk himself out of his depression.
He
challenges himself to not let himself be so discouraged but put his hope in God
for it will still be okay.
In
this, the Psalmist here hints at the solution, but he is still dominated by
feelings of doubt and discouragement.
And so this
self-talk apparently brings no relief.
Verse
6, “My soul is downcast within me.”
But still
determined to use memory to overcome his discouragement he moves from
remembering his experiences of worship on the way to the temple to remembering
God himself.
He
realizes that it is the absence of God that he is fundamentally experiencing
and he wants to know the presence of God again.
So he again
harnesses memory to help him.
He apparently recalls times when the presence of God felt real.
Jordan and Hermon might be places where he had experienced God’s presence before.
But recalling those places doesn’t help – instead they apparently only
exacerbate the feelings of discouragement.
Instead of
quenching his thirst, remembering the waters of Jordan and Hermon seem to
suggest waves and floods that overwhelm.
Verse 7
“Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your
waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.
“Deep calls to deep” -
“One vast body of water (waterfalls) seems to summon another (waves and
breakers), as if on purpose to swallow him up.” (Perowne, 353)
What
he meant to remember to be of help, his discouraged mind only turned to further
doubt.
In our gloomy thinking, we quickly find the cloud within every silver
lining.
The
doubts, the memories, the statements by others all combined to simply take him
deeper into discouragement.
Said more poetically, Spurgeon wrote, “Satanic suggestions chimed in
with mistrustful forebodings, outward tribulation thundered in awful harmony
with inward anguish.” Spurgeon, TTOD, 274
Still determined
to exercise memory to dispel the discouragement, he tries to remember the good
old days.
Verse 8:
“By day the LORD directs his
love,
at night his song is with
me--
a prayer to the God of my
life.
But apparently it fails and in the vacillation so common to our own experience, he slips back into the negative:
Psalm 42:9-10
“I say to God my Rock,
"Why have you forgotten
me?
Why must I go about mourning,
oppressed by the enemy?"
My bones suffer mortal agony
as my foes taunt me,
saying to me all day long,
"Where is your God?"
Memory has not
served him well.
Writing later about the experience, the Psalmist here, in the Psalm, repeats the refrain.
Psalm 42:11
“ Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
The answer is given in the last part of the verse but at this point in his experience the emphasis is still on the first part - the discouragement.
But in Psalm 43,
as I said earlier, the Psalmist takes a very different tack (direction) at this
point.
In Psalm 42 he was talking to himself.
Our
so-called prayers are often like that, especially when we are discouraged.
We say we are talking to God when usually we are just talking to
ourselves: arguing, lamenting, or complaining.
But now the Psalmists moves from just remembering to actually praying!
He moves from talking to himself to talking to God.
Psalm 43:1-2
Vindicate me, O God,
and plead my cause against an
ungodly nation;
rescue me from deceitful and
wicked men.
You are God my stronghold.
Professor Peter
Craigie, who was very helpful in understanding the logical flow of these Psalms
said, “This marks the beginning of real progress: he has already learned that
there is no help to be found in the weak ally of memory, and aid must come
directly from God.” (Peter Craigie, Pslams, 328)
It is true that
the same lament is offered here again (“Why have you rejected me?”), but that
lament is now in the context of his prayer to God – he is no
longer just struggling within but is now talking to God.
The
lament of v2 only helps to form the plea to God to act.
The very presence
of God he desired in 42:1-2 is now seen as possible but only by God’s
intervention.
Psalm 43:3 Send forth your light and your truth,
let them guide me;
let them bring me to your holy
mountain,
to the place where you dwell.
The
only thing that can lead him out of the darkness of his discouragement and
despair is God.
He knows that when
God intervenes with light and truth, it will lead him back into the presence of
God.
PS 43:4 Then will I go to
the altar of God,
to God, my joy and my
delight.
I will praise you with the
harp,
O God, my God.
And he ends the
Psalm with the familiar refrain that he has used twice before.
But
this time, it seems, he focuses on the last part rather than the first.
PS 43:5 Why are you
downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
I think
he has now turned the corner from despair toward hope.
He is now challenging his own soul – “Why are you downcast?”
NOW the emphasis is God and the “hope” that is in Him.
First of all please notice how this change came about.
I don’t pretend that this change was automatic or instantaneous!
What the Psalmist is doing in these few verses is first of all showing how real the struggle with discouragement and hopelessness is and then secondly showing where real hope can be found and how it becomes ours.
But before thinking about the source and means of hope, let’s think about what Christian hope is and is not.
First
of all what it is not:
It is
not the hope of “I hope so.”
Hope is always for something we desire.
We
never say we hope we get in an accident.
So, “I hope so” is desire but it is hope without confidence and in fact with a fair amount of doubt that what is desired will ever happen.
That kind
of hope is simply wishful thinking.
Neither is it the hope of “There is hope now that he’s in college.”
This too is desire and now with more confidence yet still uncertain.
This is waiting with fingers crossed.
Nor is Christian hope the hope of a hiker saying, “I believe
we going to reach the top of the mountain.”
This
is something desired and it is expected with confidence.
But even this hope, this “confident expectation,” is not sufficient to
explain Christian hope.
Such
confidence may be misplaced.
My son may hope with confident
expectation that he is going to be an NBA star but he may be wrong.
Such confidence may be nothing more than optimism.
We
all love optimistic people but optimism is not the same as Christian hope.
Worldly
optimism is simply a hope in hope.
It is the
person who says, “At least we have hope.”
That’s just
silly! That’s Little Orphan Annie, singing “Tomorrow.”
At best, worldly optimism is based on a belief in human progress.
Human progress believes that “Because
man’s knowledge grows and his capacity for applying knowledge increases, life
must become better and better.” Emil Brunner describing the origins of modern optimism in Faith, Hope and Love, 38
The temptation then is to base our hope in
material prosperity or physical health or the feeling of happiness.
If I’m prosperous, healthy and happy, then hope has been
realized.
And then we set out to turn those hopes into reality by our own means.
Emil Bruner wrote, “If man…thinks
paradise must come within this earthly life, he is bound to take recourse to
coercion and violence to produce it.” Emil Bruner, Faith, Hope
and Love, 54
And
the Christian who bases his hope in those things becomes very
critical of God.
Because our
objectives are different than God’s, we charge God with unfairness and we
despise his means of accomplishing his objectives in our lives.
So
when the Psalmist says, “Put your hope in God,” what does he mean?
The source of Christian hope is God.
Romans 15:13 “May the God of
hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you
may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
“For
the Christian, hope never resorts to ‘Keep hoping, things may get better.’
Christian hope says, rather, ‘Things may get worse: anything may happen; but
God…’ Such hope is essentially a stable
one, because it is grounded in nothing so fluctuating and uncertain as
circumstances, still less in moods, which change, but (it is grounded) in the
undeviating reliability of God’s character.” (Moule,
The Meaning of Hope,18)
The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in ourselves.
But “When we gaze upon God, then first the chance of
(comfort) dawns. He is not affected by our mutability: our changes do not alter
him. When we are restless, he remains serene and calm; when we are low,
selfish, or dispirited, he is still the unalterable “I AM., the same yesterday,
today and forever, in whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning. What God is in himself, not what we may
chance to feel him in this way or that moment to be, that is our hope. My soul,
hope in God.” (Perowne,
Psalms, 352)
“Hope
is a gift of God through Christ that produces a confident, unshakable trust in
his faithfulness, and a vibrant expectation of his timely interventions in
keeping with his gracious promises to us.”
(Lloyd John Ogilvie, A Future and a Hope, 50)
We can
have such confidence in our God that we are able to live, day by day, with the
continuing expectation that it is nothing but good he has in mind for us.
The great temptation is to simply endure our present circumstances and
“hope” they will pass instead of seeing in them the beginning of what God is
doing.
God is a God of hope, who is out in front of us in
life, who goes before us.
God comes from
the future and, from his perspective, reaches back into our lives to open new
possibilities for us, to call us forward to his future.
Jesus said the
Kingdom of God had come - the Kingdom of God has reached back, to us today.
We live in the
presence of the risen Christ who is making all things new.
Birth may be
traumatic, but it is good.
It is tempting for us, as Christians, to
think only of past and future and forget the present.
We say Christ died for our sins in the past and is
coming again in the future but what is Christ doing now?
Jesus is even
now bringing his Kingdom to pass.
What is your future?
We all live anticipating something better
in the future.
When we stop hoping, we stop living.
Our present actions find their energy in
our anticipation of the future.
And
the future is not only about aging and death but about learning and growing in
relationship with Jesus.
The future is about what God will do
today, what new beginning starts today.
And we can live with that hope because we
know God – our hope is in him and his work.
But what is our temptation?
Jurgan
Multmann wrote, that Christians, “no longer have confidence in the humanity
which God (is recreating). It is a
fearfulness fed by lack of faith, which leads to capitulation before the power
of evil. God exalted human beings and opened to them a vista into what is wide
and free, but human beings hang back and say no. God promises the new creation
of all things but human beings behave as if everything remains as it was.” (Jurgan
Multmann, In the End, the Beginning,
93)
Hopelessness leads to resignation, boredom
with life, emptiness, amusing us to death (Neil Postman), and waiting to
die.
We say we believe in God and heaven but
we live as if “there is no tomorrow that shines with God’s promises.” (Ben Patterson, Waiting, 13)
Hope is not seen only when the end comes but also in the beginning of
things in every minute.
Fundamentalist
Christianity “calls the world evil and leaves it. Humanity is waiting for a
revolutionary Christianity which will call the world evil and change it.” Walter Rauschenbusch in
Jurgan Multmann, In the End, the Beginning,
91
We don’t just look forward to the Second
Coming; we look forward to the future made possible today by the grace of God.
Today is the first day of the rest of eternity!
Hope is found not only in birth (God’s creation of us) but in rebirth
(God’s recreation of us) and in sanctification (God’s shaping us) and in
resurrection (God’s remaking even of our bodies).
God
is doing a work in us, creating, at every age.
The future doesn’t just belong to the
young – but to all.
In fact if age is
defined in relationship to time, we are all young – because eternity is yet
ahead.
So what is hope?
Hope is a
vibrant expectation that God will do his gracious work in our lives by whatever
means he chooses.
And so
how does that hope become ours?
As
the Psalmist demonstrates, it is not something we conjure up by talking
ourselves into an optimistic frame of mind.
The source
of that hope is obviously God himself.
Christian
hope is a gift from God.
And it becomes ours as we ask him and believe him.
Isn’t
that what the Psalmist experienced?
He finally
realized that his discouragement, his despair, would not go away by simply
talking to himself, by rehearsing the facts of the good and evil in his
life.
He desperately
needed for God to intervene and he asked God to do so and he waited with his
hope in God.
And he
used the means of grace that God has provided – namely God’s word.
Psalm 43:3 “Send forth your light and your truth,
let them guide me;
Many times in the Bible, God and his Word are
thought of as synonymous.
Psalm
119:14 “I have put my hope in your word.
It is the sure promise of our faithful God that is our hope.
Do we
meditate on his word so that we are more and more certain of his promises to us
and his sovereign love to make it happen?
How can we
know he is great and good unless we learn of him in his word?
Harry Fosdick
said, “In the crises of life…our words show where our souls have been feeding.”
Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Beam,
December 1965, 16
Will we feed our souls on his word so that we may know him in all his grace and power?
Will we stop just talking to ourselves rehearsing the difficulties of life and instead turn to God in prayer – asking and trusting him to be about his good work in our lives?
Romans 15:13 “May the God of hope fill you with all joy
and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power
of the Holy Spirit.
Psalm 43:5 “Why
are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
Other notes
on the next pages.
Other notes:
“At the heart of religion lies this
significant paradox, that it is only by coming to care more about God than
about either our own character or our own destiny that either our character can
be transformed or our destiny in any wise known in advance. The transference of
attention from self to God is the secret…of hope.” (John Baillie in Moule The
Meaning of Hope, 16)
“Nothing
is real hope except God himself, or his name or his word; and the NT transposes
that into the New Covenant when it speaks of Christ himself as our hope.” (Moule, The Meaning of Hope, 10)
“It is
characteristic of the Bible to use ‘hope’ for something greater even than
confident expectation – for something more closely related to the character of
God.” (Moule,The Meaning of Hope, 2)
Hope
is faith on its tiptoes. (Paraphrase of M.A.C. Warren in
Moule, The Meaning of Hope, 11)
“Prayer is a door to hope.” paraphrased from Herbert Lockyer
A promise is “a device to conquer time.” Guy Mansini in Promising
the Good, reviewed by John Wilson in CT August 2006
A promise may conquer time but hope transforms time.
The loss of hope has serious consequences:
In marriage – we quit trying and settle
into merely coping.
In work – this is a “dead end job” and it
sucks the life out of us.
In life – seeing no future except slow
death.
Faith – Trust that is based on the past fact of the full and final
revelation of God in Christ. (Emil Bruner, Faith, Hope and Love, 45)
Hope – Confidence in the coming reality of the not yet seen and not yet
experienced.
“Faith is the foundation of hope.” Ralph L. Murray, The Biblical Shape of Hope,
9)
“Faith is the root; hope is the fruit.” (Leslie Flynn, The Sustaining Power of
Hope, 38)
Faith is directed toward the Promiser; hope looks toward the things
promised.” (Leslie
Flynn, The Sustaining Power of Hope, 38)
“I bet my life on Beauty, Truth
And Love, not abstract but incarnate Truth,
Not Beauty’s passing shadow, but its Self.
Its very self-made flesh, Love realized.
I bet my life on Christ – Christ crucified.
“…Through the clouds of Calvary – there shines
His face, and I believe that Evil dies,
And God lives on, loves on, and conquers all.
“…Such is my faith, and such
My reasons for it, and I find them strong
Enough. And you? You want to argue? Well
I can’t. It is a choice. I choose Christ.” G.A.
Studdert Kennedy, The Unutterable Beauty, 16-17 in Ralph L. Murray, The
Biblical Shape of Hope, 12)
“There
are two forms of hopelessness. One is arrogance or presumption. The other is
despair, the obliteration of hope. In presumption we take fulfillment of hope
into our own hands, and no longer hope for God. In despair we doubt that there
can ever be fulfillment, and destroy hope in ourselves.”
(Jurgan Multmann, In the End, the Beginning,
93)
“Hope suffers the contradiction
of circumstances.” (Ralph L. Murray, The Biblical Shape of Hope, 12)
“The temptation among us is to
split hope and history. As a result we hold to a religious hope detached from
the realities of the historical process, or we participate in a history, which
ends in despair because the process itself delivers no lasting victories for
the participants… Obviously such a split, which yields both a historyless hope
and hopeless history, is a betrayal of biblical faith. It is precisely the
wonder and burden of the biblical texts that hope is relentlessly historical
and history is cunningly hope-filled.” (Walter Brueggemann, Hope Within History, 3)
Hope and fear both anticipate the
future but differently.
“Apart from Christ expectation of
the future is a mixture of all three (hope/optimism, fear and anxiety). We
cannot cease to hope but we are not sure of our hope; therefore we are in
anxiety. We fear certain things; so there is fear along with hope and anxiety.
And the certain expectation of death kills all hope. Emil Bruner, Faith, Hope and Love, 54
“A hopeless soul
is clamorous: one while it chargeth God, another while it reviles his
instruments.” William Garnall in Spurgeon TTOD 282
“All sorrow of
heart springs principally from our unbelief, not from the greatness of other
evils.” Matthew Lawrence in The Use and Practice of
Faith 1657 in Spurgeon TTOD 283
“If you would get
assurance, spend more time in strengthening your evidences of heaven than in
questioning them.” Christopher Love in Spurgeon TTOD 234
“Distinguish between the feelings of faith that God is
present and the hope of faith that he will be so…There are hours in which
physical derangement darkens the windows of the soul; days in which shattered
nerves make life simply endurance: months and years in which intellectual
difficulties, pressing for solution, shut out God. Then faith must be replaced
by hope.” Robertson quoted in Perowne, Psalms, 351)
“Faith reasons
with his fears, hope argues with his sorrows” Spurgeon TTOD, 272)
“Hope knows her
title good when she cannot read it clear; she expects the promised boon though
present providence stands before her with empty hands.” Spurgeon,
TTOD, 273)