Such an experience is related in Psalm 42 - “I used to go to the house of God...with shouts of joy and praise among the festive throng.” Familiar faces and places; a role to play - perhaps a significant one - within the communal gatherings. All are now gone, lost. The psalmist’s removal to a far place (the heights of Hermon and Mount Mizar) is not simply geographical but is powerfully symbolic of where things are now at, psychologically and emotionally: his soul is downcast and disturbed within him; he is like a deer panting for streams of water, desperate to have its thirst slaked.
He is not where he used to be, nor where he wants to be. And it is affecting his experience of God in significant ways. It feels like God is unmindful of him, or even opposed to him: “all your waves and breakers have swept over me...Why have you forgotten me?” Our circumstances and our physical and mental anguish can take us, unerringly, to such barren places, to such intense struggles. We scarcely need other voices to ask “Where is your God?”
Yet the portrayal of that relationship with God is complex (thankfully, given that our own is likely to be so, too). It may even appear confused and contradictory, but that is the authentication our hearts recognise.
In the extremity of such distress, when God feels absent, there is nevertheless intense contact: “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls.” And there is the awareness, profoundly thankful, that “By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me.” Which culminates in the repeated refrain that affirms with genuine confidence “I will yet praise him”.
What drives the hope the psalmist applies to his own downcast soul? That he is speaking of and to the one who is “my Saviour and my God”. The God who saves, not indiscriminately but with individual care and attention - my Saviour; my God - a reality that is deeper than the depths of self-despair. The God who saves by way of the cross, where deep called to deep in the roar of death’s waters, where all the waves of anguish broke over the Son of God.
In all the changes, in all the losses, this God is true and trustworthy. He is supremely touched by the feeling of our infirmities. He is the only one qualified and able to rescue from death, destruction and despair. "My soul...put your hope in God."
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Through all the changing scenes of life,
In trouble and in joy,
The praises of my God shall still
My heart and tongue employ.
Of his deliverance I will boast;
Till all that are distressed
From my example comfort take,
And charm their griefs to rest.
O magnify the Lord with me,
With me exalt his Name;
When in distress to Him I called,
He to my rescue came.
The hosts of God encamp around
The dwellings of the just;
Deliverance He affords to all
Who on His succour trust.
O make but trial of His love,
Experience will decide
How blessed are they, and only they,
Who in His truth confide.
Fear Him, ye saints, and you will then
Have nothing else to fear;
Make you His service your delight,
Your wants shall be His care.
(Nahum Tate, 1652-1715; Nicholas Brady, 1659-1726)
