Panting for the Living God

To the choirmaster. A Maskil of the Sons of Korah — and it opens not with a doctrine but with a thirst. “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (Psalm 42:1–2). The picture is a drought-stricken animal, sides heaving over a streambed that used to run — and the psalmist says that animal is his own soul, and the water it was made to drink is God himself. He is thirsty not for religion or relief, and not even for answers, but for a Person — the living God.

And he is not getting a drink. “My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, ‘Where is your God?’” (Psalm 42:3). The taunt lands because he is half-asking it himself. He remembers how it used to be — “how I would go with the throng… to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise” (Psalm 42:4) — and the memory of old nearness only sharpens the present distance. Any of us who has felt God go quiet in a hard season knows the ache — not doubt that he exists, but the dry-streambed sense that he is somewhere we are not.

Then the psalm does the bravest thing in it. It turns and talks back to itself: “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” (Psalm 42:5). He does not wait to feel better before he speaks; he preaches to his heart while it is still down. This is not denial — three verses on he admits, “deep calls to deep… all your breakers and your waves have gone over me” (Psalm 42:7). It is something harder and better: faith that refuses to take dictation from its feelings. And even in the dark he finds one thread still holding — “by day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me” (Psalm 42:8).

But how is a thirst like this answered? Only by the living God coming to the dry streambed himself. Jesus stood up in the temple and cried, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). Yet he did not answer our thirst from a safe distance; he went down into this very psalm. In the garden he prayed its refrain back to his Father — “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38) — and on the cross, where the breakers and waves of judgment went over him, he gasped the deer’s whole cry in two words: “I thirst” (John 19:28). He was cast down and forsaken, drained dry in our place, so that our thirst would not be the end of us.

That is why the soul can be told to hope. “I shall again praise him” is not wishful thinking; it is underwritten by an empty tomb and by the day the thirsty will drink “from the spring of the water of life without payment” (Revelation 21:6), when God himself “will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4). The tears that were his food will be dried by the hand that made them. So when our soul goes quiet and cast down, let us do what this psalm teaches — neither lie to it nor obey it, but speak to it, and point it home: hope in God.