“Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and [why] art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him [for] the help of his countenance…[Yet] the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song [shall be] with me, [and] my prayer unto the God of my life.” (Ps 42:5, 8 AV)
I know I have written on these two verses before. I have treated them separately. Verse five is David’s instruction to himself. Verses six and seven are those things David has to get off his chest before he can have hope. Then, verse eight is the result. Verse five is the beginning of David’s emotional healing. He must chasten his heart for the lack of hope he feels. Regardless of what is causing it, there is no foundation for losing hope. Losing hope is an indictment against an almighty God — that He is not sufficient. Hopelessness could almost be thought of as a sin. There is no reason for it. God is still God regardless of how we feel. So, dealing with our feelings in the context of what they mean to the person of God is the best way to handle them. Then we have verse eight, which is David’s claim of faith. Notice that verse eight is future tense. He claims by faith that God will show him lovingkindness during his waking hours and will stir his heart to joyful praise as he falls off to sleep. Believing that he will see them means that he will see them.
Reading this again and meditating upon it, the Spirit seems to indicate that verse eight was more permanent than perhaps we think. When we are challenged with hardships of life, we tend to emotionally experience them is dramatic fashion. Our lives tend to be a rollercoaster ride of extreme ups and downs. Rather, it appears to this reader that David is purposing in his heart to believe that God will always be loving and He will always provide that which is praiseworthy. It appears to the writer that the Spirit is saying a life of lovingkindness and joyful praise can be the normal day-to-day experience of the saint regardless of circumstances. This is a bit hard to understand.
We are brainwashed into thinking that life is a series of emotional experiences that take us as high as we can go only to fall as deep as one can go. We live in this reality of extreme happiness or pain. The world tells us this is normal. We need more than God provides just to survive. We need assistance from the world that only the world can provide because God just doesn’t cut it. After all, the Bible is mere words on a page. How can that help? I am being facetious, of course. The world wants us to abandon the LORD as our chief help. It is ok if we are religious. But let us not go too far into thinking that God alone is all-sufficient. David has another idea. He does not give his heart permission to stay in the state of hopelessness he currently feels. He yells at himself. He refuses to allow his heart to forget who and what God is. He does not relent to his emotional responses. HE chastens the heart. He challenges his heart to live in truth. Not in perception. Then, by grounded theology, he claims what he knows to be true. God will be loving to him every waking moment of his day. As a result, upon reflection of that day, David will be able to joyfully praise God for how good He has been! If only we could learn to be like David.
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