Psalm 42 and 43

[0:00] If you have a Bible with you, then open up to the book of Psalms in the Old Testament, but more or less in the middle of your Bible, open up to Psalm 42.

[0:11] Now this morning we're going to be reading actually two Psalms, Psalms 42 and Psalm 43. We're going to put them together. And so before we even start, I want to talk to you a little bit about why we're putting them together, and then say something about the title or the superscription that we have before verse 1 in this particular Psalm, and then we can read and we can dive right in.

[0:35] But before we even do that, you might be wondering, why are we covering two Psalms this morning? And there are a few reasons for that. Originally, in the earliest manuscripts, some of the earliest manuscripts that we have for this portion of the Psalms, Psalms 42 and 43 were together as one Psalm. They weren't split up into two Psalms.

[0:56] And so we know that early on, these Psalms were often read together. And then aside from that, when you actually read these two Psalms, you can see that there are clues that they probably do belong together.

[1:11] One clue that you have is that we do have sort of a title or a superscription at the top of Psalm 42. It says, And then we don't have anything before Psalm 43.

[1:29] And yet, from Psalm 42 to 49, all of these first Psalms here in this second book of the Psalms, in all of these, you have the same basic superscription. You have these Psalms attributed to the sons of Korah in all of these, except for 43.

[1:45] And so it makes you wonder, why? Why is it missing from here? And one good answer to that is that because, originally, it didn't need a title, because it was the end of Psalm 42.

[1:58] And there's another good reason for keeping them together. And that is, when you read through these two Psalms, you recognize that you have the same refrain repeated in both Psalms.

[2:09] You might think of it in modern songs like you have a chorus. You sing a verse, and then you sing the chorus. You sing another verse, you come back to the chorus, right? It would be strange to have two songs in a row that have the same chorus and are disconnected.

[2:24] Well, that's exactly what we have here. When you look at the Psalms in 42 verse 5 and 42 verse 11, you have the same chorus, the same refrain.

[2:35] And then we see it again at the very end of Psalm 43. So the way that this is laid out is, verses 1 through 4 of Psalm 42 might be like the first verse of a song.

[2:47] And then you get the chorus in verse 5. And then verses 6 down through verse 10, second verse, and then you see the same chorus again. And then you look at the first four verses of Psalm 43, and you get another verse, the third verse of the song, and then finally again, the same chorus repeated again.

[3:07] So just by looking at it, if you just read it and pay attention, it becomes pretty clear that this is probably originally just one song or one psalm, and so we're going to keep them together this morning.

[3:20] We're going to consider them together. Now the other thing that I do want to mention to you is that we have so far, we've seen in the Psalms, as we've walked through them, and it's been spread out over several years, so I don't expect anyone to have picked up on this.

[3:34] But all the other titles that we've seen at the beginnings of some of these psalms have, if they have them, and some of them don't, but all those that do attribute the psalms to David.

[3:45] A psalm of David. Something along those lines. And yet here we have the sons of Korah. No longer David. In fact, from here through Psalm 49, they're all attributed to the sons of Korah.

[4:00] And you might be scratching your head wondering who these people are. Who are the sons of Korah? Why do they matter? Why are they important enough to be mentioned right here several times in the book of Psalms?

[4:10] And then there are a handful more scattered throughout the rest of the book of Psalms that are attributed to these people. The name Korah might be familiar with you if you know your Old Testament really well, or it may not be all that familiar to you.

[4:24] Korah was the fellow who led kind of a revolt against Moses and against Aaron. That he wanted to be able, he was a part of the priesthood, but he didn't want to have to follow all the rules and regulations that had been laid out by Moses, by God, through Moses in the law.

[4:41] He wanted to be able to offer sacrifices in the way that he thought was best. And so he did exactly that with a couple of his buddies. And that's when God judged them by opening up the ground and swallowing them up.

[4:54] And now we have his descendants, which is good news for us. Because it tells us right at the beginning that all is not lost for Korah and his descendants because of his own failure.

[5:10] That there is yet hope that remains for his great, great, great, great, great grandchildren. And in fact, by the time of David, these sons of Korah were leaders in temple worship.

[5:23] That was their main function. Their main job is that they led the people as they went up to the temple, as they climbed the temple mount, and as they participated in various sacrifices and things that were happening at the temple, they would lead them in singing, lead them in music.

[5:38] So these descendants of one who rebelled against God in the terms of the forms of worship are now leading God's people in worship. That's really good news for us.

[5:50] That God redeems the family line of Korah. And now we get to read some of the psalms that they led Israel to sing. So let's do that.

[6:00] Let's dive into these psalms. We're just going to read straight through both of them. So if you want to stand to your feet in honor of God's word, we're going to read these together. To the choir master, a mosqueal of the sons of Korah, as the deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.

[6:22] My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before my God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, where is your God?

[6:36] These things I remember as I pour out my soul. How I would go with a throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.

[6:51] 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.

[7:08] My soul is cast down within me. Therefore, I remember you from the land of Jordan and Hermon, from Mount Mizar, deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls.

[7:19] All your breakers and your waves have gone over me. By day the Lord commands His steadfast love, and at night His song is with me. A prayer to the God of my life.

[7:32] I say to God, my rock, why have you forgotten me? Why do I go on mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me while they say to me all the day long, where is your God?

[7:49] 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.

[8:01] Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people. From the deceitful and unjust man, deliver me, for you are the God in whom I take refuge.

[8:11] Why have you rejected me? Why do I go about mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? Send out your light and your truth. Let them lead me. Let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.

[8:25] Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, and I will praise you with the lyre, O God, my God. Why are you cast down, O my soul?

[8:38] And why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God.

[8:50] Father, we thank you that you inspired the psalmist from among these sons of Korah to write down these words, and that you have preserved them right where they are so that we might be taught, corrected, and encouraged this morning.

[9:10] So help us to understand and apply what we see here. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen. You guys take a seat. If I were to mention three, what I would call, giants of the faith, some you may have heard of and some you may have not, but if I were to mention three, Martin Luther, David Brainerd, and Charles Spurgeon.

[9:38] Now maybe you've heard of them, maybe you've heard of one or two of them, maybe you've not heard of any of them, but if I were to mention them and ask you what do they have in common, of course apart from the fact that they are faithful followers of Jesus, apart from the fact that they believe many of the same things, they believe the same gospel, they preached the same gospel, they were all servants of the Lord.

[10:00] Apart from that, what did these men have in common that many other fellow preachers of the word, proclaimers of the gospel in church history, might not share with them?

[10:12] And the answer is, is that each one of them really fought and wrestled with what we might today refer to as depression. That's probably the word we would use today.

[10:23] It's not the words that they used back then, even though we're looking at men from different centuries. In none of those centuries did they typically use that terminology. Martin Luther spoke of the dark night of the soul, how he would describe that he would wake up in the middle of the night and he would be just overcome with sorrow and fear.

[10:43] We would probably consider that some sort of panic attack or anxiety attack. But he would have these dark nights of the soul and they would sometimes last throughout the night, last for hours, and he really wrestled with them and he struggled and he cried through them and he felt deep sorrow and anguish in these dark nights.

[11:03] Charles Spurgeon speaks of how because of his physical infirmities, because of the sicknesses that he dealt with throughout much of his life, that he was forced to take long breaks from the ministry and go away and recover.

[11:18] And those would happen because the pain and the difficulties of ministry and the criticisms that were coming against him from those who opposed him would become overwhelming at times and he would find himself weeping, struggling with sorrow, with anguish really.

[11:36] And then there's David Brainerd, who you may, if any of these you've not heard of, he would probably be the most likely. We know him because someone more famous than him preserved his diary. Jonathan Edwards edited and published David Brainerd's diary, because David Brainerd passed away in his late 20s.

[11:53] He was a missionary. And he was a missionary in the 1700s and he made it his goal to preach the gospel among Native Americans who had never heard the gospel before.

[12:05] And he went and he lived with them. And he spent a great deal of time alone, which contributed to some of his sorrows and some of his difficulties. But he writes over and over in his journal, you will find short little entries like, overcome by the darkness today.

[12:21] Or you'll find something like, struggled for three days with melancholy and sadness. The Lord delivered me from it this morning. You see these kinds of entries over and over in his diary because he genuinely, really struggled with bouts, being overwhelmed with a sense of just sorrow and pain, not because necessarily something had happened to him.

[12:47] No one had driven him out into the wilderness save for the Lord himself. He was there because he believed it was his calling. But even before going there, he struggled with these things.

[12:59] These men were godly men. These men were men who did great things for the sake of the kingdom, who spent their lives to spread the gospel to others.

[13:11] And yet, they struggled themselves. And we see the same kind of struggle for us in Psalms 42 and 43.

[13:22] We see a man really wrestling with inward turmoil. And as I mentioned earlier, that you can break these Psalms down really into three parts.

[13:35] Sort of a verse and a chorus, a verse and a chorus, and a verse and a chorus. And if we view the Psalm in that way, then we can summarize each section of this Psalm or each verse, if you will, of the Psalm itself.

[13:48] We can summarize them by saying that the first, the Psalmist primarily expresses his deep longing. He has a real longing for something that he once experienced regularly, and now he feels deeply the absence of it.

[14:06] There's longing. longing. And in the second verse, there's lament, or the cry of sorrow. Because of the thing that he misses, because of the longing that he describes earlier, he now describes this sorrow that comes upon him and is increased and made worse by his enemies who oppose him and mock him and make fun of him in the midst of his struggles.

[14:31] And then lastly, the last verse, if you will, turns a little bit of a corner. There's still lamenting, there's still longing, but there is a looking forward to future hope, to something beyond the pain and the difficulties of the moment in which he finds himself.

[14:58] And so what I want to do over the next few minutes is quickly look at the longing that he expresses and then the lament, the cry of sorrow, and then the looking ahead.

[15:11] And then I want to come back to this chorus and I want to look at the chorus as it occurs each time and I want to talk about how significant that chorus might be in our lives.

[15:22] But as we do that, as we take each step, we're going to connect each section to the life of Jesus himself. Because Jesus draws our attention to Psalms 42 and 43.

[15:37] Jesus himself, in his words, as Matthew and Mark, both of them record these words, as they record these words, they point us back at a key moment in the life of Jesus, they point us back to this particular Psalm to help us understand what Jesus was experiencing.

[15:59] It was when he was in the Garden of Gethsemane. So, the night upon which his betrayal would happen, when his close friend would hand him over to the Romans who would take him to deliver him to the chief priests and scribes so that he could be flogged and beaten and tried and eventually crucified.

[16:20] It's the night before all of those events unfold. And Jesus, as he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, he says, my soul is deeply troubled.

[16:38] Now, there aren't very many places where you find the phrase, my soul, in that particular word that's translated troubled, you don't find those together very often.

[16:50] Guess where we find them? All three times in the chorus of Psalms 42 and 43. Each time that we read that refrain, why are you cast down, oh my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me, we're seeing those same words slightly rearranged.

[17:10] Jesus is not quoting there, but he's alluding back to this Psalm as if Jesus is now living to the full what the psalmist only experienced in part.

[17:23] And I assure you, whatever sorrows you and I endure, whatever pains we experience it, we experience it in comparison to Christ, we experience it in part, he experienced it to the full.

[17:36] Because Isaiah tells us that the future coming Redeemer from Isaiah's perspective in the Old Testament, that he would be a man of sorrows, deeply acquainted with grief.

[17:52] I know that most of our contemporary portraits of Jesus, the Jesus movies that you might catch or the TV shows that you see, usually present Jesus as almost kind of a happy-go-lucky, always joking, always smiling, and I do think that he had real joy that probably emanated out of him.

[18:12] I do think he probably laughed at times with his disciples. I'm not discounting all of those things, but what we don't see often in some of those portrayals is the reality that throughout his life, Jesus himself was a man of sorrows.

[18:29] He was deeply acquainted with grief. However closely acquainted with grief and depression you may feel yourself to be, I assure you the son of man has endured more.

[18:43] I promise you. Which is why the writer of Hebrews tells us he's able to sympathize with us in our weaknesses.

[18:57] Just the coming of Jesus into the world was a great experience of losing and lacking as we'll see in a moment. In all of his life, the only sinless man to walk the face of the earth, surrounded by the grief and pain of sin around him.

[19:19] He knows there are reasons why Jesus ventured into the wilderness over and over again, sometimes for days, just to pray.

[19:31] We're getting a glimpse of the kind of prayers he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus knows and understands to the full what the psalmist experiences here.

[19:42] And the psalmist, I think, is writing in anticipation of what the Redeemer would someday fully experience. So let's dive in. Let's look at the longing first.

[19:53] And it's clear in the first two verses, the song that we sang, that's drawn from these two verses, make the longing that he experiences clear. It says, as a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.

[20:10] That these flowing streams, this word is usually used to describe the sorts of streams that would form in valleys as the rains would come and the rains would gather down in the valleys or when the snow would melt at the top of the mountain.

[20:25] So these are those seasonal, part-time streams. They would even be rivers at times, certain times of the year, flowing, but they weren't always there. So as a deer wandering in the wilderness longs to come upon one of those streams, the psalmist says, that's how deeply I thirst and long for my God.

[20:49] Now why would he be thirsting for God himself? Is God not available to the psalmist? Well, the problem that he's expressing is that he has been for some reason separated from the experience of worship that he has enjoyed with the people of God throughout most of his life.

[21:09] The sons of Korah, remember, are those who lead Israel in worship as they draw near to the temple. Listen to what he says. He says, these things I remember as I pour out my soul, verse 4, how I would go about with the throng, with the mass of the people, and lead them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.

[21:38] In the next verse, he's going to mention that he is in the land of the Jordan of Hermon and from Mount Mizar. He's way up in the north. He's like in the Galilee regions where Jesus did a lot of his ministry.

[21:50] That's a pretty good stretch from Jerusalem. I mean, it's not far for a Texan, but for an Israelite who has to walk everywhere, it's a pretty good distance. And he's just out there, away from the temple, away from the people that he gladly led before the throne of God, leading them in worship, and now he's driven away from that.

[22:14] We don't know why, but he's driven away from that. He's far away from the experience of God's presence that has been his great joy and comfort all along. Maybe you've experienced that.

[22:25] maybe you've been at a place where you long for what you once had and experience with God that you had. Sometimes we look back to events, to camps and conferences.

[22:40] Sometimes we just look to a stretch and a period of our life. Sometimes we look at a congregation that we were once a part of, but we all, some of us, we all look at sometimes to past experiences to say, I want that experience of the presence of God again.

[22:55] I long to have that again. And that's sort of, in some way, what he's talking about. That he's longing to experience God's presence with God's people in ways that he's unable to experience while he's driven away from Jerusalem and from the temple.

[23:18] Jesus experienced that to a far, far greater degree. God the Son existed for all of eternity in a perfect love relationship with God the Father.

[23:36] And yet, when he clothed himself in flesh, when he allowed himself to become a human being in the womb of the Virgin Mary, to be born into a fallen, broken, sinful world, the experience that he'd had, not for a brief period of his life, not for a week at a conference or a camp, but for all eternity past, that experience of infinite joy in the presence of his Father is replaced with a body that aches sometimes, a stomach that growls when it grows hungry, legs that have to learn to walk as a toddler, vocal cords, the word who spoke all things into existence now has to learn to use vocal cords to talk in baby talk?

[24:30] Come on! This is deep loss for him. This is how Paul describes it. You can look in Philippians chapter 2. Paul says, though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

[24:59] And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient all the way to the point of death, even death on a cross. So when Jesus speaks of longing, he longs for what he missed.

[25:18] When the psalmist talks about his own longing, as great as it is, it pales in comparison to what Jesus experienced. Do not think that Jesus cannot relate to the sorrow that you feel when you miss the experiences of God's presence that you've had in the past and long for them to come back.

[25:40] He gets it, he understands, he knows what it's like, in fact he knows it better than you and I will ever know it. He knows the longing.

[25:52] And in the longing he knows how to lament, how to look back at the thing that he had and express that genuine sorrow over it.

[26:03] Here's how the psalmist says it, beginning in verse 6, he says, my soul is cast down within me. And so I remember you, again from this great distance, from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mazar, he says, deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls, all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.

[26:28] No longer the joyful presence of God in the temple courts with all the people singing praise, but now as he sits perhaps along the shore of the Sea of Galilee and he watches the tumultuous waves, what he feels like is a man drowning.

[26:47] Your waves, God, because you're sovereign and you've brought me to this place. Your waves are breaking over me and pushing me under the water. He feels it.

[26:59] He even sees the hand of God in it. There's hope in the midst of it. Verse 8, by day the Lord commands his steadfast love and at night his song is with me a prayer to the God of my life.

[27:14] There's hope in it, but nevertheless he still cries out, verse 9, I say to God my rock, why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

[27:27] As with a deadly wound in my bones my adversaries taunt me. Well they say to me all day long where is your God? Whoever, whatever means God has used, whatever sinful people God has used to drive him out.

[27:45] He says, now they taunt me while I mourn. Have you ever had that happen to you? Have you ever had people that you tried to share the gospel with, that you tried to point them toward Christ and then when your life started to fall apart and things were not going well for you, did they ever snarl and say, where's your God now?

[28:11] It's not so great now, is it? Have you ever experienced that? You ever had a family member that you tried to share the gospel with, when they were going through tough times and they see you going through tough times and they shrug it off like, guess what you said didn't really matter?

[28:28] I guess life is just a series of letdowns, even for you. that's what the psalmist is experiencing, that's what he's, that's what he's feeling in the moment.

[28:42] And do not think that Jesus did not understand that kind of real pain. In fact, as we saw last week when we were looking at Psalm 41, that that pain came at the hands of those whom he'd once called friends.

[29:01] After he prays that prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, a man will come and kiss him on the cheek and identify him as the one to be killed.

[29:12] It's Judas, his own disciple. And then he will be mocked by the chief priests and by the elders. If you're a prophet, tell us while you're blindfolded, who's going to hit you in the face next?

[29:28] He gets it, he understands that, he's experienced it, he knows what it is to have enemies, even his former compatriots turn on him, he knows what it is to have them come against him, even in the midst of his sorrow.

[29:43] His sorrow came before his enemies arrived. He knew where he was headed, he knew that he had to bear the weight of the sins of all of his people throughout all of time, he knew that was coming, that was the weight in Gethsemane, he's not worried about the soldiers, he's not concerned about Pilate, he's not concerned about all the physical effects of the crucifixion upon him in the garden.

[30:08] What he asks is not, let my friends treat me well, vindicate me in front of the Jewish religious leaders, what he asks is, let this cup pass from me, the cup of God's wrath, that he's going to drink on behalf of his people, that's what he asks to pass, that's the source of his suffering, that Luke describes as sweating like drops of blood, he knows he's going to endure the wrath of God, that's the source, compounding that, adding to that, are the attacks of his enemies, so if they kick you when you're down, he understands, if other parts of your life start to fall apart, while you're also struggling with sorrow and grief and loss, he understands what that's like, he knows, and just like the psalmist though, he also knows that there is great hope beyond even his greatest suffering, here's what the psalmist says, and now we get to Psalm 43, first a plea, vindicate me oh God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people, from the deceitful and unjust man, deliver me, that's the prayer, just a call, just a cry, help me, get me out of this mess, and then he says, for you are the

[31:48] God in whom I take refuge, mourning comes back, longing, sadness, and lament, why have you rejected me, why do I go about mourning because of the oppression of the enemy, it's not like a, it's not an easier linear line from longing to lament, to looking ahead, because it doesn't work that way in life, you start to pray, you start to feel hope, and then you drop into the trough of mourning and lament again, that's normal, that's what's happening here, but then the future hope arrives, verse 3, send out your light and your truth, let them lead me, let them bring me to your holy hill, and to your dwelling, he's praying, God lead me back to the place where I was, the holy hill is the temple mount, take me back, bring me back to the place where I had that experience that I now long for, he says, then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, and I will praise you with the lyre, oh God, my God, now he's not there when he says this, he's not back at the temple, he hasn't returned, and yet, the thought of it, the prayer that

[33:11] God would bring him back to that place, and the hope that he has that he will get there, in the present, reminds him that it's God himself that is his exceeding joy, that is the source of his happiness, and his delight, it's God himself, it's not just the experience that he had, and that he hopes to have in the future, it's not recapturing an early period of your life, you weren't filled with joy in those moments, because of the things or the people around you directly, those were just the means that God provided to give you joy, and the same joy providing God is with you in the valleys, he's right there, and he can give you that joy again, indeed, he promises us that all of us someday will experience that joy in ways that we've never experienced, that we can never imagine in this world, in this life, Jesus knows that too,

[34:13] Jesus can relate to enduring present difficulties, because of the promise of future joy in the presence of God, you may remember this verse, it's from the book of Hebrews, you may remember this, the writer of Hebrews, getting towards the end of the book of Hebrews, in chapter 12, talks about Jesus, he says at the end of verse 1 that we're to run with endurance the race that's set before us, and then here's how we do it, that we are to look to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who, here it is, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God, how did Jesus endure drinking the cup of

[35:14] God's wrath, how did he do it, and then added on top of all that, while he's dealing with that, to be beaten and mocked publicly, how does he do that, how does he handle all that, and some of you might be tempted to say, well because he's God, true he is God, but he's man, he's fully human, when Jesus is tired, he doesn't draw on divine power, so that he doesn't have to sleep anymore, he's not some comic book superhero, who gets to transcend normal humanity, to get out of a mess, he walks through it like every other human being, there are no stories in the Bible, of Jesus healing himself, or miraculously providing food for himself, only stories of Jesus providing for others, while hungering himself, of Jesus healing masses of crowds, and then having to recover out in the wilderness, to sleep and rest and pray, so don't run to, don't escape and say that

[36:33] Jesus could do it and I can't, because Jesus was God, he's, he's human, he hurts, he weeps, he weeps, his bones and his, his joints creak at times, he's, he experiences the full gamut of what it means to be a human being, and he didn't, he didn't endure what he endured because of his divine nature, he endured because he looked ahead to future joy, and the writer of Hebrews says look to Jesus and do what Jesus did, that's the point, look to Jesus, look to his example, do what Jesus did, and it's not, it's not just a promise that the things you're struggling with now are going to get better, that's not the thing here, it's bigger than that, it's not the promise that you're going through a difficult time in your marriage but have hope because your marriage is eventually going to be the perfect marriage that you want it to be, that's not the kind of promise we're dealing with here, it's you're facing troubled times, endure through it in this life because beyond this life there is infinite joy, and it's yours if you are in

[37:55] Christ, it is as secure as anything can be, it is yours, endure the now for the promise of future joy, and Jesus shows us the way, the only question left to answer this morning is how do we do this, how do we in the midst of our longing for what we've lost, in the midst of real sorrow, lament, real deep pain, how do we learn to focus on that future hope, future joy, how do we do it?

[38:38] Because it's not automatic, and not everybody achieves it, not everybody gets there, so how can we do it? We go back to the Psalms, and we cover the part that we skipped, we cover the chorus, it's there three times, it's there in verse 5, it's in verse 11, and then it's in verse 5 of Psalm 43.

[39:07] It's there to help us and to show us the way. It says in 42.5, why are you cast down, O my soul? Why are you in turmoil within me?

[39:18] hope in God, hope in God, for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God. Now, I do want to pause for just a second, because I think this is important.

[39:33] That last little phrase where it describes God as my salvation and my God, that's not a very literal translation of what we find here. literally what it says in Psalm 42.5 is the salvations, the deliverances of my face, which is weird.

[39:59] The salvation of my face. Well, actually, it says that in verses 11 and 43.5. There's one slight difference here. If you translate it really literally, there's one slight difference in 42.5.

[40:15] It's the salvations of His face. It's just a tiny little letter difference in Hebrew. But I think it does make a difference in how we apply this verse.

[40:32] Because it begins by recognizing that the solution to the longing and the key to hanging on to the future joy is really ultimately found in clinging to salvation that comes from the very face or presence of God Himself.

[40:53] It's the very thing that I'm longing for that is really the answer to my problems. The difficulty here is that the psalmist thinks that he needs to go back to where he was to get that presence.

[41:07] but we know that now in the new covenant the presence of God is not limited to the temple. That God doesn't just reveal himself his glory doesn't only shine forth in the temple anymore because Jesus became the temple and Jesus promises that he is with us to the end of the age.

[41:30] In other words the very same kind of presence that Israel had to go to the temple to experience we experience everywhere we go as followers of Jesus because he's with us. He never leaves us he never forsakes us he is with us all the time.

[41:49] And the reminder the first time we see this chorus the reminder is that the salvation the deliverance that we long for is only to be had in God's face or in God's presence.

[42:01] And in the other two choruses switch it to my face. Why the change? Because it's a play on words. Because your face tells the story.

[42:15] Your face is where sorrow is expressed. Your face is where joy is expressed. In other words the salvation of my face in 42.11 and 43.5 is God reversing the longing and lament.

[42:32] That's what it is. It's the reversal of all of that. It's the turning of it on its head. It's the receiving of the thing that you're pleading and begging for. Now that only happens in the presence of God.

[42:47] But when we come into his presence he turns those things on their head. He's with us now. Christ is with us joy in the midst of sorrow and while we're walking in darkness he can be a light that lights the way for us.

[43:10] And more than that he promises us that eventually he won't just light our way in the darkness he will destroy the darkness. He won't just give us joy in the midst of sorrow he'll give us nothing but joy and no more sorrow no more tears.

[43:30] That's the promise of the gospel of Jesus. And what this chorus is teaching us to do over and over is to remind ourselves of the promise.

[43:41] That's the point. That's why it's repeated three times. What is the psalmist doing? All of a sudden he turns from expressing how he feels and he starts to talk to himself.

[43:53] Right? Why are you cast down O my soul? He gives himself a command. Hope in God. He's talking to himself.

[44:05] I came across this this week. I was going to summarize it but I need to read it. It's from Martin Lloyd Jones. He's commenting on this verse. He says the main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to ourself.

[44:27] He says this is the very essence of wisdom in this matter. Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?

[44:42] He says take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You've not originated them but they start talking to you. They bring back the problem of yesterday. Somebody's talking.

[44:52] Who's talking? Yourself is talking to you. And then he goes on and he says the main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand.

[45:03] You have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul, why are you cast down? What business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, say to yourself, hope in God, instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way.

[45:27] And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, who God is, and what God is, and what God has done, and what God has pledged himself to do.

[45:40] Let's pray. God has