Why Are You Cast Down, O My Soul?

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? (Psalm 42:5)

There is a believer I want to speak to, and you may be him or her.

You are not involved in any scandal. You read your Bible this morning and felt nothing. You prayed, and the words seemed to climb halfway to the ceiling and come back down. And the worst of it is that you cannot name a reason. You have no idea why. Nothing happened. God has simply gone quiet, you think, and you have begun to wonder, in the part of you that does not say such things out loud, whether any of it was ever real.

The man who wrote the forty-second Psalm sat exactly where you are sitting.

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)

Sometimes that taunt comes from the outside, from men who watch a Christian suffer and ask where his God has got to now. But you know, and I know, that the cruelest voice asking it is the one inside. Where is your God? You cannot answer. He was here. You remember when He was near. And now there is only the roar of the water going over your head. The psalmist felt that too. All your breakers and your waves have gone over me. (Psalm 42:7)

Now watch what he does, because this is the turn the whole psalm rests on.

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? (Psalm 42:5)

He talks to himself. Stop and see how strange that is. He does not simply feel cast down. He stops, he turns, and he takes himself in hand, and he begins to question the very mood that has him by the throat. A physician who became one of the great preachers of the last century put his finger on it exactly. The trouble with the cast-down Christian, he said, is that he spends all his time listening to himself when he ought to be talking to himself. Your soul has been preaching to you. It has been saying, all day long, that God is gone and the case is hopeless and you may as well stop pretending. The psalmist has heard enough. He interrupts. He turns on his own despair and demands that it give an account of itself. Why are you cast down? What exactly do you have to say for yourself?

That is the first medicine, and it is not what we expect. We expect to be told to feel better. Instead we are told to stop believing everything we feel. The cast-down soul is not a reliable witness. It speaks with great confidence and it is often simply lying.

But interrogation alone would only leave a man arguing with himself in the dark. And that would be weird, but it’s already strange. So the psalmist reaches for something solid, and he finds it in two places.

He finds it in memory. I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar. (Psalm 42:6) He does not wait to feel God near before he acts. He deliberately calls up the days when God was near, and he holds them in front of his own face. Wow. Remembering is not nostalgia here. It is a weapon! The God who met you at the Jordan has not changed His character on the day you cannot feel Him.

And he finds it in hope, which is to say, in God Himself. Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. (Psalm 42:5) Read the tense. I shall again. Not I feel that I will, but I shall. The darkness is present and the praise is future and certain, because the ground of it is not the weather of his heart but the unchanging Person who is his salvation and his God. He preaches to his soul a sermon with only one point: hope in God.

Now hear the thing that ought to lift your head, if you are the believer I began with. Look back at how this psalm opens. As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. (Psalm 42:1) That thirst, the very ache you took as evidence that your faith had perhaps died, is the proof that it has not. A dead soul does not pant for God. It feels nothing and is content to feel nothing. The thirst that is tormenting you is the surest sign that the living God still has hold of you and will not let you go. You are not cast off. You are cast down, and those are not the same word.

Now I have to be honest with you, because a true comfort never lies in order to do its work. Not every moment of darkness that we might have is the soul telling tales. Sometimes the weight on you is the hand of God Himself, pressing on a sin you have not confessed. David knew that weight. When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. (Psalm 32:3) That heaviness is not to be argued with. It is to be heeded. Its cure is not to preach yourself cheerful but to come into the light and say the thing plainly to God, and to find that whoever confesses and forsakes [his transgressions] will obtain mercy. (Proverbs 28:13) And sometimes the cause is plainer still. A body worn down to nothing from work or sickness, robbed of sleep, will preach despair to a saint as loudly as any devil, and that saint needs rest and bread before he needs a sermon. So ask the honest question first. Is my soul lying to me, or is it telling me a truth I have been refusing to hear? Where the conscience is clear, and the darkness has no name, then the medicine the psalmist uses is all yours.

So talk to your soul tonight. Be brutal. Tell it the truth, it has stopped telling you. He has not moved. The waves you are feeling are real, and they are not the end. Hope in God, for you shall again praise Him, your salvation and your God.