¹As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God. ²My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?

There are spiritually dry seasons of life when doubt vies with faith in controlling one’s emotions. This psalm gives words to the anguishing thirst of spirit when God seems distant and our adverse circumstances continue unrelentingly, leaving our souls parched. Since the Lord includes this psalm as part of inspired Scripture, we know that He approves and accepts the honesty of expressing thoughts like this before God.

This psalm and the following one are connected, with the refrain of the first found in the second (with minor differences):

Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him for the help of His presence. (Ps. 42:5, see also Ps. 42:11 and 43:5)

Who among those who desire a close relationship with God does not at times echo the cry of the psalmist’s heart, a desire to gain back the sense of our first love? This is not simply a desire for a spiritual high that we may have experienced when we first came to the foot of the cross and there received the love of God as we believed our sins were forgiven. The psalm writer is not pining for a feeling but challenging himself to loosen the grip of despair by going back to simple faith in God.

Faith in God here is expressed in the call to hope. It may be helpful to understand hope as expectancy with desire. We hope when we choose to desire what God has promised to us and reorient our thinking to expect it will happen. Our hope, though, is not in the promise itself but in the God who promised. Paul puts it this way: “Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him” (Col. 2:6). We must continually call ourselves back to where we began our walk of faith, namely to believe God and take Him at His Word!

Psalm 42 begins the second of five sections of the Book of Psalms, as most Bible versions point out. The authorship is unknown, though it reflects the tone of David, the writer of many psalms. He pictures himself as a deer thirsty from the exertion of running for its life. He feels spiritually parched and dry. Where he once felt joy, emotionally he feels nothing when he thinks of going to worship before God. He remembers the feeling of elation in his past spiritual service to the Lord, but his present emotion is despair.

As believers, we should not make our emotions the end goal of our spiritual endeavors, as though faith means “feeling” God’s presence. However, our feelings are real, and they are important. Faith is about learning to control our emotions by what we think and know to be true about God.

So, the psalmist engages in self-talk, chastising himself, as it were, for doubting God, like saying to himself incredulously, “How could you possibly doubt God after all you have seen of His work in your life?”  (vs. 6-7). Even when we don’t feel God’s presence or presently see tangible evidence of His miraculous work in our lives, we call ourselves to still believe in Him. We have hope that things will change in the future, and we will regain the ability to praise God and sense His presence. As important and desired as it is to experience God in that way, faith enables us to overcome despair even when we don’t feel His presence. But we err if we minimize the reality of this struggle by putting on a spiritual façade, pretending to be spiritually excited when we are spiritually dry inside, and struggling with doubt. We must take this seriously and wrestle with ourselves, which ultimately is to wrestle with God.

The psalmist then asserts in a bold proclamation of faith:

The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime; and His song will be with me in the night, a prayer to the God of my life. (Ps. 42:8)

Whether this is his attempt to reassure God of his faith or to reassure or challenge himself about it is uncertain, but it may be safe to assume both reflect his heart. But the struggle continues beyond himself. In his self-talk, he continues,

I will say to God my rock, “Why have You forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? As a shattering of my bones, my adversaries revile me, while they say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’” (Ps. 42:9–10)

His doubt concerns the fact that God has not rescued him from his present difficulties. The struggle is not so much whether God exists (as sometimes doubters today would frame it), but where He is when we need Him. The taunts of the psalmist’s enemies have pierced his soul, and doubt has been planted. Does this not sound like the work of the devil, the enemy of our souls, who fires doubt at us like arrows? So writes the apostle Paul, that the believer’s armor includes “taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one” (Eph. 6:16).

The barbs cannot be easily extracted, and the battle is not easy. The psalm returns to the refrain, reflecting the central struggle of doubt and faith. Where is the resolution in this otherwise depressing psalm? It is in this: though others may challenge us to “pull ourselves out of our depression,” the struggle is ours, and we need to instruct ourselves to go back to first things, to hope in God.

Lord, at times I feel spiritually dry and I thirst for You. Thank You for giving me the words of this psalm to help me express and understand my discouraging feelings and to challenge me to renew my hope in You. And thank You for not judging me for having these thoughts.