As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
My tears have been my food
day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”
These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
and lead them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of praise,
a multitude keeping festival.
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.
My soul is cast down within me;
therefore I remember you
from the land of Jordan and of Hermon,
from Mount Mizar.
Deep calls to deep
at the roar of your waterfalls;
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.
Comment: I think that most of us think of the book of Psalms as a great collection of heart-filled ‘pourings-out’ of overwrought emotions – thanks, fear, hopelessness, joy, despair, victory etc. Why are the 150 psalms in the whole book further subdivided to 5 books or chapters? Some think that the second book 42-72 is a subdivision associated with the second book of the Torah, that is Exodus, in our Bible. The panting heart of the deer is a great example of acknowledgement of deep need for and gratitude of God’s help. In some ways poetry doesn’t need to make the logical sense of a well made case argued out in prose. It seems to burst out in explosive emotions or ‘out-of- the-wild-beyond’ answers which suddenly make sense to incomprehensible problems.
How their hearts must have beat in fear when on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea as they heard the chariots chasing them in the distance? How their hearts leapt for joy as they stepped into the relative safety of ‘the other-side’? The taunting cry of their unbelieving slave-masters highlighting their hopelessness breathed away, gone, as they breathe the free air of the wilderness, God’s Wilderness. There had been good reason for them to be cast down before, but oh the promised excitement of God’s Interference in their affairs and the promise of His steadfast love.
Prayer: How I long, my Father, to express my unfettered thanks and joy for Your Coming into my life!
As I read it! 