Hope in God (Psalm 42–43) from South Woods Baptist Church on Vimeo.

The unexpected happens. Life puts you squarely where you don’t want to be. You look to the left, to the right; you glance in front and in back but nothing seems quite right. Oddly, in the midst, God appears conspicuously absent. But is He?

My brother’s best friend from high school took his wife and family on a ski trip to Colorado. While there, they noticed that he kept slurring his speech. Ken was a successful businessman, a faithful follower of Christ, and a leader at his church. Now he faced the unexpected. Soon his limbs began to lose strength. His once athletic frame slumped into a wheelchair. His articulate speech silenced; he slowly typed out answers to questions with a half-cocked grin. Not yet forty, Ken had that mysterious ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. Was God absent for Ken and his family?

One of our former members, now in another city, had a good job in which he excelled. But then his company pressured him to cut corners, to do some things that clearly seemed unethical. He refused to compromise his integrity. He lost his job. Was God absent?

Some of our workers serving Christ in a region prone to terrorism got word that one of the team members had been captured by an unknown terrorist group. Desperately, all wheels turned to every possible source to locate the team member and bring this one safely back. But it didn’t happen. Nor has any reliable word ever come about the team member’s whereabouts. Was God absent?

The psalmist, identified as one of the sons of Korah, knew the experience far too well. While opinions vary on the background of this pair of psalms, at the very least, we know that he felt isolation from the normal fellowship and worship of God’s people. He struggled with despair that God might have abandoned him. Some say that it may have been David fleeing from Absalom (Eric Lane). Others suggest it pictures David’s long wandering while escaping Saul (Calvin). Some think it pictures the exile of the Jews in either Assyria or Babylon (VanGemeren). Derek Kidner [TOTC: Psalms 1–72, 165] thinks that it may have been the situation depicted in 2 Kings 14:14, when Judah’s King Amaziah, with a bit too much bravado after a military victory, took on Israel’s King Jehoash, who defeated him and took him and others as hostage. The sound of one held against his will in a foreign land seeps through the text, especially verses 6–7. Regardless of the setting, the emotional weight of lament and despair grabs us.

Kidner calls this “one of the most sadly beautiful [poems] in the Psalter” [165]. The superscript identifies it as a Maskil, one of thirteen with that identity, implying a psalm to make you wise or prudent [Kidner, 38]. So this psalm instructs and teaches. While recounting his own experience of despondency by his acute feeling of God’s absence, the psalmist seeks to teach others as well. Despair may pursue us, but it does not have the final word. Hope in God does. But how do we move from despair to the kind of confident hope in God that we find in this psalm? Let’s think about that under four headings.

1. Longing

Like Psalm 63 that began our worship time, these psalms picture intense longing for the Lord. They upbraid the casual religion practiced by so many, where occasional nods toward God substitute for daily passion and longing to know Him and enjoy Him. Through the psalmist recounting his struggle, he also offers glimpses of what it looks like to long for the Lord’s presence in spiritual growth.

This longing is deeply felt. “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?” The writer does not use a camel for this model of longing for the Lord. Camels seem to carry their own water cooler with them. While we can only last a few days without water, camels have the capacity, especially in winter, to go months without water. But not so[...]