Having given this wonderful text of Psalm 42 an expositional and pastoral survey in our previous three articles, we return one last time for a fourth installment wherein we consider some further implications and applications:

1. The great Matthew Henry writes in his commentary notes on Psalm 42,

Sometimes God teaches us effectually to know the worth of mercies by the want of them, and whets our appetite for the means of grace by cutting us short in those means. We are apt to loathe that manna, when we have plenty of it, which will be very precious to us if ever we come to know the scarcity of it.¹

In our own parlance, we might say something along the lines of, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” How true this is of corporate worship and the assembly of the saints.

How many of us either personally have, or have known someone who has experienced an involuntary absence from the gathering of God’s people, perhaps due to illness or some other legitimate hindrance? How many of us can recount conversations with homebound saints who ask after the congregation and recall fondly the singing, the prayers, the preaching, and the fellowship? What a strangely encouraging sadness is theirs—these Christians who sincerely miss the church and the camaraderie and companionship of God’s people. I remember an elderly saint advising me once, “Spend and enjoy as much time under the preaching of God’s Word and in the company of God’s people as you can. You just never know when the time may come when you might not be able.” This saint had known experiences in both foreign military and mission capacities where the opportunity to gather regularly for worship with God’s people under the regular ministry of the Word was severely curtailed and irregular. Now advanced in years and due to the infirmities that often accompany old age, he was frequently confined to his home, unable to get to Lord’s Day worship as often as he would have liked.

The psalmist in Psalm 42 expresses a longing for and thirsting after God in the context of God’s gathered people. Is this sentiment shared by us? Do we crave God’s worship, or do we attend it simply out of habit or duty and—if we were brutally honest—would not really find ourselves with a sense of lack if it did not occur for a week or two? Such a sentiment is to our spiritual shame. Perhaps, as Henry suggests, when joys are not rightly cherished by us as they ought to be, God, in his fatherly wisdom, may take them away from us for a time so that in the lack of these precious graces, we may come to esteem them all the more in the future. Christopher Ash says it well when he writes, “The psalms are, therefore, a challenge to us if we have undervalued church and an offer of hope to us if we deeply miss it when we are separated from church.”²

2. The above application focuses narrowly on our absence from gathered worship. We do well to think similarly regarding the nearness of the Lord more generally. There is something of God’s loving and fatherly discipline to be found in those times when he withdraws certain things from our experience or perception in order that we might either learn to better cherish God’s graces or develop a greater dependence on the Lord. Commentator Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802–1869) suggests that, in comparing our own life with the experience of Psalm 42, “most closely analogous are the circumstances in which the Lord withdraws from us his felt nearness—the states of internal drought and darkness, amid which his form fades in our souls.”³

In reading Hengstenberg’s comments, I am reminded of the language of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) regarding the believer’s apprehension of their assurance of salvation. WCF 18.4 states,

True believers may have the assurance of their salvation divers ways shaken, diminished, and intermitted; as, by negligence in preserving of it, by falling into some special sin which woundeth the conscience and grieveth the Spirit; by some sudden or vehement temptation, by God’s withdrawing the light of his countenance and suffering [allowing] even such as fear him to walk in darkness and to have no light. (emphasis mine)

The Confession states that a believer may find his assurance of salvation shaken due to God’s withdrawing the light of his countenance. That paragraph goes on to explain that the believer may, in due time, have that sense of assurance restored and revived. But in the meantime, they “are never utterly destitute of that seed of God,” and they will be supported from utter despair.

So, on the one hand, the child of God is never truly cast off by his heavenly Father. Nevertheless, how greatly the believer craves that sense of assurance and longs to have it restored—the believer yearns to have that sense of the nearness of God’s presence replenished. The nearness of God’s presence may be something a believer had taken for granted, the favorable countenance of God something he had never especially appreciated. . . until the light of it (or his apprehension of it) was withdrawn. Then, suddenly, getting it back was all that he wanted! Until it was taken away, perhaps the believer had not realized what a cherished thing the “felt nearness” of the Lord really was. Now, like the psalmist “thirsting for the living God,” restoring that sensible apprehension of the Lord’s presence is what that child of God desires more than anything else. God may use even these kinds of intangible “withdrawals” to whet our spiritual appetites for more of himself.

3. The psalmist is clearly a pious believer who loves the Lord, yet he is facing a season of darkness and acute burden. We should not think it a strange thing that believers, in God’s marvelous and inscrutable wisdom, are sometimes subject to periods of hard providence, trial, and testing. Such an experience was not foreign to the old covenant believer, and neither is it unknown to the new covenant believer: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Pet 4:12–13).

4. Even in this season of woe, the psalmist is able to pour out his soul to God with a raw and reverent honesty. It is surely a blessing and mercy that believers are able to approach God in such a manner, to come to him and commit to him all our griefs and sorrows. The psalmist shows us that old covenant believers, like new covenant believers, had groanings which cannot be uttered (Rom 8:26). Psalm 42 is an example to us that we need not fear being honest with the Lord. Rather, we must be sure to bear our burdens to him and not stubbornly refuse to disclose them: “[Cast] all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Pet 5:7).

5. There is great reason for the believer to heed the exhortation and refrain of the psalmist, to “hope in God,” knowing that the saint shall “again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Ps 42:5). Though it is cliché, there is something of a biblical-theological truth in the maxim, “The night is darkest just before the dawn.” The darkest hour in salvation-history was surely those late hours on Friday and all-day Saturday when the body of Jesus was dead and buried in the tomb. The Lord of Life had been slain, and all seemed hopeless and bleak when, in fact, just a few hours before dawn on that Sunday morning, Christ would rise in triumph and splendor. The disciples’ darkest and most mournful hours immediately preceded the glorious resurrection. Psalm 42 reminds us that for the believer, oftentimes, the darkest hours of the Christian experience will precede seasons of relief and blessing.

And even if the believer does not in this life find the relief for which he is seeking or receive the answer to prayer for which she might be hoping, for the saint, there are always better days ahead. For the people of God, whatever evils might surround and oppress them, and even if they should not acquire the desired resolution to current earthly woes, good days are yet coming. For the saints who have rich days now and know the reality of the lines falling for them in pleasant places (Ps 16:6), there are still better days ahead. The apostle audaciously calls these earthly woes “this light momentary affliction,” assuring us that it “is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor 4:17).

So Christian, take heart, Psalm 42 would tell us (vv. 5, 11). Our redemption draweth nigh (Luke 21:28); we shall soon forever be with the Lord (1 Thess 4:17). “Hope in God,” for we shall again praise him, our salvation and our God.

May the Lord bless the truths of Psalm 42 to our hearts and minds, to our piety, our practice, and our eternity.

Notes

1. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible: complete and unabridged in one volume (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 803.
2. Christopher Ash, The Psalms: A Christ-Centered Commentary, 4 vols. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024), 2.528.
3. Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Commentary on the Psalms, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1845), 92.

©Sean Morris. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Sean Morris

  

  Sean was educated at Grove City College, Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, MS), and the University of Glasgow (Scotland). He is an ordained teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, and serves as a minister at the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Oak Ridge, TN. He also serves as the Academic Dean of the Blue Ridge Institute for Theological Education. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Historical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sean lives in Oak Ridge with his wife, Sarah, along with their children and useless beagle.

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