Day 3: The Yearned For...
It’s an impractical thought, I know, but ever since I was a little kid, I have always wished I had a time machine to go back to the time of Christ. I imagine me sitting down with Him and listening to Him as the apostles had the chance to do. I say it is impractical because
1) Time machine is a little hard to come by
2) I would have to learn a new language
3) I would probably not blend in
4) I would have to get Him to pick me as the 13th apostle and somehow that just wouldn’t seem right and
5) Jesus would spot me from miles away as a time traveler with a Texas twang.
So as silly as that is, what is the next best thing? Prayer. True, God does not speak audibly to us in prayer, but don’t you just long to have the presence of Christ in your prayer closet?
The Yearned for: The writer longs for God and more specifically, he desired to have a vibrant companionship with God. But the writer is disturbed. We have all had times where we have been asked and even asked ourselves, “Where is God?” (verse 3). The psalmist had a thirst for God, but not for a dead or impotent deity, but for a living God (verse 2).
There are times when we feel as though we are banished from all sense and perception of His presence. This is normal. When we are down like that, and even when we hear the taunts of others mocking our downcast condition, it is as hurtful in the spirit as the breaking of bones would be to our physical bodies (v. 10).
The solution of the Psalmist is to quench his spiritual thirst, according to verse 8, with “a prayer to the God of my life.”
He remembers God in the valley of Jordan, where a river flows in the midst of a desert.
He also remembers God in the heights of Mount Hermon, whose snow-capped peaks melt in the spring to provide water throughout the summer heat. And as the psalmist remembers God in all points in between (“Hill Mizar” means “small hill”).
In verse 7, deep calls to deep. The depths of writer’s sense of absence from God calls out to the depths of God’s abundance of presence. He longs and yearns for a presence and imagines, just like I imagine having a time machine, but his imagination summons presence of God in the form of waterfalls of God’s merciful presence to his dry parched mouth, his dust-caked face, his shriveled, dehydrated body. One moment is crying out like a desiccated deer and the next he’s drowning in waves that dwarf him in an immense cascade of God’s manifestation and answers to his prayer.
Waves of water, billows cascading showers sweep him away in a flood of revelation. His solution (also found in Psalm 43, the conclusion of this two-part song) is to praise God in the deafening silence of night, to lift up a song to God, his Rock from whom water flows.
Child, oh child, don’t despair in your thirst from God. Don’t faint in your hunger for Him. You are not alone. The one you yearn for is near, though you do not sense Him. He is close, though you cannot see Him. His filling, nourishing, thirst-quenching presence is there, hearing, seeing, waiting to manifest Himself when you come to the end of yourself. Your thirst, your hunger, your yearning that has been billowing up is soon to be swallowed up by his sudden appearance to you.
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