The Biblical Illustrator
Psalms 43:5
Why art thou cast down, O my soul?
and why art thou disquieted within me? hope in God: for I shall yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance and my God.
Discouragement’s recovery
This psalm was penned by David, which shows the passions of his soul; for God’s children know the estate of their own souls for the strengthening of their trust and bettering their obedience. Now, this is the difference between psalms and other places of Scripture. Other scriptures speak mostly from God to us; but in the Psalms this holy man doth speak mostly to God and his own soul; so that this psalm is an expostulation of David with his own soul in a troubled estate; when being banished from the house of God, he expostulates the matter with his soul: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me?” The words tell of--
I. David’s perplexed estate. “Why art thou cast down,” etc.
1. How did he come to be thus perplexed? He was in great trouble and affliction. A soul that is lively in grace cannot endure to live under small means of salvation.
2. The second thing that troubled this holy man was the blasphemous words of wicked men. Therefore if we would try our state to be good, see how we take to heart everything that is done against religion. Can a child be patient when he sees his father abused? God’s children are sensible of such things. But observe--
1. A child of God must not be too much discouraged and cast down in afflictions. There must be measure both in sorrow and in joy. Not as Nabal (1 Samuel 25:36). And we may know when this measure is exceeded if our mourning and sorrow do not bring us to God, but drives us from God. Grief, sorrow and humility are good; but discouragement is evil (Exodus 6:9; 1 Peter 3:7). Christians must not exceed in anything; when they do they are overcome of their passions. And to be cast down and disquieted is sin, because it doth turn to the reproach of religion and God Himself; and because their so sinking under afflictions never yield any good fruit, and it hinders us both from and in holy duties; for either we do not perform them at all, or otherwise they are done but weakly; for as the troubled eye cannot see well, so the troubled soul cannot do good, nor receive good. Observe--
II. His expostulation with himself. “Why art thou cast down?” etc. The word in the original shows that it is the nature of sorrow to bring the soul downwards. Sorrow and sin agree both in this, for as they come from below, so they bring the soul down to the earth.
1. What is meant by casting down, and why doth he find fault with himself for it? Because it breeds disquieting. Hence it is said in Psalms 37:1, “Fret not thyself,” etc. Here is no true humiliation but abundance of corruption. But note--
III. The remedy to which the psalmist turns: he first reflects upon and expostulates with his soul, and then bids it. “trust in God.” And so we learn that. God’s children in their greatest troubles recover themselves, that the prerogative of a Christian in these disquietings, and in all estates, is, he hath God and himself to speak unto, whereby he can remove solitariness. Put him into a dungeon, yet he may speak unto God there, and speak unto himself. Let all the tyrants in the world do their worst to a Christian; if God be with him he is cheerful still. (R. Sibbes)
The psalmist’s dialogue with his soul
These words occur thrice, at short, intervals, in this and the preceding psalm. They appear there twice, and here once. Quite obviously the division into two psalms has been a mistake, for the whole constitutes one composition. The first part of each of the little sections, into which the one original psalm is divided by the repetition of this refrain, is a weary monotone of complaint.
I. The dreary monotony of complaint. We all know the temptation of being overmastered by some calamity or some sad thought. We keep chewing some bitter morsel and rolling it under our tongues so as to suck all the bitterness out of it that we can. You sometimes see upon the stage of a theatre a funeral procession represented, and the supernumeraries pass across the stage and go round at the back and come in again at the other end, and so keep up an appearance of numbers far beyond the reality. That is like what you and I do with our sorrows. A bee has an eye, with I do not know how many facets, which multiply the one thing it looks at into an enormous number; and some of us have eyes made on that fashion, or rather we manufacture for our eyes spectacles on that plan, by which we look at our griefs or our depressing circumstances, and see them multiplied and nothing but them. “That way madness lies.”
II. Wise self-questioning. There are a great many of our griefs, and moods, and sorrows that will not stand that question. Like ghosts, if you speak to them, they vanish. It is enough, in not a few of the lighter and more gnat-like troubles that beset us, for us to say to ourselves, “What are we putting ourselves into such a fuss about? Why art thou cast down?” We cannot control our thoughts nor our moods directly, but we can do a great deal to regulate, modify and diminish those of them that need diminishing, and increase those of them that need to be increased, by looking at the reasons for them. And if a man will do that more habitually and conscientiously than most of us are accustomed to do it, in regard both to passing thoughts and overpowering moods that threaten to become unwholesomely permanent, he will regain a firmer control of himself--and that is the best wealth that a man can have. Very many men who makes failures, morally, religiously, or even socially and commercially, do so because they have no command over themselves, and because they have not asked this question of each sly temptation that comes wheedling up to the gate of the soul with whispering breath and secret suggestions--“What do you want here? What reason have you for wishing to come in? Why art thou cast down, O my soul?”--question yourselves about your moods, and especially about your sad moods, and you will have gone a long way to make yourselves bigger and happier people than you have ever been before.
III. An effort twice foiled and at last successful. In the cathedral of St. Mark’s, Venice, there is a mosaic that represents Christ in Gethsemane. You remember that, like the psalmist, He prayed three times there, and twice came back, not having received His desire, and the third time He did receive it. The devout artist has presented Him thus: the first time prone on the ground, and the sky all black; the second time raised a little, and a strip of blue in one corner; and the third time kneeling erect, and a beam from heaven, brighter than the radiance of the Paschal moon, striking right down upon Him, and the strengthening angel standing beside Him. That was the experience of the Lord, and it may be the experience of the servant. Do not give up the effort, at self-control and victory over circumstances that tempt to despondency or to sadness. Even if you fail this time, still the failure has left some increased capacity for the next attempt, and God helping, the next time will be successful.
IV. The conquering hope. The psalmist’s question to his soul is not answered. It needed no answer. To put it was the first struggle to strip off the poisoned sackcloth in which he had wrapped himself. But his next word, his command to his soul to hope in God, completes the process of putting off the robe of mourning and girding himself with gladness. He makes one great leap, as it were, across the black flood that has been ringing him round, and bids his soul: “Hope thou in God.” The one medicine for a disquieted, cast-down soul is hope in God. People say a great deal about the buoyant energy of hope bearing a man up over his troubles. Yes! so it does in some measure, but there is only one case in which there is a real bearing up over the troubles, and that is where the hope is in God. But the hope that is in God must be a hope that is based upon a present possession of Him. It is only if a man has a present experience of the blessings of strong and all-sufficient help that come to him now, when he can say, “My God, the health of my countenance,” t, hat he has the right, or that he has the inclination or the power to paint the future with brightness. And we shall not attain either to that experience of God as ours, or to the hope that, springing from it, will triumph over all disquieting circumstances without a dead lift of effort. There is a great lack amongst all Christian people of realizing that it is as much their duty to cultivate the hope of the Christian as it is their duty to cultivate any other characteristic of the Christian life. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
Despondency: its cause and cure
I. Why the soul is bowed down and disquieted.
1. The soul may be bowed down for lack of the old help and strength got from the means of grace. As our hearts are framed we need help from habit, from outward expression, from worship, from voice and ear, from sympathy and exhortation, from words and sacraments.
2. The soul may he cast down from thoughts and doubts springing at once out of the man’s own mind, growing at once out of the evil of his very spiritual nature.
3. The soul may be bowed down by the burden of wilful sin, neglected duty, or worldly indulgence. No amount of religious fervour, or doctrinal knowledge will keep the heart glad in which is the consciousness of wrong.
4. But all this sore trouble is deepened, if it happens to come upon us in times of worldly woe, when we can least afford to miss God’s peace, when we are in greatest need of comfort. “Why, was it not just this we had counted on, that when all earthly fountains would be dried up, then the river of God would still flow on?
II. why the soul need not be bowed down.
1. God would have us to learn and know that He Himself is an all-sufficient comforter, apart from any outward helps or earthly sympathy. Thus we enter further into the secret of God’s covenant.
2. All progress in religion seems to be from dark to dark. The plant at first strikes its roots in the dark; and it would appear as if the spirit needed fresh times of sorrow before it will be moved to larger growth.
3. We must learn the insufficiency of present attainments before we will seek more. How vague and dim are the hopes and expectations of many! In worldly prosperity such meagre experience does well enough; but, oh! it is not well for the soul to rest there. “Come unto Me,” He cries, now loudly, now whisperingly; and it is to move and bend us He has to send darkness and trouble. How natural it is we should be disquieted; and is it not the case that so soon as we see this good wise reason for our dejection, immediately we are delivered? And though it was good for us to be dejected, yet we say, why should we be so? “Why art thou cast down,” why dost thou still continue to be cast down, O my soul? (R. MacEllar.)
The psalmist’s remonstrance with his soul
There is a kind of dialogue between the psalmist and his soul. He, as it were, cuts himself into two halves, and reasons and remonstrates with himself, and coerces himself, and encourages himself; and finally settles down in a peace which unites in one the two discordant elements.
I. The psalmist’s question to his soul, “Why art thou cast down? why art thou disquieted?” There are two things here, apparently, opposite to each other, and yet both of them present in the fluctuating and stormy emotions of the poet. On the one hand is deep dejection. The word employed describes the attitude of a man lying prone and prostrate, grovelling on the ground. “Why art thou cast down?” And yet, side by side with that torpid dejection, there is a noisy restlessness. “`why dost thou mourn and mutter”--as the words might be rendered--“within me?” And these two moods are, if not co-existent, at least so quickly alternating within his consciousness that he has to reason with himself about both. He has fits of deep depression, followed by, and sometimes even accompanied with, fits of restless complaining and murmuring. And he puts to himself the question, “What is it all about?” Now, if we translate this question into a general expression it just comes to this--A man is worth very little unless there is a tribunal in him to which he brings up his feelings and makes them justify their existence, and tell him what they mean by their noise and their complaining. “He that has no rule over his own spirit is like a city broken down and without walls.” The affections, the emotions, the feelings of sorrow or of gladness, of dissatisfaction with my lot, or of enjoyment and complacency in it, are excited by the mere presence of a set of external circumstances; but the fact that they are excited is no warrant for their existence. And the first thing to be done in regard to them is to see to it that the nobler man, the man within, the real self should cross-question that other self, and say, “Tell me, have you reason for your being? If not, take yourselves away.” “Why art thou cast down, O my soul, and why art thou disquieted within me?”
II. The psalmist’s charge to his soul. “Hope thou in God.” Ah! it is no use to say to a soul, “What is all your agitation about?” unless you can go on to say, “Be quiet in God.” Sweep away the things seen and temporal, and put the thing, or rather the Person, Unseen and Eternal, in the front of them. And then comes quiet; and then there comes aspiration. Then energy comes hack to the languid and relaxed limbs, and the man that was lying on his face in the dust starts to his feet, ready for strenuous effort and for noble service. The soul that is to be quickened from its torpor, and to be quieted from its restlessness, must be led to God, and, grasping Him, then it is able to coerce these other feelings, which, apart from Him, have, and ought to have, the field to themselves. Nor must we forget another thought, that this charge of the psalmist to his soul teaches us. The deep-seated and central faith in God which marks a religious man ought to permeate all his nature to the very outskirts and circumference of his being. Even amidst the perturbations of the sensitive nature of the poet-psalmist, his inmost self was resting upon God.
III. The psalmist’s confident assurance, which is his reason for exhorting his lower self to quiet faith and hope.”:For I shall yet praise Him,” etc. The “I” here is the whole united and harmonized self, in which the emotions, affections, passions and lower desires obey the reins and whip of the higher nature. When God governs the spirit, the spirit governs the “soul,” and the man who has yielded himself to God, first of all in the surrender, possesses himself, and can truly say “I.” Only when the heart is “united to fear God’s name” is there true concord within. Oh to live more continually under the influence of that glorious light of the assured future, when our lips shall be loosed to give forth His praise, and when we shall have learned that every sorrow, disappointment, loss, painful effort, all that here seemed kindred with darkness, was really but a modification of light, and was a thing to be thankful for. If only we chose to walk in the light of the future, then the poor present would be small and powerless to harm us. “I shall yet praise Him” is the language that befits us all. And there is not only the assurance of a future that shall explain all, and make it all material for praise, when all the discords of the great conflicting piece of music are resolved into harmony, but there is here also the deep sense of present blessing. “I shall yet praise Him who is the health” (or salvation) “of my countenance and my God.” “Who is,” not who will be; “who is” in the moment of difficulty and sorrow; “who is,” even whilst as the other part of the psalm tells us, the enemy are saying “Where is thy God? who is,” even whilst the sense and flesh and the lower self have lost sight of Him. “And my God.” Ah! there we touch the bottom and get our feet upon the rock. He that can say “He is my God” has a right to be sure that he will yet praise Him. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
The psalmist’s remonstrance with his soul
I. Moods and emotions should be examined and governed by a higher self. There are plenty of people who, making profession of being Christians, do not habitually put the break on their moods and tempers, and who seem to think that it is a sufficient vindication of gloom and sadness to say that things are going badly with them in the outer world, and who act as if they supposed that no joy can be too exuberant and no elation too lofty if, on the other hand, things are going rightly. It is a miserable travesty of the Christian faith to suppose that its prime purpose is anything else than to put into our hands the power of ruling ourselves because we let Christ rule us. If the wheelhouse, and the stearing gear, and the rudder of the ship proclaim their purpose of guidance and direction, as eloquently and unmistakably does She make of our inward selves tell us that emotions and moods and tempers are meant to be governed, often to be crushed, always to be moderated by sovereign will and reason. In the psalmist’s language, “my soul” has to give account of its tremors and flutterings to “Me,” the ruling Self, who should be Lord of temperament and control the fluctuations of feeling.
II. There are two ways of looking at causes of dejection and disquiet. There is a court of appeal in each man which tests and tries his reasons for his moods; and these, which look very sufficient to the flesh, turn out to be very insufficient when investigated and tested by the higher spirit or self. We should “appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober.” If men would only bring the causes or occasions of the tempers and feelings which they allow to direct them, to the bar of common sense, to say nothing of religious faith, half the furious boilings in their hearts would stop their ebullition. It would be like pouring cold water into a kettle on the fire. It would end its bubbling. Everything has two handles. The aspect of any event depends largely on the beholder’s point of view. “There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
III. No reasons for being cast down are so strong as those for elation and calm hope. Try to realize what God is to yourselves--“My God” and “the health of my countenance.” That will stimulate sluggish feeling; that will calm disturbed emotion. He that can say, “My God!” and in that possession can repose, will not be easily moved by the trivialities and transitorinesses of this life, to excessive disquiet, whether of the exuberant or of the woeful sort. There is a wonderful calming power in realizing our possession of God as our portion--not stagnating, but quieting.
IV. The effort to lay hold on the truth which calms is to be repeated in spite of failures. No effort at tranquillizing our hearts is wholly lost; and no attempt to lay hold upon God is wholly in vain. Men build a dam to keep out the sea, and the winter storms make a breach in it, but it is not washed sway altogether. And next season they will not need to begin to build from quite so low down, but there will be a bit of the former left to put the new structure upon. And so by degrees it will rise above the tide, and at last will keep it out. Did you ever see a child upon a swing, or a gymnast upon a trapeze? Each oscillation goes a little higher; each starts from the same lowest point, but the elevation on either side increases with each renewed effort, until at last the destined height is reached and the daring athlete leaps on to a solid platform. So we may, if I might so say, by degrees, by reiterated efforts, swing ourselves up to that stedfast floor on which we may stand high above all that breeds agitation and gloom. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
Hope, the antidote to despondency
I. The state alluded to. Dejection and despair. Many things conduce to it.
1. There are not only the difficulties of the Christian course--its dangers, trials, sorrows, disappointments, etc., but--
2. There are the frailties and the circumstances of material life.
(1) Some are cast down owing to constitutional physical temperament. This tendency might and ought to be checked and overcome by cherishing an opposite state of mind.
(2) Others are cast down by the reflections on human existence, the failure of the right, and triumph of wrong--the utter abandonment of the world, the almost imperceptible progress of the Gospel in the world.
(3) Others, again, are dispirited by failure of health and the crushing hand of affliction, by domestic trials, ill-assorted marriages, and invincible sorrow.
II. The investigation suggested. It is very advisable and useful to act as the psalmist did, and institute the inquiry as to the reason of our despondence. Most of the troubles of life and religion come in an unreasoning manner, inasmuch as they appeal to our feelings, not to our logic--our hearts and not our heads. But when we bring a little logic into our feelings and sentiments, it acts as a whole, some regulation and useful restraint. We should generally find that in the dealings of Providence there is no cause whatever for the soul to be east down. Not one moment of trial but what is necessary for the soul’s discipline, and shall minister to the soul’s best condition.
III. The antidote supplied--“Hope thou in God.” Yes, it is the want of faith that is at the root of all fearful despair, and faith, trust and hope are the remedy, the cure of the soul’s disease and spirit’s gloom. Just think what it is to hope in God! There is everything to make us do so! He has all the resources of the universe at His control. But the keynote of hope is love. If we realize that He loves us, we shall know that He will use all these resources for our good. Perfect love casteth out fear. (Homilist.)
The defeat of Despair
Mr. Greatheart, old Honest and the four young men went up to Doubting Castle to look for Giant Despair. When they came at the castle gate, they knocked for entrance with an unusual noise. At that the old giant comes to the gate; and Diffidence his wife follows Then these six men made up to him, and beset him behind and before; also, when Diffidence the giantess came up to help him, old Mr. Honest cut her down at one blow. Then they fought for their lives, and Giant Despair was brought down to the ground, but was very loath to die. He struggled hard, and had, as they say, as many lives as a cat; but Great-heart was his death, for he left him not till he had severed his head from his shoulders. (J. Bunyan.)