When Your Soul Is Cast Down

This is part five of Praying the Psalms on Your Worst Day. Today, Psalms 42 and 43, for the day your soul is cast down and will not get up.

As the deer pants for the water brooks, 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 continually say to me, “Where is your God?”
Psalm 42:1–3 NKJV

Most of us know verse one. It became a chorus, and churches have sung it for years as a gentle song of longing, soft piano and hands raised.

Read two more verses and the song changes key. The man who wrote it is thirsty the way a deer is thirsty in a drought, the kind of thirst that kills. He has been crying so long that tears are what he eats. And the people around him keep asking the question that cuts deepest. Where is your God?

This psalm is for the discouragement that does not lift. A bad afternoon passes. This is the kind that settles in and stays.

One Prayer in Two Parts

Psalms 42 and 43 belong together. They share a refrain, repeated three times, and Psalm 43 has no title of its own, which is rare in this part of the Psalter. Some Hebrew manuscripts write them as a single psalm. Read them as one prayer, because the man does not climb out of his hole in Psalm 42. He is still climbing in Psalm 43.

The title names the sons of Korah, and that alone deserves a moment. Korah led a rebellion against Moses in the wilderness, and the ground opened and swallowed him (Numbers 16). But when Moses lists the tribes again ten chapters later, the text adds a sentence you could easily miss. “Nevertheless the children of Korah did not die” (Numbers 26:11). Centuries later their descendants were the Levites who stood up before Israel to praise Jehovah with voices loud and high (2 Chronicles 20:19).

The family of a rebel became the choir. Some of the most honest worship in the Bible came from a family line that started in judgment and was spared by mercy. If you think your history disqualifies you from talking to God, look at who wrote this.

Far From Home

When I remember these things, I pour out my soul within me. For I used to go with the multitude; I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept a pilgrim feast.
Psalm 42:4 NKJV

The writer is cut off. He used to lead the crowds up to the temple at the feasts, singing all the way. Now he is far to the north, remembering God from the land of the Jordan, and from the heights of Hermon (42:6). That is headwaters country, where snowmelt comes off the mountain and pours down through the rocks to start the Jordan River.

So when he says, “Deep calls unto deep at the noise of Your waterfalls; all Your waves and billows have gone over me” (42:7), he is looking at real water. The roar he can hear from where he sits has become a picture of what is happening inside him. He came looking for water, and now he is drowning in it.

Discouragement does that. The things that used to refresh you start to feel like they are pulling you under.

Talking Back

Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance.
Psalm 42:5 NKJV

This is the move that makes the psalm worth praying. In the middle of the dark, the psalmist stops and turns on himself. He asks his own soul a question. Why are you down? Why are you churning? And then he tells it what to do. Hope in God.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a physician who left medicine to preach in London, built a series of sermons around this refrain, later published as Spiritual Depression. His point was that much of our misery comes from listening to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves. Your soul wakes up in the morning and starts speaking. It tells you nothing will change, that you are alone, that God has forgotten you. And most of us just lie there and listen.

The psalmist talks back. He does not deny the darkness or pretend he is fine. He simply refuses to let his soul have the last word.

And he has to do it more than once. The refrain comes back in 42:11 and again in 43:5. Discouragement is rarely beaten in one round. You answer it in the morning, it is back by noon, and you answer it again.

Most of us wake up and listen to our souls. The psalmist talks back.

Forgotten

I will say to God my Rock, “Why have You forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”
Psalm 42:9 NKJV

There is that word again. Forgotten is shakach, the same word David used in Psalm 13:1. Will You forget me forever? The psalmists keep circling the same fear because every believer under enough weight eventually feels it.

But notice what he calls God in the same breath. My Rock. He accuses God of forgetting him while calling Him the one solid thing under his feet. He complains to the Rock because there is nowhere else to stand. That is what faith sounds like in the dark.

The verse just before it says, “Jehovah will command His lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me, a prayer to the God of my life” (42:8). Lovingkindness. Chesed. The same anchor David held in Psalm 51 and Psalm 13 shows up here in the middle of the flood.

The Face Lifted

Watch the refrain closely, because it changes. In Psalm 42:5 the psalmist hopes to praise God for the help of His countenance, God’s face turned toward him.

Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance and my God.
Psalm 43:5 NKJV

By the last refrain it is the help of my countenance, and my God. The face of God turned toward the psalmist becomes the lifting of the psalmist’s own face. A man whose head has been hanging down begins to look up.

That is the face thread we have been following. David asked God to hide His face from his sins and not from him. In Psalm 13 he feared God had hidden His face. Here a discouraged man learns that God’s face turned toward him is what finally lifts his own.

The Words Under the Words

Word	Original	Strong’s	Meaning
shachach	שָׁחַח	H7817	To bow down, to sink low, to be brought low. “Cast down,” 42:5, 6, 11, and 43:5
hamah	הָמָה	H1993	To roar, to churn, to be in turmoil, like a crowd or the sea. “Disquieted”
yachal	יָחַל	H3176	To wait, to hope with expectation. “Hope in God”
panim	פָּנִים	H6440	Face, countenance, presence. “The help of His countenance” and “the help of my countenance”

For the One Who Cannot Get Up

I need to say something plainly. If your discouragement has gone on for weeks, if you cannot sleep or cannot stop sleeping, if you have stopped eating or started thinking everyone would be better off without you, please talk to a doctor and to your pastor this week. If you have had thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 today. Praying this psalm belongs beside that help, never in place of it. The God who gave us Psalm 42 also made the body you live in, and He is not offended when you take care of it.

For those carrying an ordinary heaviness that will not lift, this psalm hands you a sentence to say to yourself. Use it every time the low thought comes. Why are you cast down, O my soul? Hope in God. Say it out loud if you have to. Your soul has been doing all the talking for a while. It is your turn.

Pray It This Week

Pray the refrain every time the low thought comes back this week, out loud if you can. Then each morning, pray Psalm 43:3 as your request for the day.

Oh, send out Your light and Your truth! Let them lead me; let them bring me to Your holy hill and to Your tabernacle.
Psalm 43:3 NKJV

Why are you cast down, my soul? I know why. I have been listening to you all week. Now listen to me. Hope in God. Jehovah, I am thirsty and I cannot find the water. Send out Your light and Your truth and let them lead me back to the place where I used to worship You. I will yet praise You. You are the help of my countenance, and my God. Amen.

Discussion Questions

What does your soul tend to say to you on a bad day? What would it sound like to answer it with Scripture?
Why do you think the refrain repeats three times instead of once?
Read Numbers 16:31–33 and Numbers 26:11. What does the story of Korah’s sons add to the way you read these psalms?
The psalmist calls God his Rock and accuses Him of forgetting in the same verse. How can both be true in one prayer?
What used to refresh you spiritually that now feels heavy? What would it take to go back?

Going Deeper

Read Psalms 42 and 43 straight through as one prayer and mark the three refrains. Then read 1 Kings 19, where Elijah sits under a broom tree and asks to die. Notice what God does first. He lets him sleep and feeds him twice before He says a word about his calling. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s Spiritual Depression is still in print and still one of the wisest books on the subject.

Next in the series, Psalm 109, for the day someone has wronged you and you want them to pay.