Prayer of Deliverance

Psalm 42 and 43 are linked poems whose author is unknown, but perhaps it’s David. Some think Psalm 43 is an appendix to Psalm 42 or as one poem in the ancient manuscripts. The poem offers counsel for the disillusioned and depressed with three stanzas, and three repeated refrains of hope including one as the ending for Psalm 43:

Why are you in despair, O my soul?

And why are you disturbed within me?

Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him,

The help of my countenance and my God.

The Psalmist is disheartened and overwhelmed with disillusionment and despair. The low point of the poem is verse 2, where he mourns his personal state of affairs with God and his relationship with others who he thinks are ungodly and deceitful. In a downtrodden season in life, I too learned one tends to ask T.S. Eliot’s lament, “What happened to life while living,” where disillusionment leads to cynicism and a shrunken kingdom of one — me.

The Psalmist shows us the way forward out of the fog of despair and an inward gaze of the cynical self starting in verse 3. He says a prayer that turns the whole poem and renews and lifts his perspective, “O send out Your light and Your Truth, let them lead me; Let them bring me to Your holy hill And to your dwelling places.”[NASB] He then vows to go to God’s altar and praise Him in joy.

To deal with the despair, the Psalmist made three choices we can learn from in Psalm 43, which will help in overwhelming times when life is out of tune. He prayed to ask for God’s light and Truth; he chose to be with the people of God (church) by going to “Your dwelling places” and bringing himself to the altar of God, and the Psalmist joyfully praised God. Prayer. Participation. Praise.

Centuries later, Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy under duress while sitting in his jail cell awaiting execution. Boethius imaginatively used a muse of Philosophy who consoled Boethius with questions, answers, and explanations that offered important arguments regarding human suffering. Philosophy told Boethius, “Fix your gaze on the extent, the stability, the swift motions of the heavens.”

The Psalmist, in the end, also did that very thing in Psalm 43 by fixing his gaze on the hope in God and the stability of divine guidance through prayer, participation, and praise to make spiritual progress while dealing with personal despair.

-Dan Nickel