Psalm 43
PSALM FORTY-THREE
1 Vindicate me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation; rescue me from deceitful and wicked men.
2 You are God my stronghold. Why have you rejected me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?
3 Send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me; let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell.
4 Then will I go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight. I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God.
5 Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
A footnote in the NIV reads: "In many Hebrew manuscripts Psalms 42 and 43 constitute one psalm." Why it is given a separate number in our Bibles is not clear. Some phrases are identical in both psalms. Vs. 2 in this psalm, for instance, corresponds with vs. 9 in Ps. 42, and the last verses in both psalms are identical. Yet, there are great differences between the two: the emphasis in Ps. 43 is on another kind of separation and abandon.
In vs. 1, the psalmist finds himself facing a wicked majority, and he asked to be vindicated. The words: "Vindicate me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation," are a plea for justice. The KJV reads: "Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation." The language is judicial. Satan sometimes makes use of judicial language, when he plays the role of "the accuser of our brothers."1 We face the horrible reality that he, who is the personification of all injustice, uses a form of legal persecution in order to drag people into a lost eternity.
Back to the beginning! This psalm was written also by the son of Korah, the gatekeepers in the temple. In the previous psalm they described the experience of a man who was banned from God's presence. They indicated that a person could stand at the entrance of the temple, and yet be endlessly removed from God's revelation of Himself. Here, they seems to say that such people form a minority.
Being Levites, they form the bridge between God and the people they serve, and as such they are being rejected. As far as the majority is concerned, it makes no difference whether God is in their midst or not. The NIV uses the phrase "an ungodly nation." The Hebrew uses two words: lo', which is a negative, like "no," or "not," and chaciyd, which means "pious." Vine's Expository Dictionary describes the word as: "'one who is pious, godly.'… Basically, hasid means one who practices hesed ('loving-kindness'), so it is to be translated the 'pious' or 'godly one.' The word's first biblical occurrence is in <Deut. 33:8> where it represents a human being: 'Give to Levi thy Thummim, and thy Urim to thy godly one' (RSV). The word appears in <Ps. 32:6>: 'For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found....' The word is applied to God in <Ps. 145:17>: 'The Lord is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works.' This noun is derived from the noun checed." The masses come to the temple and participate in the rituals, and the worship services, but there is no visible fruit in the lives of the individuals. Their relationship with God is not such that they bear fruit.
The average person continues to live in his old condition, wherein he was under the power of sin, and where he gave in to his own sinful tendencies. The Levites who kept watch at the gates of the temple felt threatened by this majority, and they called to God to vindicate their position. They saw the danger of being swept away in the current. We could translate their prayer with: "O God, keep me standing through your righteousness." It is this pressure that makes them feel as if they are forsaken, and removed from God's revelation. Just as in the previous psalm, the image is used of a physical distance between man and the place of God's revelation is employed. As there, so here, we can maintain that the separation is not necessarily literal but that it is a feeling of being far away.
We can understand this struggle of the Old Testament Levite; he knows the reality of God's revelation, and he believes that God is truly present between the cherubs above the cover of the ark, as Scripture says: "There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the Testimony, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites."2 But the Levite must also have had this hard to define feeling that the symbol stood for more than he could comprehend. This must have been the reason for the feeling of being unfulfilled of one who fled to God under the pressure of his interhuman relations. We, who are in Jesus Christ, understand that he who has seen Jesus has seen the Father. This deep satisfaction, which is ours, could only be divined by the Levites.
The Korahites describe this situation as a double attack: being forsaken by God to whom they had fled, and being oppressed by the enemy, threatened by death itself, so that they are like people who are mourning. This paradox has no basis in the reality in which a child of God lives, but it is a vivid expression of their feelings. Our experience of reality can sometimes be rather strange. As New Testament Christians we may quote the Apostle Paul by saying: "If God is for us, who can be against us?"3
I cannot read this psalm without remembering the story of a Dutchman who, during World War II, was led away to the firing squad by the Nazi, because he had hidden Allied pilots who had parachuted over Holland, when their plans were shot down. Going to his death he sang the hymn based on these verses:
"Send forth your light and your truth,
let them bring me to your holy mountain,
to the place where you dwell.
Then will I go to the altar of God,
to God, my joy and my delight."
If light and truth are the elements which lead us to the place of God's revelation, then it is not a physical but a spiritual distance that separates us from God. The separation is not caused by deportation but by darkness and lies. More than anyone else in the New Testament the Apostle John emphasizes that God is light, and that light is synonymous with holiness. God leads us through life by making us partakers of His holiness, which is the fulness of His being. The Holy Spirit within us will ultimately make us what He is. We are being led by the glory of the Lord. God Himself is the measure of all truth. Everything that conforms to His being is truth; everything that deviates from Him is a lie. And if God's light and truth guide us through life, it means that God Himself goes with us. Moses said to God: "If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here."4 We cannot do with less than that. The Father literally sent His light and truth in Jesus Christ. When the Word became flesh, light shone in the darkness, and the Word was full of grace and truth.5 The Prologue of John's Gospel is one great commentary on this truth. The coming of our Lord Jesus Christ was the answer of the prayer of the Korahites. According to the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews, one of the purposes of Christ's coming into the world was to brings many sons to glory.6 Jesus brings us back to the real altar, to the heavenly Jerusalem.
For us, who have come to know Him, the altar is not only the place where the Lord of glory was crucified for our sins, but also the place where we were crucified with Him. It is the place where we give ourselves to Him, spirit, soul, and body, the place where we burst out in unrestrained praise. At the altar we acknowledge God as "God my exceeding joy."7 The cross of our Lord Jesus Christ is, at the same time, the awful abyss of human depravity, of demonic activity, of unselfish abandon, and of victorious love. Our song of praise contains both the dissonance, and the harmony of this mystery. There is nothing cheap in going to the altar of God. Our song of praise will cost us almost as much as it cost Him. The place of worship is full of blood, and death, and life, and joy.
If we understand this, we will say to ourselves: "Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God…!" Our struggle will always be in applying the truth of the cross to the present time in which we live. The coal of the altar has to touch our lips, or any other part of our life that is in need of being touched.
So this forty-third psalm and third stanza of psalm forty-two, with the question: "Why are you downcast, O my soul?" becomes a challenge by the minority that knows intimate fellowship with God, to the majority that urges us to serve God, but does not bring forth fruit, and even to the people who live a lie. Those people will probably rediscover this psalm during the great tribulation.