"I asked the Lord that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace;
Might more of His salvation know,
And seek more earnestly His face.
'Twas He who taught me thus to pray;
And He, I trust, has answered prayer,
But it has been in such a way
As almost drove me to despair.
I hoped that in some favored hour
At once He'd answer my request;
And by His love's constraining power,
Subdue my sins and give me rest.
Instead of this, He made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry powers of hell
Assault my soul in every part." —Cowper.
"If we listen to David's harp, we shall hear as many
hearse-like harmonies as carols."—Lord Bacon.
"If we be either in outward affliction or in inward
distress, we may accommodate to ourselves the melancholy expressions we find
here. If not, we must sympathize with those whose case they speak too plainly,
and thank God it is not our own case."—Matthew Henry.
Although this Psalm, in bold and striking figure, presents
a faithful miniature picture of the Believer's life, we must regard it as
depicting an extraordinary experience at a peculiar passage of David's
history, and which has its counterpart still in that of many of God's
children.
The writer of the Psalm was evidently undergoing "spiritual
depression"—what is sometimes spoken of as "spiritual desertion,"—that sorrow,
dreadful in its reality—too deep for utterance—deeper than the yawning chasm
made by family bereavement—the sorrow of all sorrows, the loss of God in
the soul!
There is much caution needed in speaking of this. There are
causes which lead to spiritual depression which are purely physical,
arising from a diseased body, an overstrung mind—a succession of calamities
weakening and impairing the nervous system. We know how susceptible are the
body and mind together, of being affected by external influences. "We are,"
says Robertson, an able analyzer of human emotions, "fearfully and wonderfully
made. Of that constitution which in our ignorance we call union of soul and
body, we know little respecting what is cause, and what effect. We would
sincerely believe that the mind has power over the body; but it is just as
true that the body rules the mind. Causes apparently the most trivial—a heated
room, lack of exercise—a sunless day, a chilling northern aspect—will make all
the difference between happiness and unhappiness; between faith and doubt;
between courage and indecision. To our fancy there is something humiliating in
being thus at the mercy of our animal nature. We would sincerely find nobler
causes for our emotions." Yes—many of those sighs and tears, and morbid,
depressed feelings, which Christians speak of as the result of spiritual
darkness and the desertion of God, are merely the result of physical
derangement, the penalty often for the violation of the laws of health. The
atmosphere we breathe is enough to account for them. They come and go—rise and
fall with the mercury in the tube. These are cases, not for the spiritual, but
for the bodily physician. Their cure is in attendance to the usual laws and
prescriptions which regulate the healthy action of the bodily functions.
There is another class of causes which lead to spiritual
depression which are partly physical and partly religious. There must
necessarily be depression where there is undue elation; where the
soul-structure is built on fluctuating frames and feelings, and the religious
life is made more subjective than objective.
Many imagine, unless they are at all times in a glow of
fervor—an ecstatic frame of feeling—all must be wrong with them. "You will not
be asked in the last Great Day whether you had great enjoyment and much
enlargement of soul here on earth. Speak to that vast multitude, which no man
can number, now around the throne. Ask them whether they came through much
consolation and joy in the Lord. No! through much tribulation. Ask
them whether they were saved by their warmth of love to their Savior! No! But
they had washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."
(Miss Plumptre's Letters)
Now, there is nothing more dangerous or deceptive than a
life of mere feeling; and its most dangerous phase is a life of
religious emotional excitement. It is in the last degree erroneous to consider
all this glowing ecstasy of frame a necessary condition of healthy spiritual
life. Artificial excitement, in any shape, is perilous. Apart
altogether from the moral and religious aspect of the question, the tendency
of the ball-room and theater, and a preference in reading for works of
fiction, is to make a man nauseate the plain, commonplace work, the
occurrences and themes of this everyday world. Feed him on dainties and rich
meats, and he despises husks and plain fare. Equally true is this with regard
to the life of the soul. It is not fed on luscious stimulants and ecstatic
experiences. When it is so, the result is every now and then a collapse; like
a child building his mimic castle too high, the perpendicular and equilibrium
are lost. It totters and falls, and he has just to begin again. The dew
distills, and hangs its spangled jewels on blade and flower, gently and in
silence. The rain comes down in tiny particles and soft showers, not in
drenching water-floods. So the healthy Christian holds on the even tenor of
his way, unaffected by the barometer of feeling. He knows this is apt to be
elevated and depressed by a thousand accidents over which be has no control.
His life is fed, not from the fitful and uncertain streams issuing from the
low ground of his own experience, but from the snow-clad summits—the Alps of
God. Were he thus allowing himself to depend on the rills of his own feelings,
his brook would often be dry in summer—the season when he most needed it;
whereas the supply from the glacier-beds on which the sun shines, is fullest
in these very times of drought.
Add to this, religion is shorn of its glory when it is
dwarfed into a mere thing of sentiment and feeling. Its true grandeur and
greatness is, when it incorporates itself with active duty, and fulfils its
best definition as not a "being" but a "doing." Of nothing,
therefore, do we require to be more jealous, than a guilty, unmanly, morbid
dwelling on feelings and experiences. You remember Elijah, when he fled
pusillanimous and panic-stricken from his work, and took to a hermit-cell amid
the solitudes of Sinai. We find him seated in his lonely cave, his head
drooping on his breast, sullen thought mantling his brow, muttering his
petulant soliloquy, "I am left alone." The voice of God hunts out the fugitive
from duty. "What are you doing here, Elijah? Why in this cave, brooding in a
coward spirit, unworthy of you? Are you to cease to work for Me,
because the high day of excitement on the heights of Carmel are over? Here is
food to strengthen your body, and here is "the still, small voice" of my love
to strengthen your soul. Go forth to active duty. Leave your cave and your
cloak behind you. Take your pilgrim staff, and with the consciousness of a
great work in hand, and a brief time to do it in, arise, and onward to Horeb,
the mount of God!" (1 Kings 19.)
But having thrown out these preliminary cautions, the
question occurs: Are there no cases of spiritual depression or
desertion, arising purely from spiritual causes?
We answer, Yes. The Bible recognizes such. Spiritual
darkness—absence of all spiritual comfort and joy—is no figment of man's
theological creed. It is a sad and solemn verity—the experience, too, of God's
own children. "Who is among you that fears the Lord, that obeys the voice of
his servant, that walks in darkness, and has no light?" (Isa. 50:10.)
"Oh," says the afflicted patriarch of Uz, "that I were as in months past, as
in the days when God preserved me; when his candle shined upon my head, and
when by his light I walked through darkness." (Job 29:2, 3.) "In my
prosperity," is the testimony of David, at a later period of his life, "I
said, I shall never be moved. Lord, by your favor you have made my mountain to
stand strong: you did hide your face, and I was troubled." (Ps.
30:5-7.) "I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the
broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loves: I sought him, but I found
him not. …My beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul
failed when he spoke: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him,
but he gave me no answer." (Sol. Song 3:2, v. 6.) Can we forget a more
dreadful and impressive example? ONE soaring above the reach of all groveling
human experiences, but yet who tells us, in His bitter Eloi cry, that even HE
knew what it was to be God-deserted and forsaken!
Are there any whose eyes trace these pages who have ever
undergone such a season? or it may be are undergoing it now? I stop not to
inquire as to the cause—indulged sin, omitted or carelessly performed duty,
neglect of prayer, worldly conformity. "In the time of need He hides Himself
often, and seems to have forgotten me. Tears have thus been my food, because
of their saying unto my soul, 'where is now your God?' But I am bound by all
the experienced freeness and riches of the Redeemer's grace to say, that when
He hides Himself from me, it is not because He has forgotten me, but
because I have been forgetting Him." (Hewitson)
Are you feelingly alive, painfully conscious that your
love, like that of many, has waxed cold—are you mourning that you have not the
nearness to the Mercy-seat that once you enjoyed—not the love of your Bibles,
and ordinances, and sacraments that you once had—that a heavy cloud mantles
your spiritual horizon—God's countenance, not what once it was, irradiated
with a Father's smiles—nor heaven what once it seemed, a second home?
"O afflicted one, tossed with tempest, not comforted!" do
not despond. In these very sighings and moanings of your downcast spirit,
there are elements for hope and comfort, not for despair. They are the
evidences and indications that the spark, though feeble, is not quenched—that
the pulse, though languid, still beats—that faith, though like a grain of
mustard-seed, is still germinating. "O you of little faith, why do you doubt?"
It is that very shadow that has now come athwart your soul, and which
you so bitterly mourn, which tells of Sunshine. As it is the shadow which
enables us to read the hours on the dial, so is it in the spiritual life. It
is because of these shadows on the soul's dial-face that we can infer the
shining of a better Sun.
"The wicked have no bands in their (spiritual)
death." Their life has been nothing but shadow; they cannot therefore mourn
the loss of a sunshine they never felt or enjoyed. Well has it been said,
"When the refreshing dews of grace seem to be withheld, and we are ready to
say, 'Our hope is lost, God has forgotten to be gracious'—this is that furnace
in which one that is not a child of God never was placed. For Satan takes good
care not to disquiet his children. He has no fire for their souls on this side
everlasting burnings; his fatal teaching ever is, Peace, peace!" (Miss
Plumptre's Letters)
But what, desponding one, is, or ought to be, your resort?
Go! exile in spirit—go, like that royal mourner amid the oak-thickets of
Gilead! Brood no more in unavailing sorrow and with burning tears. You may,
like him, have much to depress your spirit. Black and crimson sins may have
left their indelible stain on the page of memory. In aching heart-throbs, you
may be heaving forth the bitter confession, "My iniquities have
separated between me and my God." But go like him! take down your silent harp.
Its strings may be corroded with rust. They may tell the touching story of a
sad estrangement. Go to the quiet solitude of your chamber. Seek out the
unfrequented path of prayer—choked it may be with the weeds of forgetfulness
and sloth. Cast yourself on your bended knees; and, as the wounded deer bounds
past you (emblem of your own bleeding heart), wake the echoes of your spirit
with the penitential cry, "As the deer pants after the water-brooks, so
pants my soul after you, O God!"