My Soul Thirsts for You
1 A Psalm by David, when he was in the desert of Judah. God, you are my God. I will earnestly seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My flesh longs for you, in a dry and weary land, where there is no water. 2 So I have seen you in the sanctuary, watching your power and your glory. 3 Because your loving kindness is better than life, my lips shall praise you. 4 So I will bless you while I live. I will lift up my hands in your name. 5 My soul shall be satisfied as with the richest food. My mouth shall praise you with joyful lips, 6 when I remember you on my bed, and think about you in the night watches. 7 For you have been my help. I will rejoice in the shadow of your wings. 8 My soul stays close to you. Your right hand holds me up. 9 But those who seek my soul to destroy it shall go into the lower parts of the earth. 10 They shall be given over to the power of the sword. They shall be jackal food. 11 But the king shall rejoice in God. Everyone who swears by him will praise him, for the mouth of those who speak lies shall be silenced.
In a desert with no water, a man says that God's loving kindness is better than being alive.
A Psalm by David, when he was in the desert of Judah. God, you are my God. I will earnestly seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My flesh longs for you, in a dry and weary land, where there is no water.
The wilderness of Judah is limestone and dust, falling away east toward the Salt Sea, and a man in it is thinking about water whether he wants to or not.
A Psalm by David, when he was in the desert of Judah. God, you are my God. I will earnestly seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My flesh longs for you, in a dry and weary land, where there is no water.
The physical condition supplies the vocabulary. He is thirsty, and the thirst becomes the description of something else — not as a literary device but because a man without water has only one category left for wanting.
So I have seen you in the sanctuary, watching your power and your glory.
The memory of worship, recalled in a place where worship is impossible. As in the forty-second psalm, what he has is a recollection of the building he cannot reach.
Because your loving kindness is better than life, my lips shall praise you.
The most extreme claim in the psalm, made by a man whose life is genuinely at risk. Better than life is not a comparison anyone can make casually, and in the desert of Judah it is not an abstraction: he is saying that if the choice came, he knows which he would keep.
My soul shall be satisfied as with the richest food. My mouth shall praise you with joyful lips,
The word describes the fat portions of a sacrifice, the best there is. A starving man in a wilderness describes himself as having eaten well.
when I remember you on my bed, and think about you in the night watches.
The bed is a groundsheet in open country and the night watches are the hours a fugitive stays awake. The psalm takes the two worst features of his situation — no comfort and no sleep — and reports what he does with them.
My soul stays close to you. Your right hand holds me up.
The verb in the first clause is the word used of a man cleaving to his wife Genesis 2:24 — clinging, holding on. And the second clause is the answer to it: he holds on, and he is held up, and the psalm gives both without deciding which is doing the work.
But those who seek my soul to destroy it shall go into the lower parts of the earth.
The pursuers appear only at the end, in three verses. For most of the psalm the man being hunted has not mentioned them.
settled What this mark means