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Put Your Hope In God


Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.  (Psalm 42:5)

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Psalm 42:11)

        Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, but happy is he who keeps the law. (Proverbs 29:18)

          Before the first passage shared above, and between it and the second, there is nothing but woe. God feels a million miles away, and even enemies have noticed. All the author has is the memory of God’s actions in the past and the current feeling of abandonment and oppression. Even so, he tells his soul to buck up, twice. Twice he says to his soul to put its hope in God and proclaims that he will yet praise Him.
          The third passage of the day may not seem connected, but it is because hope is not hope without a vision of a positive future. In other words, hope can only be hope if the possibility of blessing is envisioned. Want another connected word? Joy is the firm belief that one is loved by someone who is capable of overseeing on our behalf, and willing to do so.
          If anyone should have had hope, it should have been the nation of Israel, who saw the plagues against Egypt, the dividing the Red Sea and the Jordan, the miracles in the wilderness, the conquest of the Promised Land. But in Psalm 42, the sons of Korah have to tell their souls twice to put their hope in God.
          It sounds to me as if the bulk of the song is being led by feelings. Life’s tough. God’s gone…. It sounds like the soul has stepped off the cliff that I have faced many times in my life. Having stepped off, one falls into the depths of despair, and have to cross a rugged wilderness and climb a sheer rock wall to escape. There are no pitons or ropes. If you fall, you have to try again, injured.
          And the will speaks up and says, “Hey, come on now, soul, you’re not doing your job!” There are times when the will and the mind must take charge over the feelings, grit and grind their teeth and remember that they are part of the “special forces.”
          And the way to do that is to hold on to the vision, to keep the joy set before us, and to put our hope in Him and not in our circumstances.

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