Psalms 42:1-11

As the heart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God.

The Korachite psalms

The second book of the Psalter, characterized by the use of the Divine name “Elohim” instead of “Jehovah,” begins with a cluster of seven psalms (reckoning Psalms 43:1, as one), of which the superscription is most probably regarded as ascribing their authorship to “the sons of Korach.” These were Levites, and (1 Chronicles 9:19, etc.) the office of keepers of the door of the sanctuary had been hereditary in their family from the time of Moses. Some of them were among the faithful adherents of David at Ziklag (1 Chronicles 12:6), and in the new model of worship inaugurated by him the Korachites were doorkeepers and musicians. They retained the former office in the second Temple (Nell. 11:19). The ascription of authorship to a group is remarkable, and has led to the suggestion that the superscription does not specify the authors, but the persons for whose use the psalms in question were composed. The Hebrew would bear either meaning; but if the later is adopted, all these psalms are anonymous. The same construction is found in Book I. in Psalms 25:1; Psalms 26:1; Psalms 27:1; Psalms 28:1; Psalms 35:1; Psalms 37:1., where it is obviously the designation of authorship, and it is naturally taken to have the same force in these Korachite psahns. It has been conjectured by Delitzsch that the Korachite Psalms originally formed a separate collection entitled “Songs of the Sons of Korach,” and that this title afterwards passed over into the superscriptions when they were incorporated in the Psalter. The supposition is unnecessary. It was not literary fame which psalmists hungered for. The actual author, as one of a band of kinsmen who worked and sang together, would, not unnaturally, be content to sink his individuality and let his songs go forth as that of the band. Clearly the superscriptions rested upon some tradition or knowledge, else defective information would not have been acknowledged as it is in this one; but some name would have been coined to fill the gap. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

Over the aqueducts of water

The Hebrew term is apheek; and in the original the clause reads, al apheekaiyrnayim, which may be translated, “over the aqueducts of water.” “Aqueducts are, and always must have been, very common in Palestine, not only for bringing water to waterless towns, but also for the purpose of irrigating gardens. Ruined remains of these structures are to be found everywhere throughout the country. It seems certain that there must have been a familiar technical term for them in Hebrew, and that the writers of the Bible, who draw their imagery so largely from the features of garden culture, must have referred to these precious water-channels. One word in Hebrew, the sense of which seems to have been entirely overlooked, must plainly have borne this meaning, the word “apheek,” which occurs eighteen times in the Old Testament, and also in some names of places, as Aphaik, near Beth-boron. The translators of our Authorized Version have been able to make but little of it, rendering it by seven different words, most frequently by “river,” which it cannot possibly mean. The word comes from “Aphak, restrained,” or “forced,” and this is the main idea of an aqueduct, which is a structure formed for the purpose of constraining or forcing a stream of water to flow in a desired direction. So strongly were the Palestine aqueducts made, that their ruins, probably in some places two thousand years old, remain to this day. In rare instances (there is one at Jerusalem) they are fashioned of bored stones. Sometimes for a short distance they are cut as open grooves in the hard limestone of the hills, or as small channels bored through their sides. When the level required it, they are built up stone structures above ground. But the aqueducts of Palestine mostly consist of earthenware pipes, laid on or underground in a casing of strong cement. “Apheek,” I contend, in its technical sense stands for an ordinary covered Palestine aqueduct, but it is also poetically applied to the natural underground channels, which supply springs and to the gorge-like, rocky beds of some mountain streams which appear like huge, open aqueducts. .. The psalmist thirsts for God, and longs to taste again the joy of His house, like the parched and weary hind who comes to a covered channel conveying the living waters of some far-off spring across the intervening desert. She scents the precious current in its bed of adamantine cement, or hears its rippling flow close beneath her feet, or, perchance, sees it deep down through one of the narrow air holes; and as she agonises for the inaccessible draught, she “pants over the aqueducts of water.” (James Nell, M. A.)

The soul compared to a hind

The “soul” is feminine in Hebrew, and is here compared to the female deer, for “pants” is the feminine form of the verb, though its noun is masculine. It is better, therefore, to translate “hind” than “hart.” The “soul” is the seat of emotions and desires. It “pants” and “thirsts,” is “cast down” and disquieted; it is “poured out”; it can be bidden to “hope.” Thus tremulous, timid, mobile, it is beautifully compared to a hind. The true object of its longings is always God, however little it knows for what it is thirsting. But they are happy in their very yearnings who are conscious of the true direction of these, and can say that it is God for whom they are athirst. The correspondence between man’s needs and their true object is involved in that name “the living God”; for a heart can rest only in one all-sufficient Person, and must have a heart to throb against. But no finite being can still them; and after all sweetnesses of human loves and helps of human strengths, the soul’s thirst remains unslaked, and the Person who is enough must be the living God. The difference between the devout and the worldly man is just that the one can only say, “My soul pants and thirsts,” and the other can add “after Thee, O God.” (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

The religious aspects of a soul in earnest

I. Intensely thirsting after God. This craving for “the living God”--

1. Renders all logical arguments for a Supreme Being unnecessary.

2. Indicates the only method for elevating the race.

II. Greatly distressed on account of the wicked.

1. Taunted on account of his religion.

2. Deprived of the public privileges of his religion.

III. Anxiously expostulating with self on account of despondency.

1. He inquired into the reason.

2. He resolved upon the remedy. (Homilist.)

Religious depression

I. The causes of David’s despondency.

1. The thirst for God.

2. The temporary loss of the sense of God’s personality.

Let us search our own experience. What we want is, we shall find, not infinitude, but a boundless One; not to feel that love is the law of this universe, but to feel One whose name is Love. For else, if in this world of order there be no One in whose bosom that order is centred, and of whose Being it is the expression: in this world of manifold contrivance, no Personal Affection which gave to the skies their trembling tenderness, and to the snow its purity: then order, affection, contrivance, wisdom, are only horrible abstractions, and we are in the dreary universe alone. Foremost in the declaration of this truth was the Jewish religion. It proclaimed--not “Let us meditate on the Adorable light, it shall guide our intellects”--which is the most sacred verse of the Hindoo sacred books: but “Thus saith the Lord, I am, that I am.” In that word “I am,” is declared Personality; and it contains, too, in the expression, “Thus saith,” the real idea of a revelation, viz., the voluntary approach of the Creator to the creature. Accordingly, these Jewish psalms are remarkable for that personal tenderness towards God--those outbursts of passionate individual attachment which are in every page. How different this from the God of the theologian--a God that was, but scarcely is: and from the God of the philosopher--a mere abstraction, a law into which all other laws are resolved. Quite differently speaks the Bible of God. Not as a Law: but as the Life of all that is--the Being who feels and is felt--is loved and loves again--counts the hairs of my head: feeds the ravens, and clothes the lilies: hears my prayers, and interprets them through a Spirit which has affinity with my spirit. It is a dark moment when the sense of that personality is lost: more terrible than the doubt of immortality. For of the two--eternity without a personal God, or God for seventy years without immortality no one after David’s heart would hesitate, “Give me God for life, to know and be known by Him.” No thought is more hideous than that of an eternity without Him. “My soul is athirst for God.” The desire for immortality is second to the desire for God.

3. The taunts of scoffers. “Where is now thy God?” (Psalms 42:3). This is ever the way in religious perplexity: the unsympathizing world taunts or misunderstands. In spiritual grief they ask, why is he not like others? In bereavement they call your deep sorrow unbelief. In misfortune they comfort you, like Job’s friends, by calling it a visitation. Or like the barbarians at Melita, when the viper fastened on Paul’s hand: no doubt they call you an infidel, though your soul be crying after God. Specially in that dark and awful hour, when He called on God, “Eloi, Eloi:” they said, “Let be: let us see whether Elias will come to save Him.”

II. David’s consolation.

1. And first, in hope (verse 5): distinguish between the feelings of faith that God is present, and the hope of faith that He will be so. There are hours in which physical derangement darkens the windows of the soul; days in which shattered nerves make life simply endurance; months and years in which intellectual difficulties, pressing for solution, shut out God. Then faith must be replaced by hope. “What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.” Clouds and darkness are round about Him: but righteousness and truth are the habitation of His throne.

2. This hope was in God. The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in ourselves: self-contemplation instead of gazing upon God. In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort never can be. For first, it is impossible to derive consolation from our own feelings, because of their mutability. Nor can we gain comfort from our own acts, because in a low state we cannot justly judge them. And we lose time in remorse. In God alone is our hope. (F. W. Robertson, M. A.)

Living thirst

This language is that of the true Christian believer. The strength that he feels is not the strength of a transient passion of the heart, but the thirst of an enlightened, sanctified, and believing soul. The object of that thirst is God. Its object indicates its origin; for a thirst that stretches upwards to God originates with the inspiration of God, and, like true religion, must have had its origin in God. This thirst is caused by admiration of God; by love of God; by desire after His holiness and His presence, and His promised restoration of all things. But how does the Christian reach the element that will satisfy this the thirst of his soul?

1. First, by thinking upon Him. A Christian in solitude and in silence can think of God. The literary man can think of literature, and hold communion with the spirits of departed “literati” through the medium of the writings they have left behind them. The statesman can think of great political questions, and his mind can be absorbed with them. Now, communion with God, thinking of Him, what He is, what He has done what He has promised to do, what He will give, and what He has given, is really letting the water pot descend into that better than Jacob’s well, to bring from its cool depths that which will satisfy our thirst for God, for the living God.

2. A Christian will try to satisfy his thirst for God by reading His holy Word. What is the Bible? Just a description of what God is. It is poetry, and oratory, and history, and all the resources of human thought, of human genius, inspired by the Spirit of God, designed to stimulate your thirst for Him, and to bring you into closer contact with the inexhaustible Fountain out of which you may drink freely.

3. In the next place, you gratify this thirst, and you deepen it also while you do so, in the exercises of public prayer and praise, and public worship.

4. And we gratify this thirst, as well as excite it, by appearing from time to time at the table of our blessed Lord. (J. Cumming, D. D.)

Thirsting for God

I. The causes of this spiritual thirst.

1. Admiration of the Divine attributes.

2. Love for the Divine Being,

3. A lively sense of Divine goodness in the dispensation of both temporal and spiritual benefits.

4. A deep sense of his wants as a sinner.

5. A conviction of the inadequacy of his inward sources of happiness, and of the unsatisfying nature of all sublunary enjoyments.

6. The afflictions which he is called to endure.

II. The means by which the Christian seeks to gratify this spiritual thirst.

1. The studious reading of God’s Word.

2. The exercise of devout and holy contemplation.

3. Prayer and praise.

4. Avoidance of sin.

5. Eye fixed on heaven. (G. Thacker.)

Panting after God

Genuine piety is the tendency of the soul towards God; the aspiration of the immortal spirit after the great Father of spirits, in a desire to know Him and to be like Him.

I. How Is A desire to know God and to be like him implanted and cherished in the heart of man? All true piety, all genuine devotion in fallen man, has a near and intimate connection with the Lord Jesus, and is dependent on Him. It is by His mediation that the devout soul aspires towards the blessed God; it thirsts for fuller and clearer discoveries of His glories, as they shine with a mild effulgence in the person of His incarnate Son; it longs to attain that conformity to Him of which it sees in Jesus Christ the perfect model.

II. The excellence of this panting of the soul after God, this vital principle of all genuine piety.

1. It is a most ennobling principle; it elevates and purifies the soul, and produces in the character all that is lovely and of good report.

2. It is a most active principle. From a world groaning under the ruins of the apostasy, where darkness, and pollution, and misery prevail, and death reigns, the child of God looks up to that glorious Being whose essence pervades the universe, and whose perfections and blessedness are immense, unchanging, and eternal, and he longs to know and resemble Him.

3. It is a permanent and unfailing principle. Each changing scene of his earthly pilgrimage affords the devout man opportunity of growing in the knowledge and the likeness of God, and the touch of death at which his material frame returns to its native dust, does but release his spirit from every clog, that she may rise unencumbered to see Him as He is and know even as she is known. (Bishop Armstrong.)

The panting hart

In this state of mind there is something sad. But something commendable also. For the next best thing to having close communion with God is to be wretched until we find Him.

I. The object of the desire which is here described. It was for God. Probably this psalm belongs to the time of the revolt of Absalom. But David’s desire is not for lost royalties, wealth, palaces, children: no, nor the temple, nor his country, but God. He longed to appear again before God, so that--

1. He might unite in the worship of the people.

2. Gain restored confidence as to his interest in the love of God, and to have it shed abroad in his heart. May such desires be ours.

II. The characteristics of this desire.

1. Directness. The hart panteth, there can be no doubt what for. So with David, he goes straight to the point. He knew what he needed.

2. Unity. As the hart longs for nothing but the water brooks, so David for God only. Have you ever seen a little child that has lost its way crying in the streets for “mother”? Now, you shall give that child what you will, but it will not stay crying for “mother.” I know it is thus with all the family of God in regard to an absent God.

3. The intensity of this desire. How awful is thirst. In a long and weary march soldiers have been able to endure much want of solid food, but--as in the marches of Alexander--they have died by hundreds from thirst.

4. Its vitality. Thirst is connected with the very springs of life. Men must drink or die.

5. And it is an expressive desire. The Scotch version reads--“Like as the hart for water brooks, In thirst doth pant and bray.” And in the margin of our Bibles it reads, “As the hart brayeth,” etc. The hart, usually so silent, now begins to bray in its agony. So the believer hath a desire which forceth itself into expression. It may be inarticulate, “groanings which cannot be uttered,” but they are all the more sincere and deep. In all ways will he express before God his great desire.

III. Its exciting causes.

1. Something inward, the secret life within. A camel does not pant after water brooks, because it carries its own supplies of water within it; but the hart does because it has no such resources.

2. But also something outward. The hart because of the heat, the distance, the dogs. So the believer. The source of David’s longings lay partly in the past. We remember delightful seasons gone by. Also from the present, lie was at that moment in eminent distress. And the future. “Hope thou in God,” saith he, “for I shall yet praise Him.”

IV. Comfortable encouragements. There is no thirst like the thirst of the man who has once known what the sweetness of the wine of heaven is. A poor king must be poor indeed. Yet out of our strong desires after God there come these comforts.

1. The thought--whence come they? This desire is a gift from God.

2. If He has given it me, will He not fulfil it?

3. And if I have wandered from my God, tie is willing to forgive. Let us return to Him, then, and let us recollect that when we return we shall soon be uplifted into the light. It does not take long for the Lord to make summer-time in the wintry heart. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Thirsting for God

I. The object of the psalmist’s desire--God. By which he means--

1. A sense of God’s favour.

2. A sight of God’s glory, so that he might not merely know that God was glorious, but that he might feel it.

3. The enjoyment of God’s presence. Hence it was that he longed after God’s house, for it was there that so often God had met him and had satisfied this thirst of his soul.

II. The strength of his desire. “My soul panteth, yea,” etc. This was his soul’s deep yearning. Hence we learn--

1. That a soul really desiring God can be satisfied with nothing else. Nor--

2. With but a little of Him. It is not a drop or a taste of the water brook that quiets the panting deer. He plunges into it and drinks eagerly of it. And so with our souls. The more these blessed waters are drunk the more they are relished and desired.

3. The cause which made David thus earnestly desire God. It was his affliction, and his inward distress and darkness. And this is God’s gracious purpose in letting such things come upon us. Do not be dismayed if you can only say, “I wish I did thus thirst.” We are saved not for our thirst, but for Christ’s sake. (C. Bradley, M. A.)

The longing for God

I. What this longing of David was. It was not, observe, his lost crown that he most longed for; nor the broken peace of his kingdom; nor even Absalom his son; he had deeper longings than these; he had a deeper need than they could supply. What he did long for was God Himself; for God, he knew, was the strength of his heart, and the only portion which could satisfy him for ever.

II. This longing is common to God’s saints (2 Corinthians 5:4; 2 Timothy 4:8; Titus 2:13; 2 Peter 3:12; Revelation 22:20). A great part of our nature is made for feeling; a great portion of our life is made up of it; every moment is full of love, and hope, and desire, and fear; and Christ who claims the whole man will not pass over these levers of action, these moving powers of the whole man, as of no importance. Let us give them their proper place; and if David, and Paul, and Peter, and John, mark out a longing after God as the healthy state of the soul, let us not be satisfied if we are strangers to such a longing.

III. How the presence of this longing is an earnest of complete blessedness. God’s Holy Spirit is Himself the water brook for man’s consolation; and He comes, as the Nile when it overflows its banks, and wherever there is a channel, or an aperture, or even a crack in the dry and thirsty soil, there He pours in the life-giving streams of comfort and of love, as one who knows not how to give and to bless enough. Your mourning heart is opened by its very grief, and He is come to bless it. Doubt Him not. Doubt not but that the same Spirit will restore you to peace and joy; will fill you with the assurance of fresh hope; will strengthen you to bear meekly the yoke which He shall lay upon you; will make you to overflow with love, and give you even upon earth a foretaste of heaven. (Canon Morse.)

Desire after God

I. Divine in its source. Desires are the pulses of the soul. We are that in the sight of God which we habitually desire and aim to be. Archbishop Leighton said, “I should utterly despair of my own religion, were it not for that text, ‘Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness.’”

II. Intense in its degree. Thirst is the strongest feeling we know. It is the established order of nature, and an original law in the constitution of the mind, that love should create love; and if this obtain in the measures and intercourse of human kindness, much more might we expect it to prevail in the sacred converse which is held between earth and heaven--“spirits are not thus finely touched, but to fine issues.”

III. Practical in its tendency, and ennobling in its influence. A pure affection towards an earthly object exalts the soul in which it dwells, by associating another’s happiness with our own; according to Wordsworth’s fine line--“Love betters that is best,” by strengthening those fine ties which ally us to the side of virtue. How much more must this be the case with our religious emotions, where the object is infinite and the benefactor is Divine.

IV. Prophetic of its own fulfilment.

Panting after God

I. The believing pant after the favour of God. The most luxurious pasture, or the securest shade and retreat of the forest has no attraction for the hart panting in the agony of thirst for the water brook; and what were honour, power, or wealth to trembling sinners, if that which alone can meet their necessities be withheld?

II. The believing pant after resemblance to God. This is a part of salvation as well as the former, and the two are inseparably connected. No man has the favour of God that does not aspire to be like Him, and no man who is like God is without His favour and complacential regard.

III. The believing pant after spiritual intercourse and communion with God.

IV. The believing pant after the presence and enjoyment of God in heaven. This is the final and glorious issue to which their hopes and desires are habitually directed; all that they pant after in God on earth shall in that better country be possessed fully and for ever. (J. Kirkwood.)

The soul’s thirst for God

Such psalms as this and the sixty-third are as important items in the history of man as the hieroglyphics of Egypt, or the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria, or the stone implements of prehistoric times: if you are to have a complete system of anthropology, to investigate and know what man really is, it is manifest that you must take account of the aspirations of his soul, as well as of the power of his intellect or the skill of his hands. Conceive an investigation as to the nature of man being made by some one quite fresh to the subject--say an inhabitant of Jupiter or Saturn: conceive such an investigator to have examined our ships and our steam engines and our agriculture, our books of science, our treatises on law and medicine and what not: and suppose that when all this was done, and our distant visitor was forming his opinion about man, he suddenly stumbled upon a book containing such words as these. “My soul is athirst for God,” etc.; suppose this, and what would be the result? “Certainly this at least,” our investigator would say, “this is quite a new view of man: ‘thirst for the living God’ And that is something very different in kind from agriculture and commerce and steam engines and law and medicine--all these things might exist, and be the things upon which the mind of man fully occupied itself--but a soul thirsting for the living God--that is something totally different in kind from what I had hitherto imagined man to be: I must begin my examination of man all over again.” And surely, if we consider the manner in which the different parts of this wonderful universe fit one into another, and exhibit consistency and order and unity, the thirst of the human soul for God is a good argument that there is a God to be thirsted for. When the hart seeks the water brooks, it is no speculative voyage of discovery upon which the poor creature goes. The living creature and the water are close akin to each other: if you analyze the animal’s substance you will find that water constitutes a large proportion of it: and though this does not prove that every hart that is thirsty will at once be fortunate enough to find a water brook, it is a good proof that water is what the animal must find if it is not to die, and it gives a strong reason to believe that the water brooks will somehow be found. And this gives us a rough suggestion of the argument for the Being of God, arising from the thirst for God which the human soul is undoubtedly capable of feeling: men would not thirst for that with which their own nature has no affinity: it is the unseen presence of the Spirit of God--that Spirit which was breathed into man when he became a living soul it is this presence which makes him thirst for God Himself, and which assures him that there is a God without whom he cannot live, “in whose presence there is fulness of joy, and at whose right hand there is pleasure for evermore.” One might have fancied or even hoped that the truth of God’s being, which was evidently the support of human souls three thousand years ago, would not have been questioned now, but as there were persons in those days who were ready at once to turn upon a believer in trouble and ask him scornfully, Where is thy God now? and as there were others who were prepared to assert dogmatically, There is no God, so it has been true ever since that the being of God has been liable to be denied. Of course that which you cannot see it is always easy to deny. Who can contradict you? Is not one man’s No as good as another man’s Aye? (Bishop Harvey Goodwin.)

Man’s craving for God

Both these psalms are by “the Sons of Koraeh,” a family of Levites whose inheritance lay on the eastern side of Jordan. They were appointed doorkeepers of the Tabernacle. They possessed the Hebrew faculty for music in a high degree; and some of them possessed the closely allied faculty of poetical conception and utterance, and became “singers” in both senses of that word, composing the psalms which they afterwards set to music and chanted in the Temple. Dwelling on the other side of Jordan, it was often impossible for them to reach Jerusalem. Many of the Korachite psalms were composed when they were thus kept from their loved work. They abound in expressions of intense passionate desire to appear before the Lord. If we ask, Why this intense craving for the Temple and its services, the sons of Koraeh reply: “It is because we want Him, the Living God.” Do these words express one of the primitive intuitions, one of the profoundest yearnings and desires of every human heart, a yearning which no words can adequately utter, much more over-state? Is this the secret of the restlessness which underlies all our rest--that we want God, and cannot be at peace until He lift up upon us the light of His countenance? We are denizens of two worlds, the natural and the spiritual, and these two, opposed as they may seem, are really one, since the natural world is but the “body,” the complex phenomenon and organ of the spiritual. So manifold are the ways in which the sense of a Divine Presence is quickened within us, and our need of that Presence, that it is hard to select those which are most suggestive and impressive Only as we trust, love and reverence God, can the cry of our heart be stilled, and the infinite hunger of the soul be satisfied. (Samuel Cox, D. D.)

Religious affections attended with increase of spiritual longing

The higher the gracious affections are raised, observes Edwards, the more is a spiritual appetite after spiritual attainments increased; but the false affections rest satisfied in themselves.

I. Marks of the true affection.

1. The more a true Christian loves God, the more he desires to love Him.

2. The greatest eminency has no tendency to satiety.

3. Spiritual enjoyments are soul-satisfying.

II. Marks of the false affections.

1. As the false affections arise, the desire for more grace is abated.

2. As soon as the soul is convinced that its title to heaven is sure, all its desires are satisfied.

III. If hypocrites profess to have the true affections, all their desires are for by-ends.

1. They long after clearer discoveries, but it is that they may be the better satisfied with themselves.

2. Or their longings are forced, because they think they must have them.

IV. Good signs of grace.

1. A longing after a more holy heart.

2. A longing after a more holy life. (Lewis O. Thompson.)

Thirsting for God

I. Man needs God.

1. Think how helpless we are in the presence of all the mysteries of life without God.

2. Think of the far greater mysteries of a moral and spiritual kind by which we are surrounded; how the wicked appear to triumph over the righteous, how the kingdom of darkness seems likely to gain the victory over the kingdom of light; and then ask what rest we can find, unless we believe and know that God ruleth over all, and that He will yet bring all things into subjection unto Him.

3. Think of the awful power of sin, how it enslaves the soul and oppresses the heart and troubles the conscience; how it spreads like fire and like pestilence, carrying death and desolation wherever it goes; and then ask how we are to be delivered from this terrible destroyer, except by the power of the living God.

4. Think how we need God in all the temptations and trials, the perplexities and cares, the business and toil and responsibility.

II. God gives himself to man. Just as He gives light and beauty for the eye, sound and music for the ear, bread for the hunger and water for the thirst of the body, so He gives Himself, for the satisfaction of the soul. It remains for us to abide in fellowship with Him, to walk all the day in the light of His countenance, and to make our life on earth a pledge and earnest of the nobler and diviner life of heaven. (G. Hunsworth, M. A.)

God

I. As A personality.

1. That He is as distinct from the universe as the architect from the building, the author from his book, admits of no rational doubt.

2. We believe in His personality

(1) Because we have it. Could He give what He has not?

(2) Because we instinctively believe it, and

(3)Because the Bible declares it.

II. As a living personality. “The living God.” The world abounds with dead gods, but the God is living, consciously, independently, actively, ubiquitously. The God of modern Christendom is rather the God that was living in Old Testament times, and in the days of Christ, than the God that is living here, and with every man.

III. As a living personality craved after by the human soul. “My soul thirsteth for the living God.”

1. The soul is constitutionally theistic. It believes in God.

2. The soul is immensely great. Nothing but God can satisfy it. It will not be satisfied with His works, however vast and lovely, it must have Him Himself. (Homilist.)

Thirsting for God

As the hunted hart; as the hart flying from the enemy, more dead than living; as the overrun, overborne, imperilled hart pants and cries for the water brooks, so. .. then we fill in our human experience; for if we are living any life at all we are hunted, persecuted, threatened. Until we are sensible of being hunted we cannot pray much. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so. .. ” The “so” is balanced by the “as.” These words of manner must be equal the one to the other; the hart will be ashamed of them if it should ever come to know that so quiet, tame speech addressed to heaven is supposed to represent its earnestness when it is hunted by furious hounds. “As the hart. .. ” Then this soul-panting after God is natural. Whatever is natural admits of legitimate satisfaction; whatever is acquired grows by what it feeds on until it works out the ruin of its devotee. No hart ever panted after wine; no bird in the air ever fluttered because of a desire to be intoxicated. When we lose or leave the line of nature we become weak, infatuated, lost. Tertullian says the natural response of the human heart is Christian. “So panteth my soul after Thee, O God.” Yea, for nothing less. Man needs all God. Every sinner needs the whole Cross. Every flower needs the whole solar system. Herein is the mystery of Divine passion and love, that we can all have a whole--a mystery, mayhap a contradiction in words, but a sweet reality in experience. “For Thee, O God.” Then for nothing strange. As the water brooks were made for the chased or panting hart, so God lives to satisfy the soul of man. Herein see the greatness of the soul of man. What does that soul need to fill it and satisfy it, and quiet it, and give it all it’s possible consciousness of glory? It needs the living God. Atheists themselves are intermittently religious. Even God-deniers are in some degree in an unconscious sense God-seekers. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The feelings and sentiments of a renewed soul

I. From whence does this vehement breathing after God arise? It evidently arises from a deep sense of our own insufficiency, and the insufficiency of any creature, however accomplished or perfect, to render the soul happy. The soul, brought to feel its own indigence, is encouraged to look forward with hope, and made to thirst after God, the living God,

II. What is implied in this thirsting for God?

1. An experimental feeling of the love of God.

2. Delight in every means, in every duty, in every ordinance of Divine appointment, where He hath promised to meet with His humble worshippers, and to bless them.

3. A heart disposed to wrestle with every difficulty that obstructs our access to God, and stands in the way of the full enjoyment of Him, as reconciled to us, and at peace with us.

4. This thirsting for God never fails to be accompanied with longing desires to be with the Lord, and to behold His glory. Sooner may iron cease to be attracted by the lodestone, or the sparks cease to fly upwards, or the rivers to roll towards the ocean, than a soul thirsting for God should sit down satisfied with any attainments at which it can arrive in this mixed and imperfect state. (T. Gordon.)

The soul of man has no resource independent of God

A camel does not pant after water brooks, because it carries its own water within it; but the hart does, because it has no inward resources. After being hunted on a hot day, it has no inward supplies; it is drained of its moisture. So are we. We do not carry a store of grace within of our own upon which we can rely; we need to come again, and again, and again, to the Divine fountain, and drink again from the eternal spring. Hence it is because we have a new life, and that life is dependent upon God, and has all its fresh springs in Him, that therefore we pant and thirst after Him. O Christian, if you had a sacred life which could be maintained by its own energies within, you might do without your God, but since you are naked, and poor, and miserable, apart from Him, you must come and drink day by day of the living springs, or else you faint and die. (C. H. Spurgeon.)