Psalm 63:1-11 O God, you are my God; early will I seek you: my soul thirsts for you, my flesh longs for you in a dry and thirsty land… I need not remind you how true it is that a man is but a bundle of appetites, desires, often tyrannous, often painful, always active. But the misery of it — the reason why man's misery is great upon him — is mainly, I suppose, that he does not know what it is that he wants; that he thirsts, but does not understand what the thirst means, nor what it is that will slake it, His animal appetites make no mistakes; he and the beasts know that when they are thirsty they have to drink, and when they are hungry they have to eat, and when they are drowsy they have to sleep. But the poor instinct of the animal that teaches it what to choose and what to avoid fails us in the higher reaches; and we are conscious of a craving, and do not find that the craving reveals to us the source from whence its satisfaction can be derived. Therefore, "broken cisterns that can hold no water" are at a premium, and "the fountain of living waters" is turned away from, though it could slake so many thirsts. Like ignorant explorers in an enemy's country, we see a stream, and we do not stop to ask whether there is poison in it or not before we glue our thirsty lips to it. There is a great old promise in one of the prophets which puts this notion of the misinterpretation of our thirsts, and the mistakes as to the sources from which they can be slaked, into one beautiful metaphor which is obscured in our English version. The prophet Isaiah says, "the mirage shall become a pool," the romance shall turn into a reality, and the mistakes shall be rectified, and men shall know what it is that they want, and shall get it when they know. Brethren, unless we have listened to the teaching from above, unless we have consulted far more wisely and far more profoundly than many of us have ever done the meaning of our own hearts when they cry out, we, too, shall only be able to take for ours the plaintive cry of the half of this first utterance of the psalmist, and say, despairingly, "My soul thirsteth." Blessed are they who know where the fountain is, who know the meaning of the highest unrests in their own souls, and can go on with clear and true self-revelation, "My soul thirsteth for God." (A. Maclaren, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: {A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.} O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; |
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