To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David. How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O LORD my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,” lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken. But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

The struggle of David in this passage - his soul and his heart. How often do we interpret our own “freaking out” as God’s departure from us? Has he not said “I will never leave you nor forsake you?”. Too often I believe we interpret our frustration as cause to think the Lord has left us, when all the while we have simply turned our gaze away from Him to ourselves.

His soul is “taking counsel long”. In other words, he is churning thoughts, advice, and voices in his head until he grows extremely weary and bogged down in His soul. Overanalyzing every thought, word, and action of ourselves and others often leads to this feeling. I recognize this feeling as “anxiety” in me, and find that once I cast it upon the Lord, who’s burden is light, I find true freedom. The mind is a great wonder God has given us, but the Bible says we are to be “transformed by the renewing of our mind.”

Matthew Henry says “It is some ease to a troubled spirit to give vent to its griefs, especially to give vent to them at the throne of grace, where we are sure to find one who is afflicted in the afflictions of his people and is troubled with the feeling of their infirmities; thither we have boldness of access by faith, and there we have parrēsia - freedom of speech. ” Hallelujah!

His heart has sorrow in it all the day, surely because His mind is so anxiously pondering everything, never reaching any conclusions. Because of this, he recognizes that the enemy is exalted over him. Why? The enemy’s goal is to bring us to confusion, God’s goal is to bring us to Himself, the epitome of steadfastness and consistency. “God is not the author of confusion..”

The answer to all of this is simple - that God would “light up His eyes”. God must bring the illumination of the situation, the revelation into the matter, break through all the darkness of his mind and heart with His marvelous light. His light reveals. His light opens up, His light discovers, uncovers, understands, and brings a right seeing of Him in the situation.

His light is “the light of life” that causes him to live and not sleep in death nor be shaken at all. My heart shall rejoice in your salvation, because your love is steadfast, even when my mind is going crazy and my heart is filled with sorrow - your love is the one thing that never changes, the rock that is higher than I that I can cling to when the storms rage inside me.

“I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.” I love the word bountiful, its the word that was used to describe the fruitfulness of the Garden of Eden. It is the word that describes the life we have access to in Christ, wherein is “every spiritual blessing.” I’m not sure David wrote the last few verses because He had “figured out” the entire situation or that he left in the middle to defeat his enemies and come back, I believe he was still uncertain of what was to come. However, it was the realization and the seeing of God’s steadfast love and light which is ABLE to help in all situations that prompted Him to worship and be at rest in His mind and soul.

Often it is not God’s desire to take us away from the trial we are enduring, but to know the hand that holds ours within it. That lesson is far worth the effort!

Not to mention that the Lord loves the singing it produces!