You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water. Psalm 63:1
David wrote this Psalm in a place of solitude, a place out in the wilderness where no one was looking. He could have been his own man out there, breaking free from the requirements of the Jewish religious traditions. Or he could have thrown the largest pity party and succumbed to feelings of worthlessness and of blaming others, or of giving up.
But he didn’t do any of that. Psalm 63 gives us a glimpse into the heart and the character of a person who is the same whether he is at the temple with other worshipers, or in a lonely desert far away from the temple and the people who go there.
In verse 1, David uses the physical terrain as the image for how thirsty he is for God. He is in a wilderness, a dry and weary land where there is no water. In his commentary on this psalm, Calvin uses words like howling wasteland, wild, hideous solitude, and distracting horrors to describe this place. The Hebrew word used for it is midbar. It’s a wilderness of uninhabited land where flocks of sheep or goats are allowed to forage for grass and vegetation. It’s a place where survival has no guarantee. Everyone–man and animals–are doing all they know how just to stay alive.
David uses this picture to confess his desperate need for God’s presence. His soul thirsts for God. His whole being longs for God. It’s like he’s saying his very person is like this parched wasteland waiting and pining for the replenishing waters of God’s presence. He feels as though God is absent and he knows he won’t survive unless God returns.
Verses 2 through 5 tell us that David has had rich and satisfying experiences of God in the past. He has been to the holy place, to the sanctuary, where God made himself known to his people. David has been overwhelmed by God’s power and glory. He has felt God’s love. It is better to him than life. Only God can satisfy him. David chooses to sing and to praise God, even while he is in the desert alone, isolated and hunted.
In verses 6 through 9, David remembers God and his protection at night on his bed, whatever that bed might have been when sleeping outdoors. The night, in the darkness, is when he felt the most vulnerable and unprotected. In the night is when the fears came. But he turned his mind to God and found peace in his memories of how God had helped him in the midst of his troubles. God’s right hand is the power that will assist him in overcoming his enemy.
At the end of the psalm, in verses 9 to 12, David is fully aware that he has an enemy who wants to kill him. But he stays confident in the moral providence of the love and power of God. The enemy is intent on destroying David, but they will meet their own violent end.
The situation of this psalm is a conflict that has been forced upon him, and it will be resolved only by one person being victorious, and one person getting defeated.
David rejoices in God, He seeks God’s help in this situation. He desires God’s presence in the crisis and remembers the clear experience of God’s power and glory in the sanctuary. God doesn’t change. He had previously satisfied David’s longing soul, and would surely do so now. He will still reveal his power, glory, and love–even in the desert–and will receive praise for it.
The whole psalter is a prayer book–or rather–a soul book that represents God and the life we can have with him. The psalms embrace the wide experience and insight of the community of faith. So we have a great variety of hymns of praise, lament, and thanksgiving, songs that recall God’s active presence in Israel’s history, songs rooted in prophetic wisdom teaching, songs of repentance and trust, songs about God’s rule, and songs of longing and hope and irrepressible joy. Martin Luther calls the psalms the “Bible in miniature.” That’s why he advises praying all of them.
The psalms change us. They form our character as we allow them to sink deep into our hearts.
When you are in those exposed, fearful places like David was, what do you do? Do you meditate on God and remember your experiences of his power and glory? Do you praise him or long for him? Or do you let your fears get the best of you and succumb to blame or feelings of worthlessness that make you want to give up?
We learn from David right away in verse one to claim God as our own. You, God, are my God. Earnestly I seek you. The thirst for God is really where our devotion to God and our confidence in him starts. We have to want what he has to offer. We have to decide that he is worth the pursuit.
