The Thirst of Human Beings in All Ages

“My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God: when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?”—Psalm xlii, 2 (Prayer-book Version).

The passage: The Psalmist says his soul thirsts for God, the living God, and asks when he will come to appear before God’s presence.

It is often said that the Psalms are out of place in our common service. All are invited to that service, and many come, at least on Sundays, whose minds are not especially devout. Yet we give them language that expressed the most fervent longings of the most devout men — language that even the private suppliant often finds far above his own thoughts. How can we offer such words month after month to an ordinary congregation, as though they could speak what it was actually feeling?

Such complaints should never be lightly dismissed. They show a sense of the sacredness of words, which we should honor in others and cultivate in ourselves. Clergymen above all need reminding that they can become mechanical repeaters of sounds, so that the holiest utterances mean almost nothing to them; they need rousing, even by rough rebukes, out of a habit of mind that can pass into lethargy and death.

But even so, no one can draw a line around who ought and who ought not adopt the prayers and Psalms of holy men as their own — a fairly drawn line might very often exclude the clergyman himself. He cannot say, “Others may use these words idly, but I am in no such danger” — he knows he is in the extreme danger, and that in judging another he would be condemning himself. He may have proof that passages have quickened hearers he would have judged unfit for them, while leaving him untouched or cold.

Many will take this as proof that no caste or order can safely be trusted with custody of the Divine Oracles, or with deciding who may claim them as their own — and will say the real distinction is only sharper for the admission: not clergy versus laity, but believers versus unbelievers. To believers such a text is profoundly significant; to unbelievers it means nothing. What can they know of the thirst the Psalmist speaks of? How can they care to come into the presence of the living God, rather than wishing Him at the greatest possible distance, thirsting instead for something to make them forget Him?

There is great force in these questions. And who will feel it? Do believers not know from their own experience the estrangement from God they describe so vividly — not merely as something seen in others, but as something they are themselves liable to still? Does not the thirst for God coexist in them with the opposite feeling, so that when they speak of an inward conflict they mean these deadly enemies live close together within them, and the most they can claim is to be aware of the strife and to know where the strength lies that can make the better side win? If believers claim the name on any other ground than this, I would wholly dispute that they are in sympathy with those who trusted in God and thirsted for Him in other days; none would drink less into the spirit of David’s Psalms than they.

But if that is the nature of belief, I do not see how anyone can exclude others from these prayers and hymns, or fault the Church for giving them indiscriminately to all her children. It is not merely that we cannot know whether our neighbor finds in them something we miss. It is that we have discovered why and when the Psalmist refuses to be our spokesman: so far as we are occupied with special interests, wrapped in our own feelings, disdaining fellowship with what is common to us and our kind, so far the Psalms are an unintelligible dialect to us. It is when the minister confesses his union with his congregation, and the congregation feels its relations with each other, that David’s harp gives out its music for us to accompany, even in this distant age. It has been the charm of those alone in closets or on sick-beds for this reason: that they were longing there for fellowship with the Church of God, wanting an expression not of solitary but of united human thoughts. The Psalms may be Jewish to the core, like the historical and prophetical books; but if that nation was set apart to realize and exhibit the common wants and tendencies of human beings — fulfilling that function all the more because it lacked the art of the Greek or the conquest of the Roman — then the most Jewish parts of it may show us best what we are as men. They would not show us Englishmen what we are as men at all, if they gave us no type of those national feelings whose loss would be the loss of all our manhood.

I have said this might be so; we have certain proof that it is. Divines and philologers may dispute endlessly about the origin of the Psalms or any other part of the Bible, calling each other heretics and bigots as it profits them. But the book established itself as a human book before those questions were raised, and will remain one however they are settled. Let those with leisure fight them out. There are other questions human beings must fight out, getting what help they can from philologers and divines if those have help to give, and from the cries and yearnings of these old kings and warriors if such allies fail them. That help comes under strange conditions: there is no requirement that the man who receives it be comfortable or satisfied, no need to make out his claim as a believer — often unbelief seems to be his main characteristic. He need not stand on firm ground; he may be sunk in deep mire, unable to prove to the world that he has a God while others claim assurance of divine favor and ask him, Where is now thy God? To such disquieted people the old Psalmist stretches out a hand. He understands their sorrows, and the ordinary miseries too — poverty, sickness, the strength of enemies, the desertion of friends. He does not pretend these calamities are nothing, or that what hurts the body does not reach the soul. Coward that he is, he wishes for the wings of a dove to fly away and rest. He finds he has been foolish, a very beast before God, prizing outward comfort above what is substantial and abiding. He hides none of this confusion. He cares only to show there is a way out of it into clearness, for all who will trust in God.

I. When he says “My soul is athirst,” he describes no rare or peculiar feeling. The thirst of the soul is as generic as the thirst of the body: all men have it because they are men. Their cravings take innumerable directions — the thirst for pleasure, for wealth, for distinction. But we are so sure that men’s desires have a common object, however distinguished or opposed they seem, that we use a vague, unsatisfactory name rather than have no way to indicate it: we say all men pursue happiness. We do not really know what we or they mean by it, and must resolve the generalization back into particulars to be intelligible. Still we must keep the word until we find an equivalent that fits not a few men or a class, but the whole race.

II. The Psalmist said, “My soul is athirst for God.” He knew that all the nations around him were pursuing gods — pleasure a god, wealth a god, fame a god — for living souls cannot follow abstract notions; whatever man pursues must be embodied as a reality, or there can be no ardor in seeking it. So as these gods began to fade into mere notions of the mind, as men suspected they had called the objects of their own worship into existence, the worship grew insincere and the worshipper cold and lifeless even in his ordinary work. He became the slave of his own schemes, bound to follow them though there was no affection left in his service, no hope they would bring any result. His heart testified they were finite while he was thirsting for the infinite — yet the infinite seemed a mere impersonal, dreary void, to dwell in which he must abandon all forms and feelings.

What the Jew had been taught was that the Lord his God was one Lord. He was not to pursue a god of pleasure, wealth, or fame, nor to worship any work of his own hands or conception of his own mind. He was made in the image of the God, who was not far from him, ordering all his ways — personal, yet infinite; an actual Ruler and Judge, yet whose majesty was not visible, who did not judge by sight or hearing; who had a Name not to be taken in vain, yet was in the likeness of nothing in heaven, earth, or the waters beneath. How often, then, did it seem as if no such Being existed! With what bitterness might worshippers of definite idols ask the Israelite, “Where is thy God?” What answer could he give — to what place could he point? If he said, “I behold Him with the mind, not the eye,” how his conscience would tremble, and the mocking voice ask, “Does He really present Himself to your mind, as these outward forms do to the senses?” This Psalm tells us what he said: his tears were his food day and night while men taunted him with “Where is now thy God?”; when he thought on this he poured out his heart, remembering how he once went with the multitude to the house of God amid praise and thanksgiving. He does not pretend the taunts do not disturb him, or that his mind is clear; he recalls old times, but knows they do not restore what he has lost or assure him of a present God. All he can do is ask that if God is, He will reveal Himself — and this he asks courageously: “Why hast Thou forgotten me? Why go I mourning while the enemy oppresses me?” And then he could say to his troubled soul, “Put thy trust in God, for I will yet thank Him who is the help of my countenance and my God.”

What a baptism of fire this was — a plunge into atheism that he might know God, a loss of all the privileges of an Israelite that he might find the ground on which Israel stood! For thus he learned that the thirst for God is the thirst of man; the thirst for happiness means this and ends in this; the thirst for all the particular finite things that try to sum themselves up as happiness has here its true center and final explanation. The holy day and solemn assembly testified of this God; and in the absence of all holy days and assemblies, He offers Himself to the solitary despairing seeker as the foundation of all human fellowship, the Being without whom all things and all thoughts must be scattered and endless. The thirst of his soul could be satisfied with nothing but Him, who both kindles and satisfies the thirst of all human souls.

III. The Psalmist goes on, “Even for the living God” — no idle addition. The gods the Israelite was forbidden to worship were dead gods, “eyes had they, but they saw not; hands, but they handled not; feet, but they walked not”; the complaint was not that they acted as men do, but that they could not — they seemed to have organs of sense but no use of them, for worshippers had imputed to them their own gifts but could impart none in return. There is a thirst of the soul to create something in its own likeness, but the deepest thirst is to find in what likeness it is itself created, whence its living powers come, who fixed their ends and can direct them there. This is the thirst possessing the Psalmist now. He has been told of a living God — priests, lawgivers, warriors have all turned to the God of their fathers as the God of life — and it is vain to tell him of a Being who is not this, vain to point him to congregations, holy days, forms, sacrifices unless these are directed to such a Being, have Him for their author, and continually witness His presence. He has found that these too can become dead things, mere portions of a religion, an idolatry — and then they cannot quench his thirst at all. They hold out the cup of water and withdraw it; they promise a divine manifestation and tell the worshipper it is not meant for him, perhaps that it would preserve him from being consumed by it.

Here too the Psalmist is, in the strictest sense, the man. The heart and flesh of all human beings, knowingly or not, cry out for the living God, giving a thousand indications that they cannot be content with dead gods or with religious notions and forms trying to take the place of a living God. Seen this way, the phenomena of so-called sceptical ages are almost as startling evidence of the truth of the Bible as of the falsehood of some who professed to believe it. Those ages are protests against substituting death for life, solemn declarations from the deepest heart of humanity that shadows are not substances, and that unless a substance answers to the shadow, the shadow must fade away. “My soul is athirst for God, even for the living God” — this cry could be heard as a deeper undertone amid the cries for the destruction of all that bore the name of religion and God in the last century. If it had not been so — if God had not meant to answer that cry as men could not — I believe He would not have permitted those destructive processes. We may be confident He will answer it at last, if some still more sweeping ruin is ordained for our own times.

IV. Finally the Psalmist says, “When shall I come to appear before God?” — a bold petition. Should he not rather have prayed, “Prepare me for the day when I must appear before Thee”? That is the modification we who live under the New Testament generally give to words those before the Incarnation could utter in simple fullness. Let us not suppose they had a feebler sense of the need to be prepared for meeting God than we have. What they believed was that they could not prepare themselves for what would surely come to pass, that God Himself was preparing them — by teaching them to hope for His appearing. Had they not hoped for it, they would have been startled and confounded by it; hoping for it, every step, struggle, and joy of their history was an education toward it. The Psalm we have been considering records one of the severest passages in that education. This man — perhaps through the absence of all the tokens of his country’s faith, perhaps through the presence of idolatry around him, perhaps through poverty or sickness that made the world look gloomy, certainly through a terrible darkness and doubt within himself — was led to discover what he needed and could not be without, what must remain even if all things in earth and heaven were shaken and perished. He found a living God beneath all things, beneath himself. He had felt that losing Him was the fullness of misery; he was sure His presence would be the fullness of joy.

His experience, I think, was human, not solitary — he learned in himself how God was training multitudes besides himself. May we not believe that training is for our time too, that Englishmen as well as Jews are subject to it? We often hear great masses of our population called “heathenish.” Vigorous efforts have lately begun, in London especially, to bring these masses to hear sermons and take part in Christian services. Our churches and chapels, it is said, have come to be regarded as belonging to the upper or middling classes, leaving the humblest class feeling excluded; and numbers have become, from this and other causes, not passively ignorant but actively infidel. Clergymen especially are urged to remove this scandal by addressing themselves directly to the poor, opening buildings, sacred or secular, for their instruction, and combating their objections to the authority of Scripture, or even to the existence of God, with whatever arguments can be found.

I have no doubt these acts of mercy will bless those who give even more than those who receive — though the blessing may come in a way we do not expect. We may find, to our shame, that “heathenish” does not belong exclusively, or even most fittingly, to those we have not had the chance to instruct. Heathenish does not mean irreligious — heathens, then and now, have made religion a principal occupation of their lives — it means idolatrous religion, the worship of visible, false, or evil gods, the direction of the soul’s thirst to unworthy or unreal objects. The impulse to this heathenism lies in us all; who has not yielded to it? Who has found the habits and maxims of an artificial society — those that distinguish one class from another — any real protection against it? Who will say the Goddess of Pleasure is worshipped more in St. Giles’s than in Belgravia, the God of Money more in cellars and garrets than on the Exchange, the God of Fame more among those who can only hope to die in the ranks than among the professions — legal, military, ecclesiastical? If the Jew, under the name of Jehovah, worshipped Remphan and Moloch, who can deny that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is often clothed with the attributes of these same divinities by those who kneel in churches and pray in His name? No; heathenism is not a title to stamp on one class. The more earnestly we seek to free others of it, the more we shall know our own need to ask the God of our salvation to set us free from it.

On the other hand, I think we shall find a thirst for God, even the living God, dwelling deep in the hearts of those who lack religious instruction, or who have turned from it in disgust and become nominally — in one sense really — atheists. God’s education by suffering — a truth we must keep repeating to ourselves, since we keep forgetting it — is a preparation for His Gospel like no other; it sweeps away trust in the many gods comfortable men make for themselves or inherit by tradition, and testifies that the God who reveals Himself in suffering, who meets men at a Cross, is the one they need and are thirsting for. The discovery that we have not presented such a Being simply and broadly enough to the faith of poor men, and that until we do, the most elaborate machinery for awakening or keeping alive a mere “sense of religion” will utterly fail to raise them from their degradation — this, I think, will be one of our great rewards if we undertake these efforts to evangelize them with sincere and deliberate purpose.

And I am certain we cannot meet the most resolute and passionate atheism by any method more effective than this. How do such words as “resolute and passionate” come to attach themselves to something that seems so untenable and cold as the denial of God? It was so in the most earnest, enthusiastic of Roman poets: the frightful thought of gods tyrannizing over mankind, holding down all its aspirations, drove him to embrace a philosophy uncongenial to his ardent nature because it promised deliverance from their yoke — he could not bear dead gods, for his heart and flesh cried out for a living God; he could not bear cruel, false gods, for his soul thirsted for a God of Love and Truth. It is not altogether different now. The notion has spread, further and deeper than we like to admit, that the upper and middle classes uphold a system of belief that is not really their own, kept up to preserve their ascendency over their inferiors. False as the suspicion may be, you will not remove it by piling up evidences that your system rests on Divine authority — such evidences play only on the surface of the mind, while a suppressed premiss, a secret conviction, lies beneath which they never reach and which would repel them, however logical, as often as they are in fact incoherent and weak. Why not say to the cities of England, as the prophets of old said to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God”? Why not answer the charge that we worship a tyrant on heaven’s throne by saying: “This Jesus, the deliverer of captives, the opener of the blind’s sight, the friend of the poor, is He in whom we see the Father; for such a Being there is an infinite thirst in your souls, because we have it in our own, and we are even such as you are”?

Yes, it must come to that; and great will be the reward to the more easy and affluent members of society, if their exertions for those shut out from some advantages bring them to this conviction of a common nature and common needs. I do not say there is no message to be carried to the poor specially as poor — it comes through improving their dwellings, through every effort to make their existence less degrading, so they do not sink into a condition where the Gospel of God sounds like a contradiction and an impossibility to them. Whatever you do of this kind is as much a part of the manifestation of Christ to men as His own acts of healing were when He was on earth. But the good news concerning God Himself is for poor men only because they are men — it is brought to them because it has been and still is the means by which all of us assert and maintain our human dignity and rights. We forfeit that dignity, we lose those rights, whenever accidents of position or the fruits of civilization make us forget that we belong to a race God has claimed as His offspring, that we are citizens of His kingdom, and that we must have an infinite, unquenchable thirst until it is satisfied out of the fullness of a Living God.