Restores My Soul

Historical Context

This psalm carries David’s name and comes from about a thousand years before Christ. Its heading puts him in the wilderness of Judah, a stretch of country he passed through twice in his life. As a young man he hid there while King Saul hunted him, and local people gave away his position more than once. Years later, as king, he fled through the same wilderness again. His own son Absalom had taken Jerusalem and turned much of the kingdom against him.

No one can say for sure which of those two times this psalm comes from. The point holds either way: David was on the run, with nowhere safe to land.

The wilderness of Judah is dry, broken country along the western shore of the Dead Sea and up into the Judean hills. On its eastern edge, the ground drops into limestone cliffs over a thousand feet high, and steep, dangerous passes cut through them. Springs are rare, and the caves in its ravines were used as hiding places.

On the run, three things a person counts on were gone. He had no safe home to go back to, no sanctuary he could reach to worship with his people, and little water in the country around him. That was David’s situation: everything that held him up was gone, and one desire was left standing.

Reflection

David is not describing a mood that a better night’s sleep would fix. He wants God the way a body in that wilderness craves water. He says it plainly: God is his, and he is searching hard for him. Soul and body are both worn down by that want. And notice the order. He starts from what is already true, that God is his, and the want grows out of that.

The application is to notice what is still standing when the usual props get kicked out: a job lost, a marriage strained, health failing. Once those go, the desire for God can be the thing that remains, rather than a scramble to replace what fell away. David had nothing left to lean on in that wilderness. What was left was this: he still wanted God, and he kept looking for him.