Talking To Yourself

How many people are talking in this verse?

The man who wrote it is far from the house of God. He remembers what it was like to go there: "I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise." Now he says, "My tears have been my meat day and night," and the people around him keep asking the same question: "Where is thy God?"

So one voice inside him turns to the other and asks, "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me?" He is not asking anyone else. He already knows why he is low. He asks the way you would speak to a friend who has been sitting in the dark for days and will not come out.

No answer comes back. In this psalm and in the next one, the soul never replies.

So the first voice stops asking and gives an order instead: "hope thou in God." It is a command, spoken by a man to himself, with no reply yet and nothing new to point to. Talking to your own soul as if it were someone in the room is an old habit in the Psalms. One psalm says, "Bless the LORD, O my soul," and another, "Return unto thy rest, O my soul."

It does not work the first time. The very next line reads, "O my God, my soul is cast down within me." He has to say the same words again at the end of the psalm, and again at the end of the psalm after it, almost word for word.

So it took three tries. The man did not talk himself round once and go to bed happy. He kept making the same case to the same soul, and God kept all three tries in the Bible for us. Each time the words end the same way: "for I shall yet praise him." That small word yet is where the hope lives. You may have to tell your soul more than once, and that is no failure. Keep telling it, because the God you are pointing it to has not moved.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 167 is Exceeding Abundantly (Ephesians 3:20).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two