Finding God’s Song in the Noise

A Devotional from Professor Benjamin Reese

Deep calls to deep
At the thunder of your cataracts,
All your waves and your billows
Have gone over me.
By day the LORD commands his steadfast love,
And at night his song is with me,
A prayer to the God of my life.

Psalm 42:7-8

These are the central verses of Psalm 42, but when you read them it’s easy to just see confusion. The Psalmist moves from the desperation of a drowning man (“All your waves and your billows have gone over me”) to the confidence of God’s day and night goodness (“By day…commands steadfast love” and “at night his song is with me”).

Is the Psalmist unhinged? Does the Psalmist just bounce back and forth from chaos to confidence, perplexity to praise?

The key to interpreting these verses comes from the sounds. Not the sounds of the words, but the sounds that are evoked by poetry.

Let’s take a listen:

First, we hear “deep call to deep.” This may feel abstract, but there is a concrete reality behind these lines. The Psalmist has stated that he’s near Mt. Hermon – that is, he’s located north of the Sea of Galilee. Mt. Hermon was the main source of the waters that flowed to become the Jordan River. Near Mt. Hermon there are waterfalls as the streams move down the mountain. One stream sends water to the stream below, and the stream below “thunders” back a response. The first sound we hear is the roaring of a waterfall.

Second, we hear a “song” and a “prayer.” It’s quite the contrast to the turbulent thunder of the waterfall.

The key to interpreting these passages is to hear the shift from the roaring of the waterfall to the ordered night music of praise.

In effect, this is what the Psalmist is attempting throughout this entire Psalm. The Psalmist begins with the confusion and turbulence of the billows and waves, and he’s trying to find within it some melody for praise. That’s why the repeating line of this Psalm is “I shall again praise him, my help and my God.”

Listening for the Melody

Now think of your nights. At the end of each day, you’ve probably gone through a wide spectrum of emotions. You’ve experienced both good and bad. You’ve probably had some victories and failures. If you were to listen to your soul at the end of the day, it would probably be quite the chaos.

We are deep creatures. Gerard Manley Hopkins is correct, “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.”

We can contain all kinds of emotions and thoughts. Sometimes our thoughts fight with our emotions (“I shouldn’t feel this way!”); sometimes our thoughts fight with our thoughts (“I both do and do not want to do this”); and sometimes our thoughts and feelings fight with our circumstances (“O, why is this happening to me?”).

It’s quite the racket inside our brains. There’s probably no better image of this than the image the Psalmist uses to characterize his own soul: Deep calls to deep.

But within all that chaos, the Psalmist remembers that God’s lovingkindness is at work. It never takes a day off.

If you don’t run away from that chaos but engage with it in prayer, you will find that within all that noise there’s a song that God is trying to sing to us—a song of mercy and kindness. What feels like turbulent noise becomes a symphony.

That is the work of prayer. We have to allow some silence and time with God to make sense of our day. It’s “his song,” and so we need to let him teach us how to hear it.

Hearing God's Song

Here’s the point. When you go before God tonight in prayer, have this intention in your heart: I want God to help me find the lovingkindness that I missed in all the chaos of the day.

I remember sitting in a busy square in San Salvador with a friend. He turned to me and said, “Hey, I like this song.” I didn’t hear it at first, but when I focused, the melody emerged from all that chaos. Beneath the motor sounds, the car horns, and the shouting, it was there. The more I focused on it, the more the other noise quieted to a humming accompaniment.

Every day God sings a song of his love. We just have to learn to slow down and hear it.