PANTING FOR GOD

Meditations from Psalm Forty-Two for the Week of Preparation Summer Communion Season,2026-Friday

Deep Calleth unto Deep

“Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” (Psalm 42:7)

Verse six tells us where the author is. In the land of Jordan and of the Hermonites, the headwaters country in the far north, where the snowmelt comes off Hermon in falls, into gorges of rushing water. The psalmist stands in that water’s quarrel, and it reminds him of his present life. Flood answering flood. One trouble arguing with the next for supremacy. Some of you know those acoustics. Sorrows rarely come alone. Are there not days when the depths seem to be talking over you, arranging over your next grief?

Now find the comfort in the pronoun. All thy waves and thy billows. These waves have a source, a Name. Heaven has sent them. The psalmist looks above the flood and says these waves, I know. Nameless waves are a terror, but His waves are appointed, counted, weighed, and timed. In a sense they are servants on errands, servants that cease when the errand is done. Read the verb with thanks too: gone over me. Over, and gone, our troubles roll. The waves pass, dear one, the waters calm, even when you cannot believe it. Every believer’s billow has a nether side. He has already brought you out of many. He will not abandon you now.

Think also of who wrote this. The title of the psalm is part of its comfort: for the sons of Korah. Their father went down alive into the deep. The earth opened her mouth and swallowed him up in his rebellion, and then closed over him (Numbers 16:32-33). Scripture adds one precious side note of sovereign mercy: “Notwithstanding the children of Korah died not” (Numbers 26:11). Their line did not end at the pit. Generations on, the sons of that swallowed rebel were standing at the very altar he had tried to seize by force. And God had made them singers there. The children of the man the earth devoured became a choir of praise, kept at the door of the house from age to age. Only grace writes family histories like that. So when the sons of Korah sing about the deep, they sing as men whose whole generation was pulled back from its edge, and set to praising where their father fell.

Centuries later a runaway prophet prayed this psalm from the strangest closet in history: “all thy billows and thy waves passed over me” (Jonah 2:3). Jonah had Psalm forty-two by heart in the belly of the fish. And it held him. Dear one, encompassed in the dark, a greater than Jonas is here. Jesus took the verse all the way down. At the cross numberless waves went over Him. “I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me” (Psalm 69:2). There the deep of our guilt called unto the depths of His mercy, and mercy answered in the loudest Voice, and the floods that should drown us all, passed forever over our Redeemer instead.

So here is Friday’s preparation, with the table now in view. Bring your deeps with you. The shallow soul brings shallow needs and carries away shallow comforts, but the deep bring their deeps. This table was furnished for the drowned pulled to shore, and Everlasting Arms have been under your waves. Deep will call unto deep across that linen on the Lord’s Day. The deep of your need to the deep of His fulness.

His deep is deeper still.

Your friend and pastor,
J. Lewis