Hold Your Hope Aloft: Psalm 43 and Psalm 16

Today we’re returning to our series of paired psalms—listening to two together, one leading into the other. This time, Psalm 43 and Psalm 16.

I have given the rendition of Psalm 43 the very long title “It Wasn’t Away from My Wreck That I Found You, but in the Middle of It.” because i felt that line captured the heart of what is happening in the psalm. The psalm comes from a place of confusion, doubt, wrestling, and desperation. It opens with a cascade of hard questions:

But there is a shift in the middle. It isn’t that everything suddenly goes right but the lost-ness pivots somehow towards hope through the medium of prayer. It ends with the line: O my soul, why would you come this farTo fall now? Hold your hope aloft. None of this is what it seems.”

On the other hand, the posture of Psalm 16 is that of someone finding refuge inside the shelter of God’s care. It says: You are my God; what other home do I have but where you are? It describes a return of what was lost. In the words of hte rendition: “My old loves all return like birds to eat from my hands.” There is the astonishing discovery of contentment. The lines of my life lead here… I didn’t know joy could run this full.

Read together, these psalms trace a single journey. The rendition of Psalm 43 teaches us how to hold on to hope before we can see it. Psalm 16 remembers what that hope eventually finds.