[aron]

Originally Posted by OBW

For Lee to be truly consistent about all of this, then he should have panned Jesus' own prayer in the garden where he asked that he be spared of the agony to come. Seems awfully whiney and natural.

Psalm 42 For the director of music. A maskil of the Sons of Korah.

1 As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember
as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go to the house of God
under the protection of the Mighty One
with shouts of joy and praise
among the festive throng.
5 Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
6 My soul is downcast within me;
therefore I will remember you
from the land of the Jordan,
the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.
8 By day the LORD directs his love,
at night his song is with me—
a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I say to God my Rock,
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I go about mourning,
oppressed by the enemy?”
10 My bones suffer mortal agony
as my foes taunt me,
saying to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
11 Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.

The RecV footnote for verse 4 says, “On the one hand, the psalmist was panting after God (v.1). On the other hand, he was recalling the glorious and pleasant past in his leading of the festal multitude to enjoy God in His house with His people. Actually, this recalling was a departure from his panting after God… We should not allow our considerations and our remembering of our past to distract us from our present enjoyment of god (cf Phil 3:13-14).”

So when it says that “Jesus, knowing that he had come from God, and that He was to return to God” (John 13:3), was Jesus mistakenly looking back to the house of God? Or rather was He looking ahead?

When Paul wrote to Timothy that he remembered the tears of his confession, was he mistakenly looking back? (2 Tim 1:4).

When the Jews put up a rock as a memorial for God's salvation, was that a mistake, as well? (Josh 24:27).

Psalm 137:5,6 says, "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, May my right hand forget her skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, If I do not exalt Jerusalem above my chief joy". Was this also vanity?

Now, we do know that the Lord Jesus taught that once someone put their hand to the plow, not to look back (Luke 9:62). We do remember what happened to Lot's wife, and what happened to the children of Israel who pined for the food of Egypt with their selective memory.

But the psalmist in chapter 42 wasn't daydreaming away from his "present enjoyment of God", as per the footnote. The Psalm's context has placed him outside of the land of promise (see v. 6) and thus he is rightly orienting himself back toward his true home.

What about the boy in Luke 15 who suddenly "came to himself" and lifted his eyes up above the pig trough as he remembered his father's house? Was that a mistake? Should he just have "enjoyed God" there with the carob pods? Or was God calling him back home?

I find WL's assessment of these verses to be quite arbitrarily subjective. Now, the Psalms are indeed poetry, and some interpretive leeway is understood. But I can make a better argument that Jesus was the unique One who remembered His Father's house. The rest of us became pigs. We were lost; we were dead to God. Only when we heard His voice calling us home did we lift up our eyes and turn homeward, again. Only then did we re-orient ourselves back to the Father who waited there for his lost sons, who were dead and now lived again. (Luke 15:23,24).

So if I am looking at the "festive throng" of Psalm 42:4 and make a connection with Hebrews 12:22-24 --

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel.…

then I also am making a subjective assessment. But what if my admittedly subjective interpretation is made after "being filled in spirit by singing psalms", per Paul's encouragement in Ephesians 5:18,19? And similarly, what was the basis of WL's subjective assessment of Psalm 42? Enjoyment of any type or stripe? I see no evidence at all. A sort of hurried, disdainful glance is all I can tell from the footnotes. He didn't linger there, like Mary at the grave, waiting for life to return. He just hurried on. He had a ministry to tend to: messages to give and meetings to preside over.