POURED OUT LIKE WATER

There is no doubt that the author of this Psalm is devastated. Fierce, dangerous enemies surround him and he has come to the end of his own resources. Sometimes it does appear that there is no way out. Life has lost its purpose, its challenge, its form.

Water on its own has no form. We can give it form by building a swimming pool, by creating an artificial lake, by diverting a river into a new course, but on its own it is formless. When the Psalmist laments, ‘I am poured out like water’, he senses that there appears to be no purpose, no form to his existence. Despair overwhelms him like a flood. He is lost! The following verses indicate in detail the depth of his hopelessness.

In the hour of His darkness and pain, the Lord Jesus felt like that. He took the first words of this Psalm to express His anguish, wondering, ‘Why?’ Matt. 27. 46. Yet He also provides us with the only way out for, in the dark moments of His life, He com­mended His spirit into the hands of the Father, Luke 23. 46. In such moments in our own lives, we remember the words of an old song, ‘Where could I go but to the Lord’.

We go to the Lord for He, and only He, commanded the light to shine out of darkness. The Bible begins with the darkness of a world without form. God commanded, ‘Let there be light: and there was light’, Gen. 1. 3. God is always the source of light, 1 John 1. 5. He excels in bringing form out of confusion. Every conversion is a special story. Saul of Tarsus is a great example. So is John Newton. It is a miracle that he survived his early years. Yet what a man of God he became!

God never stops bringing order out of disorder, of penetrat­ing the darkness with the light of His goodness. True, we may feel ‘poured out like water’, that the form of life has eluded us because of adversities. When Stephen’s life lost all form, he exclaimed, ‘I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man stand­ing at the right hand of God’, Acts 7. 56. He is the creator of the real form that awaits us. Paul writes, ‘the sufferings of this pres­ent time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us’, Rom. 8. 18. There will be no more form­lessness. This glorious ‘form’ is real, eternal!