Psalm 62: Alone

I was with a friend this week who described himself as “an introvert with extroverted tendencies”. I felt a kinship with that. I love people, I can enjoy interaction, but it’s taxing for me mentally and emotionally. I’m energized and restored in my time alone. And yet, earlier this year, my wife and children went away, and I had stayed at home, rather than being alone, I felt alone, and I didn’t like it. I was used to being the one that goes away. I travel alone a few times each year for ministry opportunities and never have I felt alone or lonely. I am beginning to realize that there are different types of alone. When I travel, I am not with my family, but I am away from home, alone with purpose. My heart and my mind are on the work I’m doing and the people I’m doing it for. Yes, I miss my family, but I never feel alone. But when my family was away and I was home, where I was used to being with them, where I am dependent upon them for conversation, for interaction, even for things like confidence and comfort, I suddenly felt alone. Being home alone revealed how much I depend upon my family for a sense of well-being.

When David opened Psalm 62 with the words, “For God alone my soul waits in silence . . .” he was writing of dependence. While the time in David’s life was tumultuous, David was not writing about the absence of others, this was not a lament for being left behind, it was a declaration to find himself fully, only in God. In fact, the Hebrew word translated “alone” in verses 1, 2 and 5 may be best translated as “only”. It’s actually used three more times in the psalm, verses 4, 6 and 9; “only” is the theme of the psalm. The question becomes not if we are “alone” with God, but if God has become our “only”. Is He our only rock, our only fortress, our only hope, our only source for all that contents, satisfies and enraptures our souls?

Once again, it’s not being left alone, it’s choosing God alone. A large part of our struggles with things like anxiety, fear, impatience and unfaithfulness is that we have given room to too many voices, we have prepared for too many possibilities, we have taken to heart too many opinions. “For God alone my soul waits in silence . . .” means that David was casting off all the other things that he had unknowingly become dependent upon, he was putting off the old so that he could be prepared for the new, he was decreasing so that God alone could increase in him, for him and through him. True and fruitful growth is a work of taking off before it is ever a work of putting on.

In John 15:2, when Jesus was teaching the apostles about the necessity of “abiding”, He told them that His Father, the “vinedresser”, prunes the branches that do bear fruit “so they will produce even more”. Abiding makes us fruitful, but pruning, the removal of the extra, the taking off of both that which was once productive and unproductive, is the only way to more fruitfulness. We are a culture of accumulators, we have been conditioned to add more, not to let go of what has been so that we can take hold of what will be. In David’s case, “more fruit”, was clearer vision, purer wisdom, greater certainty of God’s presence, God’s provision and God’s protection.

In Colossians 3, the Apostle Paul wrote that we must “put away” the things we used to walk and live in and “put on the new self, which is being renewed in the knowledge after the image of the Creator.” Do you see what happens? As we take off the old the new comes, as we let go of what has been, we prepare ourselves for what will be. To truly depend upon God, we must let go of the things we once depended upon. Many of us are trying to be new without a conscious decision or effort to put away what is now old. It’s not that it’s no longer useful, it’s that it’s in the way of our complete dependence upon God, it’s not allowing Him to be our only.

Maybe it’s a way of doing things or a process we have found to be productive. Maybe it’s a setting that makes us feel safe or a memory that we are trying to recreate. Maybe it is our own fear of being wrong, of looking foolish or of letting go of something that we should have held on to. In all these things, the true issue is if we trust God to be enough. Is our Shepherd truly enough to keep us from wanting? Do we trust Him to comfort our hearts, to lead us into green pastures and to provide for us a table when we feel completely surrounded by our enemies? Many of us have spent our entire lives trying not to be alone and yet the Scripture is constantly calling us, not to loneliness but to aloneness with God, to a place of complete trust and dependence in which the state of our soul is never found in our circumstances but in the One whom circumstances can’t change.

I believe this is what the true message of II Corinthians 6:17 was, “come out from their midst and be separate”. It’s what God was teaching when He commanded the Israelites to “distinguish between the holy and the common” in Leviticus 10:10. It’s not the removal of what is “bad” nearly as much as it is a dependence upon the One who is good. We know that God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone”, but man’s greatest good is found in God alone. I’m trying to believe what David learned, my soul was created not to be alone with God, but to live in, from and for God alone.