Psa 42:7 (NIV) – Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.

By dwelling on small snippets of Scripture, and paying insufficient attention to context, the textual preacher is sometimes prone to see things in the text that are not really there.

C.H. Spurgeon, in a sermon on ‘Deep calleth unto deep’ begins by noting – perfectly reasonably – that

‘everything around the psalmist was like an ocean tossed with tempest; his outlook was unmingled trouble; his sorrows like Job’s messengers followed on one another’s heels; his griefs came wave upon wave.’

But, for Spurgeon, this idea of ‘deep calling unto deep’ was too grand a thought to be confined to

‘the double trouble of many of God’s saints when two seas meet, and when internal and external sorrows combine.’

Rather, he says:

‘I purpose to use the general principle in other directions, and to show that everywhere where there is one deep it calls to another, and that especially in the moral and spiritual world every vast and sublime truth has its correspondent, which, like another deep, calleth to it responsively.’

What are these complementary ‘deeps’?

1. ‘The eternal purposes of God and their fulfilment in fact.’
2. Experiences of ‘deep affliction’, which are answered by deeps of divine faithfulness.
3. ‘Human wretchedness is paralleled by divine grace.’
4. ‘The depth of divine love to the saints calls for a deep of consecration in every believing heart.’
5. ‘A depth of divine forbearance’ answers to ‘a deep of immeasurable and never-ending wrath in the world to come.’
6. ‘A blessed deep of holy happiness and bliss for the saints in heaven,’ calling today ‘to the deep of joy and thankfulness within saintly hearts.’

There is much in this sermon which is both true and helpful.  But, I humbly suggest, the text itself has been almost completely misappropriated.

Of course, Spurgeon is not alone in misappropriating this text.  Richard Foster (Celebration of Discipline) cites this verse, writing:

‘Perhaps somewhere in the subterranean chambers of your life you have heard the call to deeper, fuller living. You have become weary of frothy experiences and shallow teaching. Every now and then you have caught glimpses, hints of something more than you have known. Inwardly you long to launch out into the deep.’

Again, there is valuable truth here, but not the truth of this text.

Lesson for preachers: let the text itself take us by the hand, and lead us where we should go.  Get us much as you can out of the text, but do not pour your own ideas into it, however correct and holy those ideas might be.