I. That deep was not merely the deep of affliction. You may see men with every comfort which wealth and home can give who are tormented day and night in that deep pit in the midst of all their prosperity, calling for a drop of water to cool their tongue and finding none. That deep pit is a far worse place, an utterly bad place, and yet it may be good for a man to have fallen into it; and strangely enough, if he do fall in, the lower he sinks in it the better for him at last. There is another strange contradiction in that pit, which David found: that though it was a bottomless pit, the deeper he sank in it the more likely he was to find his feet set on a rock; the further down in the nethermost hell he was the nearer he was to being delivered from the nethermost hell.
II. The fire of that pit hardens a man and softens him at the same time; and he comes out of it hardened to the hardness of which it is written, "Do thou endure hardness, like a good soldier of Jesus Christ," yet softened to that softness of which it is written, "Be ye tender-hearted, compassionate, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake has forgiven you."
III. How shall we learn this? How shall the bottomless pit, if we fall into it, be but a pathway to the everlasting Rock? David tells us: "Out of the deep have I cried unto Thee, O Lord." He was face to face with God, alone, in utter weakness, in utter nakedness of soul. He cried to God Himself. There was the lesson. God took him up and cast him down; and there he sat alone, astonished and confounded, like Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, when she sat alone upon the parching rock. But it was told David what Rizpah had done. And it is told to One greater than David, even to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, what the poor soul does when it sits alone in its despair. It shall be with that poor soul as it was with Moses when he went up alone into the mount of God and fasted forty days and forty nights, amid the earthquake, and the thunderstorm, and the rocks which melted before the Lord. "And, behold, when it was past, he talked face to face with God, as a man talketh with his friend;" and his countenance shone with heavenly light when he came down triumphant out of the mount of God.
C. Kingsley, The Good News of God,p. 68.
Reference: Psalms 130:1 . Clergyman's Magazine, vol. xii., p. 83.