Psalm 46 is a psalm that has to do not with personal crisis but when the world around seems to be in a state of utter collapse, when the oceans are surging, mountains falling into the sea, the earth caves, and when nations are at war. What does faith look like then?
This has always been an acutely relevant question, timely for every age. In the 16th Century, Psalm 46 inspired Martin Luther to write the great hymn ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’. Psalm 46 was the first Psalm translated by John Calvin.
This week was the 105th anniversary of the Frank slide, when 90 tons of limestone collapsed onto the town of Frank, Alberta, wiping it out. (Geologists expect it to happen again, they’re just not sure when.) Recent years have told us about the landslides in Brazil and the Philippines, earthquakes in Nepal, Hakiti and Turkey, and tsunamis in Japan and Sri Lanka.
So waters are still surging. Mountains are still falling. Nations are still embroiled in war. The world in which we live is not so different, and the struggle to exercise faith is not so different from the struggle God’s people have always faced.
The affirmation of Psalm 46 rings as true today as it ever has: God’s perfect strength and power, exercised on our behalf, give us a sure foundation for confidence, no matter the circumstances.
The psalm is bracketed on either end by an affirmation of God’s presence and power, verses 1 & 11 being kind of inverted parallels of each other.
Verse 1: God is our refuge and strength [power]
an ever present help in trouble. [presence]
Verse 11: The LORD Almighty is with us; [presence]
the God of Jacob is our fortress. [power]
God is present: he is good, he cares, he is near. And God is powerful: he is strong, a refuge, a mighty fortress. The two-fold idea of God’s goodness and greatness, or his care and power, is the running theme of the book of Psalms.
There is the caring preservation of the righteous and the destruction of the wicked in Psalm 1. It is in Psalm 2: ‘His wrath can flare up in a moment, blessed are all who take refuge in him’. It is in Psalm 3, 4, 5….
It is most clearly stated in Psalm 62:
One thing God has spoken,
two things I have heard:
that you, O God, are strong,
and that you, O LORD, are loving.
God is strong: he is a refuge, a strength, a fortress.
And he is loving, and ever-present help in times of trouble. ‘Ever-present’ means he will never be absent. There is not a second of our lives in which God is not present.
Psalm 13 laments, ‘How long, O LORD, will you forget me forever?’ God’s answer: ‘I have never forgotten you in the first place. I am an ever-present help. You haven’t always known it, but I have always been right here. And when the world is caving in, I am your refuge, your strength, your help.’
Verse 2 of Psalm 46: Therefore – because of God’s power and his presence – we will not fear. Fear is never appropriate for the believer in God.
Easy to say. Hard to live out.
Comedian George Carlin has very helpfully compiled a list of things we can be afraid of: ‘Quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence, flash floods, rabies, torture, bad luck, calcium deficiency, falling rocks, cattle stampedes, bank failure, evil neighbors, killer bees, organ rejection, lynching, toxic waste, unstable dynamite, religious fanatics, prickly heat, price fixing, moral decay, hotel fires, loss of face, stink bombs, bubonic plague, neo-Nazis, friction, cereal weevils, failure of will, chain reactions, soil erosion, mail fraud, dry rot, voodoo curses, broken glass, snake bites, parasites, white slavery, public ridicule, faithless friends, random violence, breach of contract, family scandals, charlatans, transverse militias, structural defects, race riots, sun spots, rogue elephants, wax buildup, killer frost, jealous coworkers, root canals, mental fatigue, corporal punishment, sneak attacks, peer pressure , vigilantes, birth defects, false advertising, ungrateful children, financial ruin, mildew, loss of privileges, ill-fitting shoes, widespread chaos, Lou Gehrig’s disease, stray bullets, runaway trains, chemical spills, locusts, airline food, shipwrecks, prowlers, bathtub accidents, faulty merchandise, terrorism, discrimination, wrongful cremation, carbon deposits, beef tapeworms, taxation without representation, escaped maniacs, sunburn, abandonment, threatening letters, entropy, nine-mile fever, poor workmanship, absentee landlord, solitary confinement, depletion of the ozone layer, unworthiness, intestinal bleeding, defrocked priests, loss of equilibrium, disgruntled employees, global warming, card sharks, poisoned meat, nuclear accidents, broken promises, contamination of the water supply, obscene phone calls, nuclear winter, mutual assured destruction, rampaging moose, the greenhouse effect, cluster headaches, social isolation, Dutch elm disease, contraction of the universe, paper cuts, eternal damnation, the wrath of God and paranoia!’
It makes us laugh. (What is ‘wrongful cremation’?) But in George Carlin’s list there are a number of things that are very real fears for people:
Moral decay: ‘What kind of world are we bringing our children up in?’
Public ridicule: ‘What if people laugh at what I say, how I look…?’
Financial ruin: ‘I think God is stirring in me to pursue a new calling and do something with my life other than this career I’m in, but if I quit this, I’m not sure I can support my family or help my kids through school.’… or ‘what if I can’t save enough for my retirement?’
Broken promises: ‘My husband made promises on our wedding day, but what if he leaves me, stops loving me?’
The fact is, there are a lot of things that could cause us to live in fear, and fear is crippling. It binds people up and robs them of life. But the Bible says repeatedly that we do not need to be afraid. Why? Because God is a powerful and present God, a refuge and strength.
The situation described here in Psalm 46 is the utter collapse of the world around us: Though the earth gives way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea… though the waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.
The sea, Biblically, was something to be feared, and came to be a picture or symbol of the powers of evil, the powers arrayed against God and his people. It was the home of Leviathan, the great serpent of the deep. In the Revelation, the beast we call the Anti-Christ, arises out of the sea. And when God creates a new heaven and new earth, there is no longer any sea.
But here, when the sea is churning and surging, when the forces of evil are so stirred up that even the mountains, the very symbols of strength, permanence and immovability give way and crumble… What then? Though the very earth beneath our feet crumbles, God is our refuge and strength! God is more secure, more stable than the earth itself. ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of God will not pass away’, Jesus said. ‘Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you,’ said the prophet Isaiah.
We will not fear. Our security is greater than our fear. Notice, though, that the psalm does not say: ‘We will not fear, for God will keep the earth from giving way; he holds the mountains from so they do not fall into the heart of the sea; he calms the raging waters and stills he mountains when they quake.’ It does not say that because ‘peace’ does not mean the absence of trouble. God never promises to keep these things from happening.
So the world continues to be in turmoil: terrorists fly planes into highrises, tsunamis slam a thousand miles of coastline, and nations continue to be at war.
We may feel like the world around us is in utter collapse: morally, crime rates spiking, and military powers increasing. Evil seems to rampage unchecked and if there is an Enemy, it sure looks like he is winning. Many western Christians feel that there will be a time where Christianity in our culture will be outright persecuted. It already is in many places in the world: Christians are attacked, imprisoned, their rights stripped, they are even killed.
The waters do roar and foam. The earth does give way. The mountains do quake. And in the midst of all of that, God reigns and rules, in all his strength and goodness, guaranteeing to us his presence and his power. Therefore we will not be afraid. We will not fear.
Verses 4-6 move from the global and general, and allude to a historical situation, probably the one out of which this psalm was written. In the 8th Century BC, Hezekiah became king of Jerusalem. The twelve tribes of Israel had for a century-and-a-half been a divided nation. Ten tribes, called Israel, had had a succession of dynasties, all of them leading the people into pagan worship and the utter abandonment of God. Two tribes, called Judah, had remained loyal to the dynasty of David, and their kings had a spotted history: some had led their people to worship and serve God, others had not.
When Hezekiah became king of Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem, the Bible says Hezekiah trusted the LORD, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. He held fast to the LORD and did not cease to follow him; he kept the commands the LORD had given Moses.
Early in his reign, the most powerful empire of the day, the mighty Assyrians, swept through the land. They overran the ten tribes of Israel and exiled them. A few years later they came against Judah and her king, Hezekiah. They conquered many of the towns there, and Hezekiah tried to appease the Assyrian King Sennacherib with gold. But Sennacherib couldn’t be bought off, and sent his armies against Jerusalem itself.
In preparation for the attack, Hezekiah had his men stop up the springs outside the city, so the enemy army would not find water. But there was one spring, the Gihon, that welled up from some deep unknown source. Hezekiah had its upper outlet blocked off, and dug a tunnel from within the city, that would feed the waters of Gihon into a pool inside the city. So while the city was under siege, the inhabitants had a constant supply of fresh water.
Having done everything it was prudent and in his power to do, Hezekiah, the prophet Isaiah, and the people of Jerusalem pleaded for God to intervene, to save his people and not let Sennacherib, who had boasted against God, get away with it.
One morning at the break of day, the people of Jerusalem awoke to discover that tens of thousands of the Assyrian soldiers had died in the night. The King Sennacherib withdrew back to Assyria, only to be assassinated there by his own sons.
And so Psalm 46 says, There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day. Nations are in an uproar, kingdoms fall; he lifts his voice, the earth melts.
The greatest nation in the world came with its army against little Jerusalem, the city of God, and it was the nation that fell. For God is greater than the nations. This was affirmed in the days of the great nations of the Old Testament era: when God ravaged Egypt with plagues and delivered Israel from slavery, when God delivered Jerusalem from Assyria, and when Babylon rose to power for God’s purposes and then fell to the Persians.
Such was Israel’s history: when God intervened, nations fell. The walls of Jericho crumbled, Gideon and three hundred men rout tens of thousands of the Midianites, the Philistines before the armies of David, the Ammonites and Moabites destroyed before the armies of Judah even get to the battlefield under Jehoshaphat. When God steps in, nations are in an uproar and kingdoms fall. When God lifts his voice, who can stand?
His voice that said ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.
His voice that said, ‘Let there be seas and dry land… sun, moon and stars, plants and all living creatures….’ and a universe was born.
His voice that thunders over the mighty waters, his voice that breaks the cedars of Lebanon and twists the oaks, in Psalm 29.
His voice that commanded the storm to be still, and there was calm
His voice that commanded demons to leave, commanded the lepers to be healed, the blind to see, the paralyzed to rise up, the dead to live…
‘His voice that says, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you’.
His voice that says, ‘Though you walk through the flame, you will not be burned, for I am with you.’
His voice that says, ‘Though a mother may forget her child, I will not forget you. I have carved you on the palm of my hand.’
His voice that says, ‘All things work together for good for those whom I have called…’
Heaven and earth may pass away, but the word of the Lord will not pass away, for the Word of the Lord is living and active. It is powerful and enduring. It is truth. When God speaks, nations fall, the earth melts. When God speaks, his people find strength. Fear is broken. Hope sweeps in. There is peace. For the final word does not belong to cancer, or death, or divorce, or crisis, or war. The final word belongs to God, and he has already spoken it: Death and Hades will be cast into the Lake of Fire… and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for behold I am making all things new.
Therefore we will not fear.
Psalm 46:7 restates the grand theme of the psalm: The LORD Almighty is with us. The God of Jacob is our fortress. In other words, ‘the One who is greater than the nations is for us!’
Then we come to verses 8 & 9. The psalmist writes, by way of affirming the theme, ‘Come and see what God has done, the desolations he has wrought on the earth. He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire.’
These verses do not describe a global reality, in that when the psalmist was writing, there was a worldwide peace. We all know that this is not so. But in the context out of which this psalm was written, God had come through for his people and brought an end to the wars that were waged against them.
The language of the psalm is pretty harsh. ‘God wreaks desolation.’ He is not merely covering his people to protect them until the storm passes. No, God is creating a counter-storm, as it were, in defense of his people. In the case of the Assyrian attack on Jerusalem, we read in 2 Chronicles 32:21 that the LORD sent an angel who annihilated all the fighting men and the leaders and officers in the camp of the Assyrian king.
An anti-war song some years ago deplored the idea that ‘the only way to bring about peace is to kill all your enemies’. We would never advocate that as good foreign policy, but there is some truth to it. It has been said that all that is needed for evil to thrive is for good men to be passive about it. What this psalm tells us is that God goes to war on behalf of his people.
It is an idea the Bible actually stresses pretty regularly: In Exodus we see the LORD devastating Egypt and delivering his people from slavery. In Joshua 10, five kings and their armies came against Joshua and the Israelites, and while the battle was fought, the LORD hurled large hailstones down on them from the sky, and more of them died by the hailstones than were killed by the swords of the Israelites. An army surrounds the city of Dothan where the prophet Elisha is and Elisha’s servant is dismayed, until Elisha prays that his servant’s eyes be opened. Then the LORD opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
When Jehoshaphat led his armies against the armies of Moab and Ammon in 2 Chronicles 20, he sent a worship team of priests in front of the army, and they sang ‘Give thanks to the LORD, for his love endures forever’. And the LORD set ambushes against the men of Ammon and Moab who were invading Judah and they were defeated.
Did you know that God goes to battle for us, for you? But maybe, like Elisha’s servant, our eyes are blind to it. But who’s to say your children are not surrounded by angels when separated from you? Maybe that Sunday that you were sick and stayed home was the day your house did not get broken into because you were there? Maybe that brief crisis at home that ruined your morning and made you late for work meant that you were not on the road at your normal time, when that guy changed lanes without looking. Maybe in the midst of your critical illness, God surrounds you with his warriors when Satan’s warriors would seek to destroy you with despair and depression.
Dare we even guess how much is happening that we do not see, how much we are kept from because God flexes his mighty arm on our behalf. Because God’s love for us is not just a pleasant, nice affection toward us. It is all the strong love of a protective parent, a properly jealous lover. He is older brother, bodyguard, best friend, and benevolent king all in one.
And God is a warrior.
What do we do? God tells us in verse 10 – ‘Be still and know that I am God.’
This is not the ‘be still’ we usually understand it to be. This is not ‘Come to a place of personal and quiet serenity’. It doesn’t have to do with prayer and meditation. It literally means, ‘quit striving’. In the context of the psalm it means, ‘Let God fight the battle. Lay down your own weapons.‘ ‘Be still and know that I am God’ is God’s way of saying ‘Stand back. I’ll handle this.’
‘Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.’
The state of the earth is not a happy one. The march of history has been marked by near constant warfare somewhere on the planet. Earthquakes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters show up in our news with alarming regularity, as does famine and disease.
We as Christians have put our hope in God. We have said that despite the apparent rule of evil and violence, there is a God who is both powerful (sovereign over all) and present (not dispassionately removed from the world). We have trusted in God and believed his word that the pain and warfare and evil of this world is temporary.
In the book of Revelation we read about the end of history. There we read of the end of nations, that the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of Christ. Nations are about power. They are, almost by nature, opposed to the values of God and the book of Revelation describes the final collapse of the world in terms reminiscent of Psalm 46: the earth shakes, mountains crumble, the sun and moon are darkened and God establishes with finality his perfect reign. Evil is no longer only kept on a leash. Evil is destroyed. There is no more death or suffering. The LORD Almighty is with us, and the dwelling of God is with people in the new Jerusalem, the city of God. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God. It is the river of life and flows from God’s very throne.
Those who have placed their trust in God will be vindicated. More specifically, those who have placed their trust in Jesus Christ will be vindicated.
For Jesus was God’s decisive blow against the forces arrayed against the city of God. Colossians 2 sets the death of Christ in this context when it says, Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
It also says that we have been buried with Christ in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.
In other words, in the death of Christ, which atoned for sin and is the ultimate death blow to all the forces of sin and death that seem to rule our world and in the resurrection, which is God’s declaration of victory and the foretaste of the final resurrection and redemption of all things, we have come to ground our hope in Jesus Christ the son of God. He is the Prince of Peace, and we will not fear. He will be exalted in the earth, for at the name of Jesus every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth will bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Jesus said, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.
The LORD Almighty is with us. He is our refuge and strength, though the earth give way. For our God and his Son Jesus Christ is greater than history, greater than all the crises that rock our world and threaten to undo us. He cares enough to work for and guarantee our preservation throughout it all.
God’s perfect strength and power, exercised on our behalf, give us a sure foundation for confidence, no matter the circumstances, for his church corporately and for us individually.
Amen.