Refuge (Psalm 46)
Summary
Pastor Dominic Jackson opens Psalm 100—a communal song of thanksgiving sung by God's people as they entered the temple together—to ask what happens when Sunday worship starts to feel like just another Sunday. Moving through the psalm line by line, Dominic explores the difference between happiness and joy, the myth of the self-made man, and the age-old debate over whether we were created to worship or created out of love (his answer: yes, both). Along the way, he challenges the consumer mindset many of us bring to church, reminding us that worship was never about us—it's a gift we get to give, and it's where we find ourselves most fully loved.
Questions for reflection
The sermon opens by asking you to fill in the blank: "God is ___." What word comes most naturally to you right now? What does that reveal about how you see God in this season?
Heschel describes faith as "the integration of the known with the unknown," which means bringing what we know of God to what we don't know about our future. What unknowns would you most like to "introduce" to God right now?
Matt calls Psalm 46 a corrective to the "so-called American spirit," which trusts in strength, competence, and self-reliance. Where are you most tempted to rely on your own strength instead of God's?
Alec Ryrie writes, "Ours is a culture that knows only what it hates." What do you think it looks like to build a life around what you love instead of what you oppose? How is the Spirit reshaping the "shorelines" of your heart?
Pieper warns that our tendency to overvalue hard work "even infects our notions of love." Are there places where you treat love as something to earn or dispense rather than a free gift?
"Be still" can also be translated "cease striving," "have leisure," or "let your hands drop." What would it look like for you to practice that kind of stillness this week?
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The word is God. God. To begin a sentence with God is to begin with the word which has no beginning. God. Even though God has no beginning, to speak of God is to speak of our own origins. Meaning, as Christians, we believe everything in existence is created and sustained by God. There are no maverick molecules, as the Calvinists sometimes say. And in this way, I think it is a helpful and reorienting way to begin an act of worship or contemplation, or maybe just your day. God.
Our psalm this morning begins with the word God—Elohim, in the Hebrew. "Dear God, it's me." How many prayers and poems and confessions and maybe profanity-laden comments have started with some version of that statement—or that sentiment, rather? Maybe me, maybe you, perhaps billions of others throughout history.
It says, "God is our." "God is our" is how our psalm begins. But it is also the starting point, I think, of a people—a people who are only a people at all because God was. And yet, God still is. And his existence is the very animating power behind this psalm, and these people, his people, our church today.
But God is what? What arises in your heart when I—"God is" something. How do we fill in that space? God is absent, scary, loving, perhaps confusing. God is distant, powerful, holy, made up, a social construct. God is my world. God is my everything. God is. Who is God? And who is he, perhaps, to you, to us?
In 1943, in the midst of World War II, Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote an essay, a little essay called "The Holy Dimension." He said this—and I wish I could unpack the story; the context is amazing, what he was going through, what he was going through with his family: "In the realm of faith, God is not derived from some logical assumptions, but an immediate insight." "Self-evident light" is the way he put it. "To rationalists, he is just some thing after which they seek in the darkness, but with the light of their reason. To men of faith, he is the light."
See that? He's saying that for some, their ability to figure out everything is their light shining in the darkness—toward religion, perhaps, even. Reason is king in this frame, and information is power. It turns out it's also quite lucrative, and this is why I think these attitudes sort of undergird a lot of the tech bros and media giants and AI companies we see today. But to people of faith, he is the light. Those who knew God, know God—they recognize God as the true source of light, rather than their own ability to comprehend all things. Thank the Lord. He isn't a means to some greater end—riches, success, whatever it is, fill in that blank. So with that blank, let's pray.
God, we're here. We know you, and yet somehow still, at times, you can feel distant. You can feel confusing. You can feel unapproachable. We thank you, Jesus, that you came and walked on this earth, showed us what God looks like, what God cares about. God, we pray just that this time together would be illuminating, that we would see you again as the light, and we'd be refreshed. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
So when our family is huddled in the basement, when we lose power during a thunderstorm, no one is trusting in my radiant personality to light up the room, right? We're looking for an external source—namely, a candle or a flashlight. They have a power, you could say, I simply do not have. But of course, our relationship with God is so much deeper and richer than this little scenario. In the language of the Bible, God is our Father. God is our Creator. God knows us, it says, even through and through. Everything about you, everything about me—God knows what I'm most embarrassed about. He knows how I feel about myself or my outfit for the day. He knows how I view other people. He knows that I don't really like seafood, and that makes me feel embarrassed in front of fancy people, right? Unrefined, maybe. He knows it all, and he still likes me. He is the light. He is light. I'm not. We've got a good thing going, I would say, so far.
Now, further down the page, Abraham Heschel continues. He says knowledge is the integration of two things, okay? He says, "Knowledge is the integration of the unknown with the known. And faith is the integration of the known with the unknown." That means when you learn something, it always begins with something you didn't know—isn't that cool?—transforming into something you do know. Unknown to known. But faith kind of works the opposite, at least to some degree. And he is being a little poetic here, right? He's not writing a textbook. But faith involves bringing something known and introducing it to the unknown. "Hey, God, it's me. Meet my fears. They're especially unhinged today," right? "Here they are."
Who is God? Who are we? These questions are brewing here in the background, I think. So let's look at our passage again this morning in Psalm 46. And I'm going to be reading, kind of inconveniently, from the NRSV—so you'll see probably the NIV on the screen—because I think it helps provide some linguistic clarity. So feel free to compare, and you'll notice some things, and that's great. It's a little exercise.
Psalm 46:1 says, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though—" "Tumult"—that's a nice word, instead of "surging." God is. God is our refuge and strength. God is a very present help in trouble.
This is a passage about faith—the integration of the known with all of the unknown. Now, these people, they don't know what's going to happen. That is, I think, what they're grappling with. But they do know God, and that's where they begin. And so this is an effort, I think, by real people who are going through real trials to introduce their fears of the unknown to the known God.
Isn't that how it goes? Traditionally, when the economy is bad, the price of gold goes up. When there's a lot of unknowns, we try to find some sort of solid footing that we can rely on to kind of reorient or perhaps even protect us. Something trustworthy. Do you have this kind of relationship with God? One where you feel comfortable asking him for help? Admitting you have needs? Do you ever, like, introduce your worst-case scenarios to him?
Let's look at verse 1 again. It says, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult."
Now, you'll find many psalms with language like this. Some we've even talked about in this series already. You'll also find a lot of worship songs with this imagery today. It doesn't take very long if you look through Planning Center—for those who know what that is. It turns out that the human experience is consistent, at least in that we end up in these places where we want to cry out, "Help! Help me! Help us! God, please, just please help."
Perhaps that's where you're at today. Or maybe you're exiting a season like this. And of course, you're in good company if that's the case. The Psalms give voice to these feelings, both individually and, I think, as the voice of a community. This is part of the beauty of the local church. We support one another. We bring voice to our pain collectively.
Who is God in this psalm? Well, at least to begin with, we see he is a refuge and strength. God is a helper, it says. And isn't that a good—perhaps maybe even a corrective—word for the so-called American spirit? God is not our strength as much as we want to think that. God is not our military might or moral goodness or competence or GDP or our ability to put people on Mars or our standing with the global community, whatever that means. You see, this entire psalm is remarkably countercultural. This is a psalm filled with reminders for the self-made man or woman who has come to the end of themselves. And it is for a community of people who maybe are just longing for rescue—for perhaps something more outside of themselves, something more humane for their own lives. They've seen the limits of their own strength. They've seen the limits of their own solutions and are ready to look elsewhere. You get the sense that they've probably learned the hard way.
It says, "God is our refuge and strength." So God is the place here that I go in the storms of life. But better than that, he is actually walking, accompanying us, right? He is, as it says, "a very present help in trouble."
Now, this connects, I think, to one of our three core values as a church that we talk about: the word presence. This is what it says on our website: "When we look to the story of Scripture, we see God's people consistently longing not only to affirm that God is everywhere, but to draw near to his manifest presence. From the tabernacle to the temple, from the wilderness to Pentecost, God's people have yearned for his nearness. We share that longing. Throughout our lives, we seek to cultivate holy spaces like this—a set-apart time and place where we might commune with Christ and be formed by his presence." I'm glad I go to church here.
God is our refuge and strength, Gateway. He is our very present help in trouble.
Verse 2 says this in Psalm 46: "Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult." God is here, and his presence changes the very nature of our fears. We still see and experience pain and are afraid, of course. Sometimes it is earth-shattering change that we encounter. Whatever the case may be, God moves toward us—moves toward us in our troubles, not away, like this, right? God is our refuge and our strength.
The picture here is of, like, an animal taking shelter in a storm on a mountainside. That's kind of like a burrow. He is a very present help—even to the animals, I might add. Therefore, we will not fear. We begin with God, and as we constantly work to reconstruct our understanding of reality—that's what's going on here. What freaks us out—we're trying to understand what's true and real. And that begins with God, his presence and accompaniment.
Okay, our next vignette, in verses 4 through 7, I'm calling formation. Verse 4 says, "There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved; God will help it when the morning dawns. The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter"—his voice, or rather, "he utters his voice, the earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge."
Now, obviously, this is poetic language, and there are different ways to interpret this section. But the North African theologian and bishop we know as St. Augustine today—he saw this passage, and he saw it as a foreshadowing of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, both at Pentecost and beyond, okay? And we'll talk about the book of Acts soon, so we'll get into this, hopefully this fall. It's just a beautiful take, so I just want to share it with you, okay? Whether this is the correct interpretation or not, let's take it up with Augustine later. Reflecting on this excerpt, he writes this: "What are these streams of the river? That overflowing of the Holy Spirit, of which the Lord said, 'If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.'" "Whoever believes in me, rivers of living water will flow from within them," which is John 7:37–38.
So in contrast to the violent and dangerous waters roaring and the mountains quaking we see in the prior section, the psalmist now envisions this refreshment and sustenance of God's provision, like a nourishing river irrigating all it touches. This, I think, is a picture of the kingdom of God. And God is there, forming and reforming the landscape.
How do you envision the kingdom of God? Maybe even, how do you envision the kingdom of God on earth? How is it nourished? How does it grow? And what do you view as the means to seeing that vision realized?
Now, I have to admit, it's frustratingly easy to remold the kingdom of God into something made in my own image. And when that happens, we slowly drift toward a picture of the world where God actually doesn't factor in at all. But this is a move toward re-enslavement, not liberation, right? It leads to a world that is unsure of itself, perhaps even struggles to call bad bad and good good.
Now, what holds things together in the paradise of your imagination? If you imagine paradise, right—what holds that image together as good and perfect? Is it money? Some sort of financial stability? The government? A political party? Something family-related? General commitment from everybody for the common good? I don't know.
In a recent article for Comment magazine, where I work, a professor named Alec Ryrie put it this way—this is just one line. He said, "Ours is a culture that knows only what it hates." And I'll give brief context here. He's talking about how so much of our moral philosophy, the way we see what's good and bad, is actually just formed by being anti-Hitler, right? So we know Hitler's bad. That we can all agree on. But then beyond that, we don't really know what's good, right? And he's saying that's an insufficient moral philosophy. It's hard to build a world around that, even though that's true, right? So we need more than that.
So much of the work of formation that happens in our hearts is encountering our tendency towards self-reliance—perhaps even our hatred—and then having the shorelines within our hearts remade by the Spirit of God over time, over and over again. This is water, sorry, not a fish. And as we are reformed, it gets easier, like stones on a beach, smoothed over time. We are made into our truest selves.
Now, one of my favorite philosophers, who I've mentioned before, Joseph—or Josef, I guess, technically—Pieper, has some helpful thoughts here. And he's actually citing Thomas Aquinas in this little excerpt. He says this: "Virtue makes us perfect by enabling us to follow our natural bent in the right way. The sublime achievements of moral goodness are characterized by effortlessness, because it is of their very essence to spring from love." Then he puts it this way—and I think this is a good word for the 21st century: "The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notions of love." The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love. Oof. Or uff da, as we said in North Dakota, where I grew up.
Now, what we want is for our love to be effortless, right? Free, natural. That's good. But instead, we kind of hedge. We decide internally that loving this person or that thing should get us some extra credit. And ironically, in that way, we are oftentimes being less loving. We withhold love. We define it and redefine it by our own terms. We dispense it based on how it looks or feels. And it drifts from being a gift to being something else entirely.
And the psalmist—he encounters—the sons of Korah, I should say, multiple sons—they encounter forces like this, but at a much, much grander scale. And yet they leave room for God, you could say. Here's verse 6: "The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge."
Now, in this sense, "the nations" here, I think, likely refers to just non-Hebrew foreign nations who perhaps are outwardly opposed to God's kingdom and the Israelites. That would have been a common image of what's happening in a song like this. And people and nations, I think, tend to be in an uproar when they feel like they aren't getting what they're owed. And just as a little hot tip, maybe: you can learn a lot about others by noticing what causes them to sort of rewrite the rules for themselves, right? Or redraw the boundaries of something. But I digress.
Doesn't this image of nations raging and kingdoms falling seem—I don't know—frustratingly relevant still today? We're thousands and thousands of years later here. Sometimes I just read about what's going on in the world, and there's some version of this that happens with me. It's, why are we still doing this, right? And yet here we are. Here I am contributing to it. We're striving and dominating and fighting and lying and doing all the things the previous generations have done before us. And then I wrote in my notes, "Sigh."
And yet, in the midst of all that noise, God still speaks. Amen? He still speaks. Hallelujah, God still speaks.
The image given in Psalm 46 is of the earth dissolving, melting away. Kind of reminds me of the old meme of Homer Simpson, like, slowly backing into the hedge—like, "Oh, okay, yeah," right? It's that. God speaks, and the earth and all its counterfeit kingdoms just kind of fade away when confronted with reality. The King has arrived—the Lord of hosts, the God of Jacob.
Verse 4 put it this way: "There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved; God will help it when the morning dawns. The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge."
So in review: God is active in forming and reforming his people and this place. He provides for us. He protects us. He helps us. He is with us. He is the giver of all good things. And from him flows all that is right and good in our lives. We are both recipients and channels—this is water again, with my hands—channels of his generosity in the world.
Okay, lastly, our final section of the psalm says this, and we're going to file it under the tag renewal, okay? Verse 8 says, "Come and see what the Lord has done, the desolations he has brought 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. He says, 'Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.' The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress."
God is present. He is forming. And God is renewing all things. And we are invited to what? To come and witness it.
Now, you know that thing in, like, a TV crime drama—it's been a while since I've watched one—where someone discovers a clue? And it seems like it's always this recurring character's job to, like, find the clue. Like, "Hey guys, come take a look at this," right? It's always that person. There's always somebody that's like, "You're going to want to take a look at this," right? It's that kind of thing. That's how this section kind of begins. "Hey guys, come take a look at this. You're never going to guess what happens next." All the efforts of proud people have been brought to rubble. It's all gone. Dust.
Verse 8 says, "Come and see what the Lord has done, the desolations he has brought on the earth. He makes wars cease"—he stops them—"to the ends of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire." God is renewing all things. But he's got to do it in style, right? He will put an end to war. He will break the very weapons used for violence and domination. The rightful King—he's making his presence known. And it becomes, I think, very quickly apparent that this King is not like the other kings.
And it is against this backdrop—these dreams of a people who are uncertain of their own future—that we get this very famous verse: "Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth." I'm going to be exalted among the nations. I'm going to be exalted in the earth. This is going to happen. But surprise—I just broke all of your weapons, because that's not how this works. Be still, and know that I am God.
I alluded to the philosopher Josef Pieper earlier, and I've been reading this little book on the word leisure, right? This is not a thing you expected to hear, perhaps—the word leisure in all this. I've been reading a book on leisure this week to prepare for the sermon, and he restates the beginning of verse 10 in this way. He says, "Have leisure and know that I am God." The Hebrew here means something like sink down, or relax, or kind of let drop. Be chill and know that I am God, right?
Now, this is not a picture of idleness. Don't go down that road. Instead, Pieper says leisure is a form of silence—"that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality." And another way I would put it is, silence is what you need sometimes to learn something—I think is what he's saying. "Only the silent hear," is what he says, "and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean dumbness or noiselessness; it means more nearly that the soul's power to answer to the reality of the world is left undisturbed." Okay? Does that make sense? It's about our soul's ability to receive reality, not numbed down by busyness or noise or laziness.
He later compares it to sleep, which I think is a helpful picture, noting that there's a kind of letting go that is just required in sleep. This is, I think, what "have leisure and know that I am God" means. It is a type of release. I think it captures it well. "Cease striving" is the more literal way you could translate it.
It says, "He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire." Be weak, and know that I am God. Be weak. Elsewhere in the Scripture, this language is used for letting one's hands drop. That's the picture.
Verse 10 says—he says, "Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress." That's good news. The very architect of the world's renewal is at hand. We are in very, very good hands.
So in closing: when you are faced with something that is just so much bigger than you—maybe something that you're genuinely afraid of—where do we turn? How do you process? There's a lot of ways to do that, of course. One way I would offer you is Psalm 46. It's sort of a simple framework for processing the chaos around us. We see this presence, formation, and renewal move. You could categorize it other ways. We begin with God—with his presence, with his character—and we respond by our own presence to God and to each other. We reflect on how he works. He forms us. Remember that he's aware of everything happening in our world and in our lives. And lastly, we lay our arms down and know that he is God, that he is with us, and that in the person of Jesus, we see all that is good in us made possible again as he walks with us in love. Let's close in prayer.
God, we thank you just that you are walking with us in love, that communion is a picture of your kindness to us, your generosity, how you share yourself, that you sustain us even now. God, we just pray for this community, for our community more broadly. We just thank you. What a privilege, what a gift it is to be with these people this morning, to think about you. God, I pray you just help us start each day, start each prayer—help us, as we meditate, to start with you. We thank you just for this time. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.
