Peace on Earth and Mercy Mild
December 18, 2022
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Psalm 46:1-11
1 God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
3 though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble at its swelling.
4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
6 The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
7 The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
8 Come, behold the works of the Lord,
how he has brought desolations on the earth.
9 He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the chariots with fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!”
11 The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
We passed out Christmas flyers with the bulletins that have information about our services. We, of course, made them for you, but we also want you to consider handing the flyer to someone else, maybe a neighbor, coworker, friend, family member. Around Christmas, people who would never come to church, might come to church . . . but probably only if we ask them. We have two services on Christmas Eve-Eve, so two nights before Christmas. We’re asking people to bring a plate of their favorite cookies to share. If anyone brings dairy-free cookies, egg-free cookies that were cooked in an oven that’s never had dairy in it, I’ll be happy to eat your cookies, which will most likely be the most no-fun cookies anyone brings. I’ll bring a sleeve of Oreos for myself.
We’ll also have one service on Christmas morning at 10:30. It will be a very simple service but one full of Christmas hymns. I’ll be leading the sermon time, which will largely be inviting the children to come up on stage and talk through Christmas themes and the hope that God is “with us,” as Psalm 46 says twice. If you’d like to come in Christmas jammies, go for it. Let’s pray again as we begin. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
We have 150 songs in our God-inspired hymnbook that we call the book of Psalms. The majority of them were written over a few hundred years by different authors, such as King David or, in this case, a musical guild called “The Sons of Korah,” who wrote eleven psalms. Psalm 46, which we’re studying during Advent, is one of them.
People who study the different themes and types of psalms classify Psalm 46 as a “psalm of confidence.” However, that classification could mislead you. It could mislead you to think that “psalms of confidence” are the sorts of psalms that believers gather to study and sing when they are already confident in the Lord, already confident in the Lord’s sovereign rule over the nations, already confident in the Lord’s goodness, already confident in his particular care of their lives, and thus they already know that they have nothing to fear. But that understanding would be a mistake.
When the people of God gather to study and sing psalms of confidence, it may be that some among them are already confident in the sovereignty and goodness and care of the Lord. We hope we all are. But, on the whole, psalms of confidence are for those who lack confidence. They are for people who believe in the sovereignty and goodness of God, but calamities of one kind or another have shaken their confidence. So they gather. They pray. They study. They sing to one another that what they know to be true, is true. They gather to remind one another that their confidence in the Lord is not misplaced, especially when suffering and chaos would tempt believers to doubt that God is, as v. 1 says, our refuge and strength and very present help in trouble.
When I read v. 1, I think of my former boss when I was a pastor at my first church. I loved Pastor Greg; I still do. He’s a great man. But the younger associate pastors of the church would tease Greg a bit, or maybe a lot. I tell myself that when all the associate pastors here tease me, which they do a bit, it’s because they also love me. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. But we’d tease Greg about wearing his cell phone in a clip on his belt. That was a little hypocritical on my part because I had spent the previous six years working in construction, and most of the people I worked with, regardless of age, wore their phones on their hips, even as I sometimes did; it was just so convenient. But we’d tease Greg by saying that if ever anyone of us were in a jam, like when something hard or crazy was going down—a time when split seconds mattered—then we would be sure to call Greg for help because his phone would not be off in some other room or hidden in a desk drawer or even in his pocket. Greg kept his phone in his holster, always ready to help. One Christmas time, Greg bought a leather belt clip.
So, as silly as that is, I can’t read v. 1 and not think about Greg. “God is our refuge and strength, / a very present help in trouble.” More very present than your pastor or closest friend or family member or the police or ambulance or an emergency room or EpiPen or insulin or the national guard, God is a very present help. He’s near. Indeed, as Pastor David pointed out last week, he’s with us in the storm. And, oh, there is a storm.
In v. 2 read of a time so chaotic that mountains move into the heart of the sea. In Genesis 1, God separates the land from the waters, so in a way, Psalm 46 invites us to envision a time when creation is revolting back against God’s ordained limits (a point mentioned in Peter Rowen’s sermon on this passage from the summer of 2021 at Second City Church). In a biblical framework, mountains are fixed and firm, whereas in the Bible, the sea is scary, mysterious, unpredictable. This isn’t only true in the Bible. If you found yourself on a small boat in what seemed like an endless ocean of water and waves and storms, you’d probably feel the same—not to mention how scary the sea would feel in a time before GPS and maps of the known world. To say the mountains are thrown into the sea, is to feel the pillars of society crumbling into chaos.
I think of the day we saw the World Trade Center buildings collapse into a pile of rubble. Seeing that, we were all concerned, some even more than others, because of the family and friend connections to the city. But I also think many of us were shocked that something so firm and fixed, something so mountainlike, could crumble. And not only the physical structure of the building but what those buildings represented: the strength and stability of the economy, indeed of America herself.
I was talking with a Christian who happens to be a public school teacher. This teacher attends a different church, a good church, but the school is very close by. He was commenting on diversity training and pronouns and the rapidness of change and so on, and he said to me, “You know the really sad thing? We have an entire high school full of young men and women who are confused; they don’t know what to think.” And this pillar of society that is education, a pillar we spend so much money on, has pockets of deep confusion and instability, like waters roaring and foaming.
On a more personal level, I know many of you have a health challenge or care for a loved one with a health challenge, and you often feel pulled thin in several directions. And on and on we could go. Pastor David mentioned many more last week.
It’s in this context that we gather at church today to study vv. 4–7. These verses here in the middle of this psalm, the second stanza, ask the people of God to consider how they respond to these trying events. They ask us to consider whether we are tempted to be just as fearful, just as despondent, and just as anxious as those who don’t know God. If so, these words give us a fresh experience of God’s power, a fresh supply of quiet confidence. In these verses, we see that God not only intends to keep us guarded but to make us glad. He not only intends to keep us safe but to make us satisfied.
What did this mean?
Let’s take a slow and closer look at the details of this psalm because poetry, especially biblical poetry, rewards those who linger, those who sip rather than guzzle. I’ll read vv. 4–7 again and then highlight truths to build our confidence.
4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
6 The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
7 The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
I’ll start our closer look with that line about the river. “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.” The contrast is jarring. What was the connotation of water in the first stanza? Just before water was violent, turbulent seas that swallowed mountains whole. Now what do we have? We have the image of a stream, a quiet river making glad the city of God. The city of God is Jerusalem, the place of God’s special presence in the Old Testament, the place where God dwelled with his people in his temple. This is why it’s called “the holy habitation of the Most High.”
The psalm invites us to envision the special city surrounded by an army, to be besieged, to be strangled of supplies of food, and, more immediately important, of water. You can go a few weeks without food but only a few days without water, especially in the Middle East. Here, a quiet stream makes the city of God happy. This is no mere provision, a mere meeting of needs. This is abundance, delight, joy, gladness. The river imagery goes back to Genesis 2 and the rivers that flowed through the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:10; cf. Zech. 14:8 and Ez. 37:1–12). Psalm 46 invites us to consider the joy the world had before sin and the joy it will have someday after sin.
Then in v. 5 we read this: “God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved; / God will help her when morning dawns.” What is the promise of this verse? That because God has pledged himself to be with his people and protect them from complete annihilation, even that he plants himself among them, and therefore she shall not be… —What does it say?—“She shall not be moved.” Put your finger on the word “moved.” Then look again at v. 2: “though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea.” Mountains might move, but the place and people of God won’t be moved.
Look also at the word “totter” in v. 6: “The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; / he utters his voice, the earth melts.” The word in Hebrew is the same for all three: Mountains move and kingdoms move, or totter, yet God’s people do not move; we do not totter. The Lord spoke the world into existence, and he can melt the most raging nations with just a word. What an encouraging truth. What a confidence booster. And Israel experienced it. In Israel’s history, though they were such a tiny, seemingly insignificant nation and people, they outlasted the rise and fall of so many kingdoms: the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian kingdoms, and later after this psalm was written, the Greek, and after that, the Roman kingdom. Nations rage and kingdoms totter, yet God is in the midst of his people, and they shall not totter, even when they feel like a stump of a tree in a forest that’s being cut down.
As we’re going through the details, look at the last verse for this morning, v. 7: “The LORD of hosts is with us; / the God of Jacob is our fortress.” When the Bible speaks of like this of “hosts,” especially hosts of the Lord, it means armies. This verse says that God is the Lord of armies, heavenly and angelic warrior armies. For those who know the story, think of when the Assyrian army surrounded King Hezekiah and Jerusalem, and in the middle of the night, an angel slaughtered that army (2 Kings 18:13–19:37). Or consider when Jesus was going to the cross and people taunted him that he couldn’t save himself. Jesus responds, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matt. 26:53). He’s the God of heavenly armies, heavenly hosts.
And he’s “the God of Jacob.” I’ve been thinking a lot about why the sons of Korah wrote God of Jacob. Jacob is the grandson of Abraham, so there’s antiquity and God’s promise to build his family. There’s the fact that Jacob has his name changed to Israel, and he fathers the twelve tribes. But why not say “God of Israel” instead “of Jacob”? I actually don’t think there’s a way to know with certainty. We are not told exactly why.
But we do know something of Jacob and how the rest of the Bible treats him. You may not know much about the Bible, so I’ll put it this way: Jacob was one of the “good guys,” but not because he was a “good guy.” Jacob proves that over and over. But he’s one of the good guys for the same reason that any of us are part of God’s people: God simply chooses to love us and love us and love us and never lets us go. That’s Jacob’s story. And that, I think, is why Jacob is highlighted. Because he’s small. Because he’s not all that special or faithful. To say the God of Jacob is a way for God to say that he is the strong and holy God of people who are weak, wounded, and wayward.
And don’t miss the final word in v. 7 and v. 11: fortress. In v. 1, God is refuge. Here, we see God is a building even stronger: a fortress.
What does this mean to us?
So, we’ve talked about the details. We’ve sipped the poetry of this psalm. But what does it mean for you? What do the details mean for us? Here’s what it means. Whatever good truths God promised to the people who came from Jacob, whatever confidence in God these truths cultivated among God’s people before their Messiah came, they only mean more to us. They only mean more to you and me. I say this for so many reasons.
Consider, if the Lord of hosts was with them, if the God of Jacob was their fortress, then how much more is God with those who know even more of our God through Jesus? The name Immanuel means God with us. And that’s the name we call Jesus. I’ll read from the Christmas story in the beginning of the gospel of Matthew.
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us). (Matt. 1:22–23)
And consider another reason these truths should give us confidence. In the Old Testament, God took up his special dwelling in the city of Jerusalem. It was, as we read, the holy habitation of the Most High. In this way, Judaism was primarily a “come and see” religion. But in the New Testament, after Jesus has come, lived, died, rose, ascended, and promised to come again, we are now a “go and tell” religion. The promises of protection and joy, provision and satisfaction that were located in the special place of God are now located in the person of God dwelling among us—Jesus Christ.
This means that wherever believers in Jesus go, these promises go with us. He goes with us. I don’t want to re-preach every truth we preached this fall, but we talked about the local church and how God is committed to building his church. To use Jesus’s own words, upon the confession of Jesus as the Messiah he promised, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). If they had a hope that Jerusalem would not perish from the earth, how much more should we have the confidence that Christ’s church will not perish from the earth. Our future is bright.
Consider, as well, the various hopes the people of God have related to this imagery of a life-giving, joy-producing river. Jesus said, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37–38). Jesus is saying that wherever believers go, as they are filled with God’s Spirit, a river of life flows from them.
And the image of the river gets even better. Last week, Pastor David talked about how, in the Bible, the imagery of the sea is one of turbulence and chaos. He even pointed out that in Revelation 21, to indicate the stability of heaven, we read “the sea is no more” (Rev. 21:1). But if you turn a page from Revelation 21 to the next chapter, which says even more about heaven and our future, what do you read? I’ll tell you:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. (Rev. 22:1–2)
I could go on and on about what these verses mean for us, but I’ll close with this: we need to be saying Psalm 46-type truths to each other. We need to be singing Psalm 46-type truths to each other. We need the confidence that God offers us in this psalm, and the way he offers it to us is not typically some mystical, private dose of joy. It might be that. But the language of this psalm is communal. “God is ourrefuge and strength . . . . Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way . . . There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God [meaning where the people of God are gathered, now meaning in the local church]. . . . The LORD of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress.”
Psalm 46 is here to bring us confidence, which is a gift we can give each other this Christmas. The confidence God has given you, you need to give to others. Who do you know who needs you to put a hand on his shoulder and look him in the eyes and say, “Because Jesus drank all the wrath of God against your sin, God will not let you be destroyed.” Oh that this gladdening stream would flow out from us as we go and tell it on the mountains that Jesus Christ is born and Lord. Who do you need to look in the eyes and to paraphrase the way the apostle Paul put it in Romans 8 say, “If God did not spare his own Son but gave him up on the cross for us all, how will God not also with Jesus graciously give us, his people, all things?”
Psalm 46 used to be my “go-to” Bible passage to read when pastoral ministry would bring me into the scary places of hospital rooms, to the places that tended to erode confidence. I say, it used to be my go-to passage to read only because Covid changed how hospital visits work. I haven’t been in hospitals near as much because I couldn’t.
But it’s still my go-to passage. And about ten days ago, I went to a hospital room and read Psalm 46 to a couple from our church. And as I put out my hands to hold the hands of this husband and wife, I realized that the last time I had stood that close to them was only a few months before. They had stood in front of me looking the part of a handsome groom and a beautiful bride as they exchanged vows and rings. And then, just seven months later, an unexpected health challenge will (probably) lead them to a scary surgery. If I told you that it seems like everything will be okay in a few months from a medical standpoint, that’s probably true. But it’s also true that for this couple—and they told me I could share this—mountains feel like they are in the heart of the sea. And they needed to hear someone say, God is refuge; therefore, do not fear. They needed to hear, God is a fortress. They needed to hear, There is a good-news river that makes glad the people of God.
And not only did they need to hear it, to be honest, I needed to say it. Again, God can wonderfully, spontaneously cause the beauty of his promises to land on a person with supreme confidence, seemingly out of nowhere an experience of gospel joy. He can do that, and he does do that. But he most often does it when one believer speaks his promises over another so that both have their confidence lifted. Or, as the case may be this morning, when one believer sings truths over the other.
If finding a friend and reading Psalm 46 over another person feels like too much, maybe you could just hand a friend a flyer for our Christmas service and tell them to “come and see.” I’ll invite the music team forward so we can have a time of response through singing. Let’s pray. “Dear Heavenly Father. . .”
Sermon Discussion Questions
Where do you feel in your life that mountains are being thrown into the heart of the sea? Where do you see this in society?
Who do you know who needs to be encouraged with Psalm 46?
How is the good news story of Jesus a “stream that makes glad” the people of God? How does it make you glad?
