2025-03-02 - Our Refuge and Strength - Psalm 46

Our Refuge and Strength- Psalm 46:1-4, 7 , 10, 11

Read Psalm 46:1-4, 7, 10, 11.

Let’s Pray.

For the past two weeks we’ve been talking about what it means for God to be our resilient refuge and why we need it. We need it not only because this world can be too much at times, but because if we’re going to be resilient people, we need to know that we have a place in our hearts and in this world that we can rest and find the resolve we need to keep pushing and being the faithful, Kingdom-minded people we desire to be. And in building that refuge we have, to start upon - to base the firm foundation of our faith upon - the super-natural actions that God has taken to reveal Himself and show Him to be the liberating and saving God that He is. How He revealed himself to Abraham and the Patriarchs with His presence. How He revealed himself to His nation – Israel – through their miraculous liberation and flight from the Egyptians. And, most of all, how He revealed Himself through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. All of these acts bear faithful witnesses to the truth of his word and the firm foundation of His promises.

And through the revelation found in Jesus’ life, death, and – most of all – his resurrection, we find not only the source for our firm, faithful foundation, but also the reason for why we cast our eyes Eastward looking for what has been promised but has yet to come. We look forward to the return of Jesus and the great victory that awaits us in the promised New Jerusalem. Jesus offers us this future hope that is reinforced by his peaceful presence in our lives in the Holy Spirit.

All of these things come together to create the idea of what it means for God to be our Resilient Refuge, but what does that look like in reality. Because I know that all of us have found ourselves in moments – probably even this week – where we did not feel like we were able to find even a moment in that refuge that God offers us. Because the reality is that if we cast our eyes backwards at what God has offered us in his faithful presence – mostly in the form of real experiences in our own lives that we can point to – a church camp, a bible study, a moment of prayer or silence, a miraculous encounter, or a calming presence in the midst of a storm. We can point to these moments, and they are the experiential basis for our faith. They are moments where we experience God in a way that lines up with what we see and hear in the Bible. But if we find ourselves focused on those moments and experiences, we can lose sight of what is being offered to us in the present. It looks so different from that first experience – that experience that we have focused on and boxed God into – that we fail to recognize how God is moving in our midst now.

On the other hand, if we become so focused on the hope that God offers us and promises us in the future, we can become so upset with how our present state isn’t lining up with what is being promised that, again, we lose sight of how God is moving amongst us now.

We have to have something that roots us in the here and now. Some kind of real experience that allows us to truly understand what it means to have God as our refuge and strength as this Psalm and countless others promise. So, what does that look like? How do we, in the midst of the storms of life, come to find the refuge that God offers us and truly feel it as something more than this thing that we’re just supposed to say and believe?

And I think the place that this question takes us to is, simply enough, prayer. But not just the general idea of prayer, but the prayer in its purest form- the prayers of the Psalms. This is the prayerbook of the Bible. It is the place where we find prayers for just about any of our needs and situations, and its where we need to come if we really want to learn about what it looks like to have a relationship with God, because the basis for our relationship with God – as demonstrated in the life of Jesus Christ – is via prayer! And just like communication in any relationship, prayer can be difficult. The good news for us is we were given this book to help us begin our conversations, and to gain a personal, first-person perspective on what the relationship can look like through the power of prayer.

And just like any prayer, if we’re going to understand the prayer being offered up, we probably need to have an idea of who is making the prayer here and what that prayer was probably addressing.

Psalm 46 is probably not new to many of you. It is one of the most popular Psalms in the bible, but I’d be surprised if many of us know the circumstances that the Psalm was written in. It was written in a time of great distress for the people of Israel, and it was given to the Levitical group responsible for singing and praise – the Sons of Korah. They were to sing it because Judah was under attack, and they were losing. This was during the reign of King Hezekiah, and the Assyrians had been invading and defeating the tribes of Israel. They had already taken Samaria and defeated the Northern kingdom of Israel, and now they were in Juday and knocking on the gates in Jerusalem, encircling and besieging the kingdom.

And this is the reality of ancient warfare that we don’t talk about much. We think it’s all horses, shields, and swords that defined warfare in the ancient era, but that kind of warfare was brutal and costly so they most often did what they could to avoid it. Most of the time it was laying siege to another kingdom or city and waiting until one side or the other eventually caved. You isolated the city and limited their resources until they finally came out and surrendered, and for those that were stuck in a besieged city, it was pretty a pretty awful experience. This was prior to indoor plumbing, so you can begin to imagine how awful this got and how fast it got there.

And the fact was that not every city was the same when it came to laying siege an this is actually pretty crucial for us to know if we’re to understand all the psalmist is trying to tell us here. Jerusalem itself was not an easy city to besiege. It is surrounded by natural barriers, it had ancient motes outside of it, and multiple walls that kept being expanded as the city itself grew and grew over the generations. And yet, the Assyrians held the upper hand. Even with this city being the City of God, David’s City, the seat of the Kingdom of Judah, it still was capable of falling and, seeing the odds stacked against him, King Hezekiah had to strike a deal with the king of Assyria. He agreed to pay them three hundred talents of silver – about $1.5M – and in order to pay the debt and make them go away, it took not only all the silver and gold in the treasury, but Hezekiah had to order the gold to be stripped from the posts of the temple itself!

Y’all, this is the defeat, the earth shattering, life altering defeat that the psalmist is speaking of in Psalm 46. How in the world can you look at all of this and come to the words, “My God is my shelter and my strength, an ever-present help in trouble. I will not fear. God is within her, and she will not fall. The Lord is with us. Be Still and know that I am God. The Lord is with us.” How in the world can you suffer a defeat like this being led by a king who is a direct descendent of David, who is described as “trusting in the Lord” and “there was no one like him among all of the kings of Judah, either before him or after him” and “he held fast to the Lord and did not stop following him” – How does Israel lose to the nation of Assyria following a king described in the Bible like that, and still hold to their firm foundation and maintain the hope of the Lord in their heart? In that moment both of those things seem lost, don’t they? The firm foundation is crumbing as it seems like the promises of the Lord are no longer being kept, and because the City of God is being beaten and the temple of the Lord being stripped, it can’t possibly seem like the hope of this promised land, this perfect place where we reside with the Lord is ever going to be realized!?

And yet, this is where we find the promise and the hope of Psalm 46 because the psalmist is describing being a citizen of two different places, two different kingdoms. There is the citizenship we have in the kingdom of this world. For them it was a citizen of the tribe of Judah or as a citizen of Jerusalem. A citizenship that was paid for with circumcision and the upholding of the laws, customs, and festivals that are prescribed to be a citizen of Judah and of the nation of Israel. This is no different from today. There are things we must do to be citizens in the United States and as citizens we receive benefits and freedoms associated with our citizenship. And, just like Israel, we can look at history and see just how fast those freedoms and those benefits can be lost or taken away. We can see how fragile our citizenship is and how predicated they are on particular circumstances and outcomes. And citizenship to any group is the exact same. Whether it be citizenship within your family, your friend groups, your church, your culture, your political party, or your nation – we begin to see how all of these things are built on foundation that is no firmer than shifting sands in the desert where each particle of sand is another whim, opinion, or popular conviction of the current culture.

No matter how strong these kingdoms seem, no matter how good their nature barriers seem to be, each of them has the ability to be overwhelmed and overcome by the enemy who is constantly besieging us and waiting for us to fail.

But we are also citizens of a very different kingdom. This kingdom isn’t like that other kingdom. This kingdom, the psalmist describes, is a kingdom where there is a river that runs through it whose streams make glad the city of God and the dwelling place of the Most High God.

Has anybody read Revelation 21 lately? There is this other place that is supposed to have a river running through it. But why is that so important? Well, when you were besieging cities, there were some that were considered almost impossible to besiege: those cities that had naturally occurring, flowing water running through them. They could last almost indefinitely because they had access to this running water. And the even better news is that the running water that flows through this city, it doesn’t come from just any normal source, it flows from the throne of God himself. And God resides on his throne in this city and with God in this city, He is with us, The Lord Almighty is with us.

And you might say, “well that’s all well and good and I can look forward to that day after I’m gone from this earth, but how does that help me in the here and now? Here and now my mountains are falling into the heart of the sea!?”

But this is the good news. Jesus died for us not so we might enter into the kingdom of heaven one day when we’ve checked the right boxes. One day when we’ve done enough good, or one day down the road when I’ve checked the box as ‘dead’ and can go to this other, better place that I can’t feel, taste, touch, or see. But I’m telling you this morning that this is the good news: your citizenship card is ready and waiting. In fact, I would dare to say that for all of us it is in our hands as we speak. The Kingdom of Heaven is not this far, distant invisible place. That’s not how Jesus spoke about it, that’s not how Paul spoke about it, that’s not how Peter, James, or John spoke about it. They spoke about the kingdom of God as being “near”, “imminent”, and “at hand”. It doesn’t say that one day when we’ve passed the citizenship test that our names will be written in the book of heave, it says they’re already there. Your citizenship is signed and sealed; you are a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven. That promise has been fulfilled, and that hope is being realized each and every moment.

And in order to realize our citizenship, to utilize our citizenship, all we have to do is pray. To “be still and know that He is God”, and to pray. To find that city of God that can never be overcome no matter who or what is laying siege to it, because there is the peaceful river of Jesus’s eternal presence that flows through the middle of it, offering peace and sustaining life to us through even the most difficult of sieges upon our life. Because we may be citizens of this world, but we are citizens of the Kingdom of God, a mighty fortress that can never be overcome. A Resilient Refuge of God’s own making, and the Lord almighty is with us. He dwells in the tabernacle of our heart, and he is our fortress and our strength.

Let’s pray.