Scripture

“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be honored by every nation.
I will be honored throughout the world.”

~Psalm 46:10, NLT

Quote

Only when the soul is calm can God’s work in us be done.

~A. J. Russel

 

Psalm 46 came up in yesterday’s devotional reading and I am glad; God gently spoke to me and I shared apart of this in Terry’s COLS yesterday evening. The literal Hebrew, in verse 10, contains fewer words in the original language; only seven whereas our English translation contains twenty-one. Be still and know are two words: rāp̄â yāḏaʿ. Rāp̄â could be translated be quiet or stop talking but the word means much more. It literally means to let go, to drop, to abandon, relax or as someone said, to takes your hands off. The devil convinced Eve that she should be God; that she should call the shots and all she needed to pull this off was more knowledge. It is in our DNA, we try to be God. We try to control and manipulate circumstances and it leads to a lot of frustration anxiety and failure. What we need to do is lay our dreams down, drop our agenda and stop trying to be God. Once we do this, we can know the things that are so vital to the abundant life. So the first step is not knowledge, the first step is being still before God. Once we cease striving, He will fill us with the knowledge of Himself.

So being “still” is one thing and “knowing” is another. If we do take our hands off the controls and trust God to be God: good things will happen and knowledge will come. The first thing you will know is that the LORD is God and He is sovereign. He is in absolute control. The world does look chaotic but don’t allow appearance to fool you: God has everything under control and His kingdom will come no matter what you do. God is not worried about folks like Marx, Neichze, Stalin and Hitler. Diocletian, the Romans emperor, vowed to destroy Christianity and save the Roman Empire. How did that work out for him? The Roman Empire bit the dust and Christianity is stronger than ever. The second thing that we can know is that the sovereign God of creation cares about us. He is our helper and our refuge in times of trouble. I was sitting on the front row Sunday morning listening to Doug and Dale sing and the holy hush fell on me. I sat there enjoyed the fact that God loves me so much that He gave his only perfect Son. So be still and know that God loves you. A third thing that you can know is that God is not only our refuge, He is our river of life. In the ancient world, rivers were vitally important to cites. There are two things we have to have if we are to live: water and food and the river provides both. Folks Jesus is the RIVER of life that flows from the throne of God. The fourth thing you can know for sure is that this world is not our home. The world is in a mess but it has been this way since Adam and Eve fowled everything up by trying to be God. Psalm 46 is about all the disturbing changes that are taking place around us: earth quakes, storms, wars. These represent catastrophic change and we have no control over these changes. Everything is the universe is changing except the CREATOR. He never changes. I don’t know about you, but I need to know that something in this universe is stable and does not change.

EXTRA

I am positive that I have blogged on Psalm 46 more than once but the thoughts above are fresh. I also know that I told this story in one of those blogs. June and I were going on a little anniversary trip about 20 years ago and we had to run through Huntsville to visit the hospital so I decided to drive on to Chattanooga and take I-75 north to Cleveland. We got into the mountains in Eastern Kentucky and stopped for the night. When we got up the next morning, we realized that both of us had forgotten to bring our devotional material. So when we got in the car, I read Psalm 46 before our prayer time. After the prayer I made the remark: “today, we are going to incarnated verse 10, we are going to relax and enjoy or experience God.” June said, “That is right sweet heart; that is exactly what we are going to do.” How many of you believe she said that? No, what she said was, “How can anyone relax with you under the wheel.” You believe that don’t you.