Psalm 46
Let’s hear from God’s word. This
is Psalm 46. It says, to the choir master
of the sons of Korah, according to the Alamoth, a song. God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear,
though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the
heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though
the mountains tremble at its swelling. 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 her. She
shall not be moved. God will help her when morning
dawns. The nations rage, the kingdoms
totter. He utters his voice and the earth
melts. The Lord of Hosts is with us.
The God of Jacob is our fortress. Come behold the works of the
Lord, how he has brought desolations on the earth. He makes wars cease
to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters
the spear. He burns the chariots with fire. Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations.
I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us.
The God of Jacob is our fortress. Amen. I was telling some of y’all
recently the story about the two men who were in the midst
of World War II, I believe it was. And as they were walking
down the streets of the city towards one another, the bombs
exploding, the airplanes flying over, the sights and sounds and
tumult of war, they approached each other and they looked at
one another with confidence and they passed one another. And
after they passed one another, they both immediately turned
around, back to one another. One poked his finger into the
chest of the other and says, what is man’s chief end? The
other replied, man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy
him forever. The other responded, I knew by
the look on your face that you were a shorter catechism boy. I believe I was telling the younger
folks that story recently, and maybe some of the parents. But
the point of that is that when we know the truth about God,
we can have confidence that no other person can have. We may
have false confidence from the things that we may amass or surround
ourselves with in this world, but they will not provide true
confidence unless they come from our triune God. This Psalm tells
us two things. One is that the world is unstable.
But secondly, that God is stable. Now I know some of you, maybe
you don’t have to admit it, you don’t have to raise your hands,
but you’re news junkies, turn on that channel that starts with
the F-O-X, and you watch the endless news cycle. And you watch
about London, you watch about Manchester, you watch about Iraq
and Afghanistan, you watch about this, that, and the other. And
then you watch the rehash of every event as it comes to its
anniversary, like recently it’s Orlando. Over and over and over,
we can see that the world is shaking. and the world is quaking. But as Christians, we can say
to the world, do your worst, shake, quake, fall into the ocean,
but God, God will keep us. We can tell the world to do its
worst. And sometimes it does. Sometimes
it will do its worst. And sometimes it won’t be across
the ocean or in another nation. or to people that we’ve never
seen or know, but it will come and shake and it will quake in
our very lives. Some of you think about this,
maybe as your son-in-law is deployed overseas or you on the back row
will be traveling to a foreign country soon. Maybe you have
a visit to the hospital this week, a test. Maybe something
is uncertain with your children. or your grandchildren, we always
are at the front of the battle line where the world can shake,
the earth can quake, it may seem like all is lost and the mountains
are falling into the sea. Psalm 46 is a wonderful psalm
that gives us confidence. Remember as we entered into the
40s in our psalms, we said these are gonna be kingship psalms.
Last week, Psalm 44 was the marriage psalm It was a messianic song,
a very strong messianic song, but today we enter into what
are the Elohim songs. These are the songs that speak
of God, particularly God the creator, God the king, God the
ruler. And this particular song, Psalm
46, was Martin Luther’s favorite. Now he had all the tumult of
the Reformation. In fact, I think y’all are pretty
well aware now, in October, 1517, what’s that plus 500? 2000, yeah, 2017. We thank God that
a man like Martin Luther had the nerve because of the confidence
he had in the word of God, particularly Psalm 46, to make it through
the tumult of the Reformation. It was a hard time. But we get
from Psalm 46, that hymn we’ll sing in just a little bit, a
mighty fortress is our God. What a wonderful, a hymn of confidence
it is for us. I was thinking in light of Psalm
46 about what our chapter one of the confession teaches us.
I forget what chapter y’all are on now in Sunday school class,
is it chapter two, chapter three? So y’all just did chapter one
recently. And chapter one tells us why God gave us his word.
He gave us his word for a lot of reasons, but one of the big
reasons is he gave it to us to help us live life in this world
with all its systems and beliefs and voices that are screaming
at us for our allegiance. He gave it to us to help us navigate
the world. He gave it to us to help us fight off the devil and
all his wicked ways, but he also gave it to us to help us war
against our own flesh or that sin that remains in us that still,
though it is pardoned in our justification, subdued in our
sanctification, it’s still, until we get to glory, is there and
it wreaks havoc in our lives. And so we need the word of God
to help us when the world and the flesh and the devil do their
worst. Psalm 46 is helpful there. One last thing before we take
a little walk through the psalm, you’ll see at the end of a couple
of the verses, I believe verse three, at the end of verse seven,
at the end of verse 11, you’ll see that little word selah. We
don’t know exactly what it means. It probably means pause. Maybe
you’ve been in church where somebody felt super spiritual, and while
everybody else was amening, they were saying Selah, looking extra
spiritual. Don’t really know what it means,
but it probably means stop, think about it. Take a little break.
Think about what you just read. And so that’s a helpful way to
break apart this psalm, is after each Selah, take up a new section. The first section we wanna look
at is verses one through three, and that’s the subject of security. Periodically, what, one out of
five weeks on a Sunday morning, we use the Heidelberg Catechism
as our affirmation of faith. What is our only comfort in life
and in death? And what is that only comfort?
That I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. In life
and in death, he’s with me. And all those wonderful and precious
promises. And it’s good for us to have
these things in mind because life will get rough. the earth
will shake, the mountains will fall into the sea, and all we
can do is put our hope and faith and trust in Jesus. Our only
comfort in life and death is the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, what
the people around us put their hope and faith in, where do we
sometimes slip and slide and put our faith, hope, and comfort? We wonder about our little stock
portfolio and think we got it pretty good and we’ll make it
a couple more years. Or maybe it’s what’s in our lockbox.
We got a little stash of money up in there or life insurance
policy or maybe a concealed weapon to keep the boogeyman out of
the house. What else do we put our confidence in? Our accumulated
goods, our family, our education, some skill that we may have.
And we are reminded over and over in the scriptures that these
things will not get us anywhere. Think of the parable of the rich
man and Lazarus. Remember the man Lazarus? He lived outside the rich man
Lazarus’ home. He ate with the dogs. All the
while the rich man was in there eating on fine food. And I love
how that passage of scripture says it. It says, Lazarus went
to Abraham’s bosom. He went to the presence of almighty
God. and the rich man died, and he
started having the, what is it, the looking across the neighbor’s
fence, and he all of a sudden decided that his life in this
world was pretty good, but his life in the next world wasn’t
so good, and what did he want? He wanted what Lazarus had, although
Lazarus never really wanted what the rich man had, and never would
be giving it to him. Sometimes we live in this life
as if this is all there is. And we trust in our riches. We
trust in our smarts, our ability to reason, our ability to work
and earn money or capture a corner of a market. And God reminds
us in passages like this that we better get right with God.
We better put our faith and trust and hope in Jesus. Some of you
have been studying Job on Sunday mornings. Job had it all. Wealthiest man, probably next
to Abraham in the Bible. had children, grandchildren,
livestock, camels, the whole works. And in two fell swoops,
God took it all from him. God, in his sovereignty, allowed
Satan to take everything but the life of Abraham. And our
decks could be cleared someday, couldn’t they? We could wake
up tomorrow and our deck is swept clean. Not our back deck, our
ship deck, so to speak. Everything we hold dear is gone. And verses one through three
tell us that when the earth shakes, when the mountains fall into
the depths of the sea, we can go into the safety of Almighty
God. You know, sometimes we watch
the news and get a little worried. We lay awake till two in the
morning, can’t think, so we pray and we get a little worried.
What’s something you can think of? Psalm 46. Verses two and
three help us greatly. What do they say? It says, we’ll
start at one, God is our refuge. Heard that word a good bit. He’s
our strength, a very present help in trouble. You know, the old desire to be
with our mom and dads, you know, when a child wakes up in the
night, where do they go? Hopefully to their mom’s side
of the bed. Don’t wake us up. But that need to have the presence
of a loved one, someone bigger than us, we never outgrow it,
do we? God is a very present help in
trouble. So therefore we will not fear, though the earth gives
way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble
at its swelling. We can go to God for safety,
he’s our fortress. And we can hide in the cleft
wings in the cleft of his rock. I was thinking this morning as
Chaplain Bake spoke to us about his ministry. And did you notice
that his ministry when days are peaceful is ping pong and Xbox. It’s just being with the soldiers.
But when that ship leaves port and you can’t see land, things
get real spiritual, don’t they? He’s not just a buddy to play
games with and to hang out with. They say, oh, dear chaplain,
I can’t see land. Or, oh, dear chaplain, those
bullets are real. They’re not the rubber ones that
we had in training. Or, oh, dear captain, we’re in the middle
of the desert and people are shooting at us. And so there are times
like that where we have to be still and know that God is our
God for reality hits. We have our earthquakes, our
losses, and our crosses. So that first little section
teaches us about security. The next little section teaches
us about what I want to call two Jerusalems. There’s the Jerusalem
that is above, the heavenly Jerusalem, but there is the real Jerusalem,
the Jerusalem that for sure would have been the center in the mind
of the psalmist. And so you want to say it in
two ways, there’s safety in the city of God. Earthly Jerusalem,
with all its walls, its soldiers, the king is there, his army,
All the fortifications and all the necessary means for protection
are there. But there’s also safety in the
city of God. There’s safety in the new Jerusalem.
Let’s think about that for just a moment. You read the Old Testament,
in which city of Jerusalem will you find out about? Well, both of them is the answer.
But more about the earthly Jerusalem. How did David acquire it? What
did he do once he captured the city of the Jebusites? How did
he build it? What were those walls like? Who
destroyed it? Who rebuilt it? Who enhanced
it? All those sorts of things we
can read about and figure out. You can even take a trip to the
Holy Land and you can walk on the city walls. You can see into
the parapets and the towers. go through the holy city and
see how they protected the stream of water, which it speaks of
here in Psalm 46, how they protected it so that when they were under
siege, they had fresh water still entering the city. You can see
all the places there where life in that holy city took place. And why is it that the city of
God was a safe place? And was it because of its walls?
The army of God? I mean, all that did help, yes.
But it’s because God was there in the midst of her. And that
is exactly what we have to look forward to in the New Jerusalem.
You read of the New Jerusalem, particularly in the end of Revelation,
chapter 22, but we read of how the city is built. It is wide,
it is square, it is tall, it has gates and it has gold, it
has armaments, it has all the things of the earthly Jerusalem.
but it’s the great city of God and in it we find safety. And
ultimately we find safety because only the righteous are there,
the unrighteous are kept out and no one will ever be able
to enter it who is unrighteous. Now, why is it important to understand
as Israelites, as the people of God, why is it important for
us to understand that Jerusalem was a safe place to be? I mean,
how many of you live inside a wall? Maybe some of you would like
to have a wall. Our president would like to have a wall. Did
y’all see the little cartoon of him recently? He was at the
Western Wall. He was at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and he was
leaning his head in like he was praying. And the little caption
said he was asking the wall, who built you and who paid for
it? It’s kind of a little humor I think I saw just the other
day. We don’t live in fortified cities
anymore, but in old times, maybe some of you watch some of those
old British movies, old BBC movies, they go into their castle, they
pull up the drawbridge and they have their bows and arrows and
archers up on the wall. Well, that’s what you have to
think of. You run to the city, the enemy’s coming. But could
you imagine standing up on the walls of the city, looking out
and seeing 185,000 Assyrians? It’s actually more than that,
because that’s how many died and there were enough others to retreat.
Say 200,000 Assyrians, the Assyrians were nasty people. Second Kings
19, we’ll put our hooks in your mouths, we’ll leash you up like
a dog and take you off into captivity. It was a bad situation when the
Assyrians were camped outside your city wall. But these cities
would be under siege for a lot of time. They would try to outlive
you, outpace you so that you would starve and your water and
food and all would run out. A little situation we read about
in 2 Kings 19, Sennacherib and the Assyrians surrounded the
city. Hezekiah and his people were
terrified. They were taunting. Did you catch
that? They were taunting Yahweh. Okay, that’s bad news. It’s one
thing to taunt Hezekiah, he’s just a king. It’s another to
lay siege to just a city, but this was the city of God. They
were taunting the God of Israel and an angel of death went through
the camp and killed 185,000 Assyrians and Sennacherib fled. What an
amazing thing it is for us to be part of the church of the
living God and to find refuge and safety in the camp of the
saints. The third little section is a
section called peace. Now, you have to understand,
there’s two ways to get peace. You parents know about this.
When you want some peace and quiet in the house, if you’re
a modern parent, like I saw the other day at the toy store, it’s
a negotiation. Y’all seen modern day parents?
Now honey, I’ve already bought you a toy. And you can’t have
another toy until you earn 40 points. I wanted to know how
to earn 40 points, because it sounds like a pretty good deal.
And then there’s the kind of peace I grew up with, and it’s
the kind of peace I think my children would say they’re growing
up with. It’s peace, or sometimes it’s peace, right? It’s imposed. It’s not an option. And so it’s the second one we
have to think of here. It’s peace. And it is imposed
by God Almighty, the Lord of hosts. It is not negotiated peace
where he comes. And he says to the Assyrians,
you know, we’ve lived beside each other for a nice long while.
And I heard you taunting me. And you know, I’m Yahweh and
I can’t put up with that. Nope, he just wipes them out. And he
gives his people peace. And one of the things that we
have to remember as children of God, one of the blessings
that we have is God fights for us because his enemies are our
enemies and our enemies are his. Now we live in a day of peace
and tolerance and whatever else. And we’re not to think that way,
but this is the way the Bible thinks. It’s what the Bible teaches.
My wife’s grandmother, who we’ll see in a few weeks, celebrated
her 100th birthday last year. And I suppose in a few weeks,
she’ll be 101. And she does this little set of exercises we call
the Iraqi Surrender, where she goes out and moves her arms up
and down. And you remember the Iraqis when
we invaded Kuwait and trying to run the Iraqis out there in
Desert Storm? They had their guns up over their head like
this. So Ma Lois, as we call her, does the Iraqi Surrender. Because the US force… She doesn’t
have a gun over her head. But the US forces were such a
sight for the Iraqi army to see back in that day that they immediately
surrendered. And friends, that is what the
enemies of God do, when we pray and when God answers and when
he intervenes on our behalf. And it’s a good reminder to us
that you can resist God and die, or you can submit to him by faith
in Jesus. and not only live, but have him
on your side. I was thinking the other week,
I went to middle school down here at term time, and there
was a bully when I was in the sixth grade, seventh grade bully,
and my dad, having a fantasy of being Harrison Ford, or Clint
Eastwood, or something like that, said, I’m gonna take care of
this bully for you. Now, this is back in the day when you could
take care of a bully and not get arrested. So he parks his
car out on that little side street. I ride by that street and think
of it every time. And he’s gonna wait for this kid. And he’s gonna
get him. I’m not kidding about it. He
wears his little leather jacket and makes himself look cool.
He’s 40 years old, not cool at the time. Yeah, I’m 40 now, so
I better be careful. This kid is behind me and he’s
talking to his friend. And my dad’s watching this thinking,
well, any kid that’s jabbering in his mouth behind my kid, that’s
the bully. So my dad walks up and gets out of the car, I get
in the car, he grabs this kid by his coat. That’s the wrong
kid. But word got out. You don’t mess
with the Kratts boys. Because there’s an elder one.
And that is what peace negotiated or rather imposed by God is like. Resist and die or submit and
live. There’s one final thing to think
of, and that’s verses 7 through 11. It’s a refrain that is repeated
twice. Look at verse 7 and then 11.
They’re exactly the same. The Lord of hosts is with us.
The God of Jacob is our fortress. It says the exact same thing
in verse 11. We’ve talked a little bit in
our study of Psalms about the names of God. They mean a lot. And if we understand it, we understand
who is on our side. So who is our God and who is
our refuge? Who is our strength? Who is our ever-present help
in a time of trouble? Well, it is Jehovah Sabaoth. It is Yahweh Sabaoth or the Lord
Almighty, the Lord of hosts. Have you listened to Handel’s
Messiah or Handel’s Israel and Egypt? Handel was quite adept
at putting the terror and the thrill of Yahweh into musical
form. And then added to that the voices
of the choir. And he sings these songs of the
strength of God and the plagues of Egypt. The strength of God
as he announces the birth of Messiah. Remember who it is that
announces that Jesus is born. Who is it that appears to the
shepherds? It’s all the hosts of the angels. Sometimes I wonder,
is it the same angels that wiped out Sennacherib’s army? They come one night to wipe out
an army, but they come on another night to announce the royal birth
of King Jesus. But Yahweh, Sabaoth, the Lord
Almighty, the Lord of hosts. You know, our modern world, our
modern church world is getting away to singing the hymns of
the faith. When y’all sing, come thou fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace. What is it that you raise in
that song? Here I raise my Ebenezer. I mean,
what is an Ebenezer? That’s a strange word. It’s a
rock of help. And we lose our education. We lose the value
of learning the Bible through singing hymns. come to Mighty
Fortress as our God in just a few minutes. Lord Sabbaoth, his name. I mean, what, huh? We’d rather
just sing some empty words, but when we know these words, when
we know what is behind them, they are worth singing about. When you think of the words of
Mighty Fortress as our God and you think about It was at the city of Dothan
and the ministry of Elisha and the wicked Assyrians, there they
were again. And it was at Ben-Hadad and his army. And Elisha prays
and they look up on the hills and what do they see on the hills?
Chariots and soldiers. and immediately the war that
they thought for a moment they might lose, they say, we got
this. No, in fact, God has it for us. The Lord of host is with
us. The God of Jacob is our fortress. Who is this? He’s the God of
host, but he’s the God of Abraham and Isaac and the God of Jacob. This is our God. Don’t let these truths be lost
to you, that God is in our midst and that we only have to call
upon him for our help. What a blessing we have. Let’s
pray together and then we’ll sing a mighty fortress. Our Lord
and God, we thank you for these wonderful truths that are ours
in Christ Jesus. These are ours from your holy
word. And we do ask and pray that that our confidence will be strong
because you are a strong God, a mighty God, God of hosts, a
God who fights. And we ask and pray for your
help and blessing to live life out of these truths. In Jesus’
name we pray, amen.