Be Still for What? [B]

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Psalm chapter 46. I realize that some of you were not here this morning, so just to catch you up with things, I started a series this morning that I’ve been talking about for several months on some of the most misused passages in all of Scripture. Some of those passages that are just twisted, misapplied, taken out of context, crammed into somebody’s preconceived ideas where they don’t fit and just in general abused.

And I’m calling the series Twisted, just one word, Twisted, on some of these scriptures that are misused. And we began this morning by looking at probably not the first that comes to mind, but one of the first that came to my mind. And as I did a little research, I thought, what are some things that some other pastors say are misquoted, misused scriptures?

And this passage, this verse out of Psalm chapter 46 was pretty high on the list. And as I said this morning, and we won’t go into as great of detail this morning, or as we did this morning, but Psalm chapter 46, you’re probably familiar with the verse or the portion of the verse that says, Be still and know that I am God. That’s a good verse. It’s a comforting verse and should be a comforting verse to us in times of trouble.

It’s also not the whole verse, and it’s also not the verse that is most indicative of what the point of the whole passage is. And we look this morning at how it’s taken out of context. Tonight we’re going to look at what the real context is.

And this morning I warned you about something that you may not have heard about, but if your children or grandchildren are involved in church, if they’re involved in any kind of Christian or pseudo-Christian teaching, if they have any inclination toward that at all that they have probably heard or been confronted with, and that any church that’s not on guard, I believe, can be confronted with today. and that’s the practice of contemplative mysticism. If you’ll recall, contemplative mysticism is the idea that in order to connect with God, we circumvent, we go around the traditional channels that we’re taught in Scripture of studying into God’s Word, meditating on God’s Word, meaning filling our minds with God’s Word and trying to get everything we can out of it that God intended for us.

We go around the traditional route of doing that. We go around the traditional route of praying, having a conversation with God and we try this back-channel way of clearing our mind, emptying our mind, quieting our mind of every conscious thought, even thoughts of God and His Word, and just clear our minds so that we can have some kind of mystical experience, some kind of feeling of God. And I warned you of the dangers of that.

And I won’t go into all of it again, but it’s been used to lead people into all forms of spiritual deception. And such seemingly innocent practices, and I say innocent because they’re things that we disagree with, things that we would not necessarily use, but we wouldn’t look at it and say, oh, that’s demonic. Things like prayer beads, things like prayer labyrinths and prayer walks.

And again, nothing wrong with walking and praying. It’s the practice of walking in such a way we try to clear our minds. All of these practices that are intended to quiet the mind so we don’t think about God and His truth, we rather just feel everything.

And it opens people to all kinds of spiritual deception. It goes against the clear teachings of Scripture that we be sober-minded, that we exercise self-control, that we exercise discernment, we test the spirits, we be sober and vigilant because our adversary the devil is a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour. It goes against the clear teaching of the Bible that we’re not to use vain repetition in our prayer the way the heathens do.

And just in general, we’re not to try to go about connecting with God in the way that the heathen or the Gentile does, according to Ephesians chapter 4. But instead, we’re only to seek God in compliance with His divine revelation, the objective truth of the Bible. And we seek Him with not only, we not only love Him with all of our heart and soul and strength, but also with our mind.

And what the Bible teaches us about our relationship with God is that we are very much engaged in it. That we strive to know Him and to love Him, not just to feel some presence that claims to be Him. And Psalm 46.

10 has been used and abused out of context to try to get people to do all sorts of things, to quiet their minds and still their minds where they can just feel a connection with the divine instead of knowing the God we serve. And some of you who picked up articles, if you read them this afternoon, you may have read some of the testimonies of people who’ve even written books. They went from being Baptists or some other kind of evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, They’ve gone from being that to embracing Catholicism, to embracing Buddhism, to embracing New Age philosophies.

One lady even talks about goddess worship that she’s into now while claiming to still be a Christian. How that works, I still haven’t received a satisfactory answer. And they not only teach that this is the journey that they’ve been on, that all started with these mystical practices, but they also encourage people to follow them on that journey.

And folks, they’re opening themselves up to all sorts of dangers. When the Bible says that we’re to meditate on the Word of God, it doesn’t mean to empty our mind, but to fill it with God’s Word. We read the passage in Psalm chapter 46 this morning.

We read the whole chapter, I should say. Not just the passage, not just that one verse, that partial verse. We read the whole chapter.

And as you’ll see from the whole chapter, it has nothing to do with any kind of mystical experience. He’s really not even talking about his prayer life. Let’s read it again just to refresh.

Psalm chapter 46 verse 1 says, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. And by the way, if you want one verse that sums up the theme of the chapter, it’s not verse 10, it’s verse 1. Now I won’t say that in every chapter the first verse is the one that sets the stage and tells you what the whole thing is about.

But if you want to know what chapter 46 is about, it’s about God being a refuge we can run to. And being still is as a result of that. We can be still because God is a refuge.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, or will not we fear, though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea, though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof, say, There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High. God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved.

God shall help her, and that right early. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved, He uttered His voice, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us.

The God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. Come, behold the works of the Lord.

What desolations He hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth. He breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder.

He burneth the chariot in the fire. Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the heathen.

I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge.

Selah. Again, as I said, we looked this morning at what the world likes to think the passage means and why it doesn’t really mean that. Tonight I’d like to go back and look in context at what it really means.

Because I think what the context of the passage is, what this really means, is infinitely better news for us than any mystical experience that we could ever have. But we have a real promise here of serving a God who is a refuge to His people. And because of that, we can be still in the midst of the turmoil around us.

So it starts out by saying that God is our refuge and our strength. And as I mentioned this morning, there’s a real story behind this. A lot of historians and Bible scholars that I read this week in studying this passage believe that this chapter was actually written by King Hezekiah.

Now that doesn’t do anything to affect whether or not it’s Scripture because the Jewish people still accepted the book of Psalms. They still accepted Psalm 46 as Scripture. Jesus quoted from the book of Psalms. We know it’s still the Word of God, and we know that not all of the book of Psalms was written by David. Some of them say that they were written by other people.

But it’s believed that this was written by King Hezekiah about what was going on in his world in Isaiah chapters 36 and 37. You might want to write that down, Isaiah 36 and 37. We don’t have time to go through the whole two chapters tonight and still go through this chapter.

but I want to encourage you to go look at it for yourself and see what was going on in his world. Isaiah 36 and 37. What was going on was that King Hezekiah was the king of Judah, the southern kingdom, the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin when Israel split after the death of Solomon.

King Hezekiah, some centuries later, was king over Judah. And we’ve talked about Hezekiah some. We’ve talked about various things from his life.

But one thing most people remember about King Hezekiah, He’s the one that God said through his prophet, you’re going to die. And he repented of his sin. He begged God for more time and God gave him 15 more years.

That’s what he’s most recognized for. The king Hezekiah was on the throne and faced King Shalmaneser, who was the warrior king of the Assyrian Empire. Now, Syria was not a nice country.

Assyria, I tend to look at as being the Nazi Germany of their day. Not that they were mass exterminating people, I mean in their intense drive for conquest. They ran roughshod over every other country that was in their way. And in order to, they didn’t have a lot of natural defenses around them, a lot of mountains and things.

They were out in the middle of the plains. And so in order to keep themselves from being invaded, in order to defend themselves, they used terror tactics. And they would go in and they would just wipe out villages as needed, just enough to scare everybody else and keep everybody else in line.

And in order to keep people from rising up against the Assyrian dominance over their country, when the Assyrians would take over a country, they wouldn’t wipe out all of the people. They would wipe out, again, the ones that they needed to, to scare everybody else. And then once everybody else was sufficiently nervous, terrified, once that was done, they would take the people that they had just conquered and split them up and move them elsewhere.

And they would take all these various countries that were in their empire and they would mix them up. And it would be as if, well, let’s say Arkansas decided to have an empire. And they were to take over Oklahoma and Louisiana and Missouri and yes, even Texas.

And to keep everybody from getting together and rising up, keep those rascally Oklahomans from rising up against them. They’d take the Oklahomans and they’d split them up and they’d send some to New Orleans and they’d send some to Kansas City and they’d settle some in Little Rock and some in Dallas. And they’d do the same with the people from Texas.

And that’s what they did in Assyria. They would take some of the people and they would split them up and just send them all over the place. So in a city like Fayetteville, you might have people from five, six, seven different places.

It was going to keep them from all getting together and deciding as one to rise up against the Assyrians. And this country, which threatened the destruction of Jerusalem, threatened the destruction of the Jewish way of life as they knew it. All being together, all being in one country, all being close to their temple where they could worship God, they stood on the threshold of taking over Jerusalem when Hezekiah was the king.

And Hezekiah stood within his city walls, and it sounds from the reading of the passage as though they had taken over just about every other city in the kingdom of King Hezekiah. And with all those other cities under their control, they turned the bulk of their firepower, not that they had gunpowder, but they turned the bulk of their firepower toward Jerusalem and said, You’re next. And King Shalmaneser sent one of his men to Jerusalem and said, Tell your people to surrender and we’ll go easy on you.

He said, By the way, tell them not to listen to what King Hezekiah says because he’s going to try to tell you. See, they knew about King Hezekiah. They knew about the God of Israel.

They said, He’s going to try to tell you that your God will do battle for you. He’s going to try to convince you that the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob is going to deliver you from our hands. Sounds reasonable to us.

I mean, he’s God. He can do what he wants. But at that point, they’re surrounded.

They’re besieged. They’re weak. The only thing that’s keeping them from being completely overrun by the Assyrians are the walls around them.

And they’ve got every bit of siege technology that they can muster aimed at Jerusalem. And they’re being told, he’s going to try to convince you. King Hezekiah, to preserve his own power, is going to try to convince you that your God can deliver you from us.

And this representative of King Shalmaneser said, but all these other countries we’ve taken over. And folks, they had so utterly devastated these other countries that as I was reading the list of them, I thought, I’m fairly familiar with the Old Testament and I’ve never heard of some of these countries. That’s because they went into the dustbin of history when Assyria was through with them.

They said, this country, and this country, and this country, and this city, and this empire, they all thought the same thing about their gods. They all said their gods were going to deliver them, But you know what? They fell to us.

Where are their gods to deliver them? And who are you and who is your God to think that you will stand against us? So you might as well throw down your weapons, throw down your city gates, and come on out and we’ll go easy on you.

King Hezekiah seeks God and says, Lord, what shall I do? And is told that God will take care of it. Because see, at this point, King Hezekiah, it may sound impressive because he’s the king and he has command of the army of Judah, such as it was remaining.

But compared to the Assyrian empire, he’s just a fly that they would swat at. He says, God, what will I do? And God makes it clear that he’ll handle it, and that he’ll handle it in his own way.

And God says through the prophets that something was going to be done that they would not be able to explain. They would not have been able to pull off on their own. And Hezekiah takes God at his word, and he rallies the people of Jerusalem and says, God will do battle for us.

And folks, in this, I’m not giving you exact quotes. I’m just retelling the story from what I remember about it. That’s why I want you to go back and look at it for yourself and check out the details of it.

This is just some background to get us to Psalm 46. He goes and rallies the people and says, God is going to do battle for us. So you go back and you go stand on that wall and you tell the people that King Shalmaneser sent there, no deal. God’s going to do battle for us.

And so they tell him that. And the Assyrian envoy walks away. I’m sure thinking, these foolish people, we’re just going to massacre them.

But that night, by the power of God, he slaughtered 185,000 of the Assyrian army in their sleep while they slept in their camp. And they were so distraught, they were so confused at what had happened, they were so perplexed that it completely threw them off. They had no power.

I mean, where do you go from that? That King Shalmaneser had no alternative but to turn away and abandon the siege of Jerusalem. And I imagine at that point King Hezekiah got on his face and gave thanks to God for doing for them what they could not do for themselves.

And it reminds me of all the times throughout the Old Testament where God’s people are told in essence to stand still because God will do battle for them. When Moses tells the people to stand still and see the salvation of the Lord. Folks, we serve a God who does battle for us.

Because quite honestly, we are weak and insignificant and we are not able to stand against the ravages of the world system in which we find ourselves. We serve a God who does battle for us. And because of that, because we serve a God who is our refuge, not the city walls of Jerusalem, but God Himself was the refuge of His people, we are able to stand calm and be still in the midst of the storm and know that He is God.

That passage has nothing to do with mysticism. It has everything to do with trusting in God’s hand. So why are we able to be still and what does that mean in context?

Being still, first of all, means trusting in God in times of trouble. We’ve got that down. If you look at it, you’d have to do all kinds of acrobatic moves through the text to try to get out of it what people get out of it.

That this has something to do with our mystical practices. Just reading the plain and clear sense of the Scripture is that it talks about the faithfulness of God to preserve and to protect His people. And we see clearly from it that being still means to trust God in times of trouble.

He starts out by saying that God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. And therefore we will not fear, though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea, though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Now this doesn’t mean there were earthquakes and such when God did battle for Hezekiah.

But what it means is if God is powerful enough that He could slaughter 185,000 of these pagan troops in their sleep as they’re ready to do violence against the city of God with no other explanation. Folks, there’s really nothing God can’t do, is there? And it doesn’t matter if the entire world is in an uproar.

I mean, look at this. He talks about the earth being removed, earth being moved from one place to another. I don’t think that means it swings off its axis.

I The very ground we stand on is shaking and moving. There’s nothing stable. There’s nothing solid in our world.

And the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. Imagine the very mountains collapsing into the sea and the chaos that would ensue from that. Though the waters thereof roar in trouble, the oceans raging against them.

And though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Everything in their world could be in chaos and upheaval and still God is a God of refuge. And folks, somebody like that, A God like that is somebody we can get behind.

A God like that is somebody that we can trust with our troubles, whatever they are. A God that we can trust. And folks, being still in the context of this passage means to trust in God when we have no place else to turn to. Not because He’s our last option, He should still be first option.

But especially when there is nowhere else to turn to, God is not off-put by that at all. God is not caught off guard. He’s not surprised by any of it.

God is in control, and God is a refuge to His people. And in that, having looked at what it means to be still, why can we be still? We trust a God whose presence is unshakable.

Serve a God whose presence is unshakable. He cannot be moved. God cannot be put off His throne.

God can’t be driven from in the midst of His people. God can’t be driven back by all the armies of all the countries on earth. God can’t be driven back from His purposes by any vote of any group of people, any population, any government.

Folks, God is sovereign. And I say that again. I feel the need to clarify that every time.

I say that not with the Calvinistic understanding that God determines every single thing that ever happens. And I know some of them would take exception with whether or not they believe that. Not that God determines everything that ever happens.

Not in the sense of fatalistic determinism. But when God says, not I’m going to allow this, not I would prefer this, but it is going to be this way, Folks, you better bet the house on it, bet the bank on it. It’s going to be that way.

God is sovereign in what He says goes. He can’t be shaken. He can’t be driven away from the presence of His people.

He’s with us. In the picture that we’ve been given already in the first three verses of everything being in an uproar, the writer points out in verse 4, there is a river the streams whereof make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High. And I’ve read this week all kinds of spiritual explanations.

The river is Jesus. The river is God’s Word. The river is the Holy Spirit.

I don’t know. Given that they believe the writer’s Hezekiah, I mean, there is a historical precedent for the fact of there being a stream that was not known to the enemy that ran under the walls of the city of Jerusalem and gave water to the city and allowed it to stand against siege. I would think that would be a good explanation for it.

He’s talking about a literal river. But either way, look at verse 5. God is in the midst of her.

Talking about the city of God, I believe. God is in the midst of her, and she shall not be moved. God shall help her in that right early.

So with God in the midst of His people, we can’t be moved, and that’s because God can’t be moved. We can’t be defeated because God can’t be defeated. There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High.

God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved. And again, does that mean that God somehow was defeated later on when the people of Judah were finally taken over by the Babylonians? No, because God decreed that to happen.

God told them it would happen because of their rejection of Him, because of their sin, time after time after time. So the point is not that the people of God will never have trouble. The point is not that there will never be a time when it seems like the world has gotten the best of us.

Folks, but overall, when we stand with God, when we stand with God, there’s very little the world can do to us because we serve a God who is an unshakable refuge of His people. And that’s the kind of God we can trust and rest in and be still when He does battle for us. We not only trust a God whose presence is unshakable, we trust a God whose timing is impeccable.

We trust a God whose timing is impeccable. He shows up just in time to deliver His people. He’s never early, He’s never late.

It says in verse 5, God shall help her in that right early. And that word early doesn’t mean God showed up three weeks ahead of time just sat around and waited until it was time for him to do something. That means God wasn’t late.

God wasn’t late. And folks, there may be times in our lives when we think, God, why did you let this happen? If you were going to do something, why didn’t you do it already?

Why am I still dealing with this? Why haven’t you delivered me from this problem or this temptation or whatever it may be? God, why haven’t you done something already?

And we may think that God is late in His dealings with us. We may think that God is late in His deliverance of us. But we serve a God whose timing is impeccable.

I can think of another example from the Bible of someone who thought that God was late. Anybody else? Anybody know who I’m talking about?

I thought I heard a name. If you had been here, my brother would not have died. Who said that?

Mary. Was it Martha? Martha.

You’re close. Whoever said Mary, you’re close. Same family.

Martha. When Lazarus was sick and dying, they sent word to Jesus. And he waited around a couple days and then showed up after Lazarus had already died.

And Martha, I’m not sure if it’s an accusatory thing or if she was just letting out her frustrations to a friend that she knew and loved and knew loved her. Said, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And some people have read into that that she was accusing the Lord, that she was angry with him.

I prefer to look at it as she was expressing her belief in him that if he’d been there, I’m sure there was some sadness in there too. But that indicated a lot of trust in Jesus that if he’d been here, you could have stopped the death. You have power over life and death.

It’s a lot of faith to have in somebody. But she said, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. And what did he do?

He raised Lazarus from the dead. And so he wasn’t late in it. It’d be one thing.

I mean, a doctor, a skilled doctor, sometimes even somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing and just knows what somebody needs, can walk in and keep somebody from dying. If I saw somebody on the ground choking, I’d like to think if I could remove the obstruction, I could stop them from dying. That’s a big if, if I could remove the obstruction.

I could stop them from dying, but it takes a whole lot more power to raise somebody from the dead. And that situation was not Jesus falling down on the job and showing up late. That whole incident was about demonstrating the power of God and demonstrating that Jesus Christ was and is who He said He was.

We serve a God whose timing is impeccable. And sometimes in the storms of your life, you may think, God, where are you and why haven’t you shown up yet? But remember this, we serve a God who will help His people.

And that right early, He shows up just in time. He shows up just at the right time to do what’s best. We trust a God whose power is undefeatable. This goes along with His presence being unshakable.

He can’t be driven away because nobody can defeat Him. God can’t be driven away from His people because no one can defeat Him. In verses 6 through 9, we see this principle.

The heathen raged. The kingdoms were moved. He uttered His voice, and the earth melted.

The heathen raged is an interesting image to put there. If any of you. .

. it’s an old movie. Well, maybe not for you.

It was for me, but have any of you seen the movie Zulu? It’s an old movie. They used to show it on the History Channel.

It’s about Dutch and British people in South Africa dealing with one of the Zulu uprisings. And it’s a little, I think, mission town, if I recall correctly. And in the movie, just when they would beat back one onslaught of Zulu warriors, you’d see on an opposite hill, you’d see line after line of these men with their feathers and their giant sort of oval-shaped shields and their spears.

And they would stand on the hilltop and they would beat their shields with their spears and make the most ungodly racket. And you’ve got this small garrison of people inside the fort that are just exhausted from having beaten back one invasion, one wave of invasion. And now they turn and here they’re coming again and they’re banging shields standing before they ever charge, banging their shields, making racket and making these guttural sounds with their throats to intimidate the enemy.

And I watch it, and I know what’s going to happen. I know how the movie ends. I’ve seen it before.

And yet there’s this edge-of-my-seat kind of feeling because you can’t hear a sound like that. You can’t see somebody act like that and not tense up a little bit. I mean, it’s a powerful image, and I can only imagine how terrified the people must have been because it’s based on a true historical event.

I can only imagine how frightened the people must have been, especially those in the village that weren’t soldiers. And I think of the Indian raids on various towns in various forts in the western U. S.

I think of the war cries and how that must have unnerved people who weren’t used to the sound. And folks, we could look at things that have happened all through history and those pictures that we get of what they call the heathen raging and the war cries and the noise that goes on and I’m sure must have gone on as the Assyrians were ready to lay siege to the city of Jerusalem. When it says the heathen raged, that doesn’t just mean the heathen was mad.

It doesn’t mean that the ungodly pagan countries around them were mad. It means they were ready for war and they showed it. It would be a terrifying thing.

And the kingdoms were moved. These people could move kingdoms. The Assyrians rearranged the Middle East. They moved entire kingdoms of people wherever they wanted to go. And yet, it changes with that colon there.

He uttered His voice and the earth melted. Sure, the heathens can rearrange the kingdoms of the world. The heathens can get things in an uproar.

But God utters His voice and He could melt the earth. And compared to all of the countries, all of the things, all the threats they faced, there was nobody with power like God. Folks, that’s not just an Old Testament principle.

That’s one that applies today. There’s nobody with power like God. God is more powerful than any of us and God is more powerful than all of us.

The heathen raged. The kingdoms were moved. he uttered his voice, the earth melted.

The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge, Selah. Come behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth. This word desolations means destructions.

They could look back at a long list of enemies of God’s people that he had defeated. The Amalekites, the Edomites, the Philistines, the Egyptians, there’s practically no end to the list of people that had gone who had declared war on God and on God’s people who God had destroyed. And so yeah, we may be at war with the Assyrians right now, but look at God’s track record.

He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth. He breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder. He burneth the chariot in fire.

Folks, it’s one thing for somebody to be strong enough to win a war. It’s one thing for somebody to be strong enough to win battles, but to be strong enough to end war from then on is another story. Right now, as far as I know, we’re still the strongest country on the face of the earth and we haven’t been able to make it happen.

And yet one day God will set all the sides down, make them to beat their plowshares, or beat their swords int

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