Happy Monday, Centennial Family! Find a devotion by one of your elders, Andy Anderson, below. Be blessed by Psalm 46 this day. Blessings, Jeremiah.
This afternoon I was randomly listening to a song by the band The Fray, when I was stopped in my tracks by the words at the end of the tune – “Be still and know that I’m with you… Be still… and know… I am.”
The words are a paraphrase of Psalm 46 at verse 10 – “Be still and know that I am God” (ESV).
Psalm 46, in its original context, was a Psalm written in response to God’s faithfulness in a time of trouble. I have even seen it suggested that this Psalm may reflect the reality of God’s faithful servant, King Hezekiah, as he found himself in II Kings 18 & 19 – helpless at the threat of the Assyrian empire.
I want to return for a moment to that last line from the Fray’s song, “Be still… and know… I am.” As noted, it’s found in verse 10 of Psalm 46, and comes in a section which is intended to assure God’s people of his never-ending care. But it’s in verse 11 that the Psalmist draws our attention to something special.
In Scripture we read the words “The LORD” (capital letters) often, though we don’t necessarily fully comprehend what we’ve read when we see it. Those words, “The LORD”, they are God’s personal name – YHWH – 4 consonants standing for the Hebrew name for God. Jehovah or Yahweh. Those letters are first seen in Exodus 3:14, where God as he speaks with Moses, responds to a question about his name by declaring, "I am that I am".
I am.
Psalm 46 uses both “Be still and know that I am God”, and “The LORD (YHWH) of hosts is with us.” It’s as if the Psalmist would have us understand something about God’s nature, his very character, in a special and very personal way. It’s a thought on how I (and hopefully each of you) might know God.
A brief tangent by way of illustration, if I may…
Last week, we had a pretty dramatic storm pass through South Carolina. Some areas outside of Columbia were hit quite destructively. With that destruction came images which would bring pause for any caring individual. Trees splintered, homes shattered…debris strewn everywhere. As my family awoke to the morning following the storm, we were greeted with a sight that would stop us in our tracks as well – but for a very different reason.
Understand first, that our family lives in a large dormitory on the campus of the University of South Carolina. We normally (under non-coronavirus circumstances) abide with close to 300 students. And, of course, in the normal hustle-and-bustle of college living, we walk out of our front door to literally hundreds of students at any given moment.
But on the day following the storms, with all of the college students no longer living with us (thanks to coronavirus epidemic) instead of hearing the normal sounds of student activity, instead of seeing the many emotions of college life plastered on faces of young men and women, my wife would walk outside to find a small, green frog perched on the handrail of our steps and enjoying the afternoon sun.
You see, it was the ability to stop and enjoy the stillness of the moment – the lack of activity - that allowed my wife to see the small and normally un-noticeable frog. It was as if God had said, “I control both the dramatic (the storm from the evening before) and the mundane (the frog). I am giving you a chance to see me in both activity and stillness because… I AM.”
God sometimes invites us to see him in the most epic ways – just notice all of the things happening around the Psalmist in Psalm 46. The earth gives way, mountains move, the waters of the sea roar and foam. God makes wars cease, he breaks the bow and shatters the spear.
But he also invites us to see him in the not-so noticed ways also – ways that are revealed throughout scripture which find their ultimate expression in the person of Jesus Christ. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”, “a bruised reed he will not break, a faintly burning wick he will not quench”, “your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.”
Jesus Christ is all of those things to us, rolled into one – the most epic in his essence and abilities, and not-so-noticed in his humility and incarnation - at the same time. He “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Phil. 2:7-8).
We live in a moment where there is much fear and much loss of the normalcy of life. The changes wrought because of the coronavirus epidemic has effected even the ways in which we worship together as a body. But those changes have not extended to I AM. Yahweh. Our Lord is yet our Lord. He is still our maker, our master, our redeemer.
There are two easy applications we may make from the reading of this passage in Psalm 46. First, even in these times, God is still I AM. Secondly, in our respective quarantined “stillness” may we together seek his presence, in his Word and in his creation. Look to find God in the supreme and in the small, that we may we know him and experience him in a personal way as our great I AM.
Andy