Here’s a very insightful post from Lee Irons critiquing the theory that “righteousness” means “covenant faithfulness”. I’ll quote a sizeable chunk of Irons’ conclusions because they’re highly relevant to both of my series on righteousness and covenant:
As you can see, the New Perspective claim that “the righteousness of God” is a cipher denoting “God’s saving faithfulness to his covenant” rests on the outdated Lowthian theory of Hebrew synonymous parallelism. Rather than equating “righteousness” with “faithfulness” (or “salvation”), it is better to see the instances in the Psalms and Isaiah where these terms are used in parallelism as “binoculars” in which these different concepts mutually interpret one another and lead to a picture that is larger than the sum of its parts.
God’s salvation is the result of his faithfulness to his covenant with Abraham. God’s salvation is also an expression of his righteousness, because he executes salvation in a manner that is consistent with his justice and holiness; indeed, salvation itself is an essentially judicial activity, for salvation comes through judgment. For example, at the Exodus, God’s deliverance of his people was accomplished by judgment on the Egyptians. At the cross, salvation was accomplished because the judgment we deserved was borne by Jesus as our substitute.
In other words, when “God’s salvation” or “God’s faithfulness” and “God’s righteousness” are found in parallel, the conclusion we are to draw is not that the word “righteousness” itself means “salvation” or “faithfulness,” but that God’s saving activity comes in fulfillment of his covenant promises and is an expression of his righteousness. Especially in those cases where “salvation” and “righteousness” are parallel (see, e.g., Psalm 98:2; Isaiah 51:5-8; 56:1), the point is that God’s salvation has a strongly judicial dimension.
To conclude, the static Lowthian theory of synonymous parallelism has been superceded in the last 30 years by a more nuanced understanding, and this scholarly shift in the interpretation of Hebrew poetry undermines one of the pillars of the NPP. When properly understood, Hebrew parallelism provides no support for the theory that δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is a cipher for God’s faithfulness to his covenant.
From the Sola Panel
This is the fifth instalment of a five-part series (Read parts 1, 2, 3 and 4)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2, and have discovered that Jesus provides the solution to the puzzle of Psalm 8.
Where do we see Jesus? We see him in the Gospels, those records and witnesses to Jesus’ life, death on the cross and resurrection from the dead. The Gospels form the first four books of our New Testaments. And as we look at this man Jesus Christ in those Gospels, we see something very significant: we actually see (if we look at this testimony closely) that God himself became human: Jesus, the Son of God.
This is the reason that we are important to God. It’s because God actually became one of us. God, the creator and designer—the one who is far above and beyond even the 70 sextillion stars—the one whose hands hold the universe—the one for whom and by whom this same universe exists—became human. He became one of us—one of the specks of dust—one of the small, pitiful creatures. He became a baby and grew. And he did it “because of the suffering of death” (Heb 2:9b).
Just as our very existence and value in this universe is a real problem, so too is the fact that suffering and death is also a problem. The Bible doesn’t give us final and neat reasons for suffering and death—especially when it comes to individual cases. But it does tell us that suffering and death are all finally bound up with our rejection of God himself. The fact that we have abandoned our responsibility and ceased to live as God desires means that we are subject to death.
Death is not the way the world should be. It’s wrong. You will know this if you have ever experienced the death of a loved one, relative or friend, as well as thought about your own impending death. But the Bible says that death is all bound up with this terrible reality—the reality that we, as individuals and as a race, have taken our importance for granted and have used it to pretend that we are God, choosing to define our own lives. Death is, in the end, God’s judgement against our rejection of him—our abandonment of who we are, our ignoring of him and our playing God ourselves. Death now; death forever.
But what has Jesus done about death? Again, take a look at the same verse: “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb 2:9c). God’s Son became one of us because of God’s grace—his lavish, undeserved love for us. The reason you matter to the God who made the countless stars and supernovas is not because you’re big or good or important to the running of the universe; it’s simply because he decided to love you. And he showed his love in an incredible way: Jesus, in becoming one of us, tasted death for us. Although he was God himself, the perfect human being, he also suffered. He died. He died, in fact, an agonizing death on a Roman cross. And he did it for us, in our place.
What does that mean for us? “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Heb 2:10). Jesus died to bring us back to God. Because Jesus has suffered the consequences of God’s judgement, we don’t need to face God’s final judgement against us. Because Jesus died, he has made us ‘sons’, which means heirs—children of God. Those who trust Jesus—those who belong to Jesus—will have ‘salvation’, which means escape from God’s judgement—escape, in the end, from death itself.
Jesus died to bring us to glory—to finally ‘crown us with glory and honour’, as the song goes (Ps 8:5). This means everlasting life in a new creation that God will make—a place where there is no suffering or death, where there is no judgement from him, where we live rightly as God’s children and where we will know him finally and perfectly.
Jesus, who has suffered and been made perfect, has risen from the dead and is now alive. He himself is crowned with glory and honour. One day those who trust in him and know him will see him as he is.
What is your response to this? Do you know Jesus? Do you trust Jesus? Do you believe that the riddle of our existence is actually found, not in yourself, but in him?
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From the Sola Panel
This is the fourth instalment of a five-part series (Read parts 1, 2 and 3.)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8, and we’ve seen the puzzle it presents us with. On the one hand, we are nothing compared to the majestic God who created the universe. On the other hand, God tells us that we are important—that we are created for a purpose in this world.
You know that you and your actions matter, don’t you? You know that what you do or say, how you treat the world and how you treat other people actually matters, don’t you? You know that some things are right and that some things are wrong, don’t you? You know that you will face death one day, like everyone else, and that there’s something scary and horrible about that. What are you going to do about it?
One possibility is that you could just ignore the whole issue. You could just decide that it’s enough to eat, drink and enjoy life as much as you can, minimizing pain as much as possible and maybe along the way, doing great things, loving, laughing and crying, and then dying. You could buy, read and act on Dave Freeman’s book 100 Things to Do Before You Die—carve out your own meaning, define your existence.
But is that really enough? History is littered with the corpses of individuals who have died and suffered under dictators who decided they wanted to define the meaning of their own existence. Maybe you will never be an evil dictator—maybe you will never try to live in a way that hurt anyone. And yet, if you’re honest—if I’m honest, I know I have hurt people. Deeply. Despite the fact that I want to pretend that I can run my life the way I want without any consequences, I also know the guilt of my failures, the pain I’ve cause by my selfish actions and the evil in my heart. And I know that my existence, no matter how full of food and drink and life and love, is not, in the end, going to matter when I die and dissolve into the dust from which I came. I also know that this matters too, somehow.
Back to the song and the riddle of the song. God is great. His creation is enormous. In all of this, what is man? Who am I? Who are you? Why am I so important?
Fast forward hundreds of years.
The claim of the Bible is that this riddle—this puzzle—does have an answer—a profound and great answer. It’s there in the words of the New Testament—where a Christian (that is, someone who knows Jesus Christ) can read the words of the song that we ourselves have just read and not only sees the problem, but also the answer:
It has been testified somewhere,
“What is man, that you are mindful of him,
or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned him with glory and honor,
putting everything in subjection under his feet.”
(Heb 2:6-8a)
Here’s that song—that problem—that age-old issue of our importance: “What is man?” And then, just to make sure we’re all on the same page, our Christian author highlights the particular problem he sees: “Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him” (Heb 2:8b)
We might believe that we have a God-given purpose and responsibility to our lives in this world. But we don’t actually see it. When we look up, we still see those majestic and distant heavens. The original Hebrew song speaks of the greatness of stars—the heavenly lights. Here in this letter to the Hebrews, it’s expressed in terms of angels, heavenly superpowers. But in either case, the point is the same: God is above it all, and we don’t and can’t see with our eyes why and how God should care for us.
And then, when we look around, we don’t see human beings living responsibly, caring for God’s world or for each other, or acting rightly as agents of God’s loving rule, do we. We just see ourselves, trying to define our own existence, hurting and being hurt, loving and hating and dying.
But there is something else—somebody else—who we do see, in verse 9: “But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor” (Heb 2:9a). Whom do we actually see? What is the piece of evidence that should make us turn around and take notice? We see Jesus. This is the Bible’s claim; this is the difference and the answer.
To be continued …
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From the Sola Panel:
This is the third instalment of a five-part series (read parts 1 and 2.)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8 and have discovered that stargazing should make us wonder why God the creator should have anything to do with us.
At this point, if you were sceptical about the existence of the creator himself, I could point you to proofs of a designer in the universe. For example, I could use the ‘fine-tuning’ argument for the existence of God—the fact that there are over 20 fundamental physical constants in the universe that all work together to make the universe work as it does, and that can’t be explained as a coincidence—at least, not yet. If any one of these constants had been a tiny bit different, life couldn’t appear. For example, if the force of gravity was even slightly different by a colossally tiny factor (1 part in 1040), no life-supporting stars could exist. Or I could talk about the statistical improbability of life itself emerging—the fact that even a small protein has 1095 possible folding combinations, and the chances of a protein folding by accident into a functional life-conducive shape during the lifetime of the universe is something like 1 in 1065.
But then you might come back with an answer—the multiverse. Do you know about the multiverse? The multiverse is a philosophical theory, born out of reflection on cosmology and quantum theory. It’s the idea that we are just one out of a gigantic number of different possible universes. The multiverse is a way to solve the problem of the fine-tuning of the universe. Since there’s such a huge or infinite number of possible universes, it’s no problem that our universe just happens to exist by chance—a universe with impossibly fine-tuned life-supporting physical constants, where proteins folded in just the right way. The multiverse is an act of faith; it’s not a scientific hypothesis in the strict sense. There is no scientific evidence for the multiverse; in fact, there’s no experimental test that anyone has conceived that could possibly prove it or disprove it. It’s a philosophy that tries to solve the apparent design of the universe without resorting to a designer. The multiverse theory is complex, physically and philosophically, and it seems to me to be the last resort of the desperate. But if you’re philosophically committed to atheism, that’s what you’ve got at your disposal at the moment.
But actually there’s a bigger problem with my proofs for a designer. You see, even if my arguments for the existence of a cosmic designer were true and irrefutable, and even if you believed them, what does that actually prove? That there is a great designer—a purpose—to the universe doesn’t say anything about you and me.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there is a great grand design to the existence of the 70 sextillion-plus stars out there. Say there is some grand 13-billion-year-old design to it all, and that God the creator is behind it all. So what? What on earth would that have to do with you, your life, your relationships, your joys, your sorrows, your acts of kindness, your feelings of guilt at those evil things you’ve said and thought and done, your goals, your children, your ethics, your conviction that it’s wrong to hurt and right to love, and your death as you dissolve back into the dust you came from? What is that to God? Why does that matter at all in this gigantic universe?
Yet this is the question of our poet, as the song continues:
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
(Ps 8:5-8)
This is actually a real puzzle—a problem—the crisis of the song—that this God, the one who made the heavens for some reason, deliberately and personally sees you and me as important. You and I are a key part of his creation. We (as the song says) are “crowned … with glory and honor”. We are rulers. We have dominion.
These words ‘rule’ and ‘dominion’ recall the words of Genesis 1-2. They are used to describe the reality that humans are put on the earth by God himself to care for it, not to exploit it for our own ends. It’s a statement of our glory and our responsibility, not a statement of our God-given right to use the world any way we want. Our poet in this biblical song recalls these words to express wonder at the fact that we specks of dust are somehow glorious in God’s eyes. The evidence of the stars suggests that we are nothing, but God himself, the creator of the stars, says we are something. We have been made by God for a purpose in this world: we have responsibility. We have responsibility to God to do what is right—to rule the works of God’s hands. And, as the rest of the Bible points out, we have a responsibility to live rightly in our relationships with each other—to honour God, to care for his world, to care for each other, to live under his loving rule.
But that’s the problem. That’s the puzzle. How is it that such a great creator—such a great and super-powerful supreme being—has given us specks of dust this responsibility?
Verse 9 gives us no answer:
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
The song ends where it began. It hasn’t solved the puzzle; it has just expressed it. God is great in the earth, and somehow, for some reason, we are important to him.
To be continued …
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From the Sola Panel
In the second instalment of a five-part series, I contemplate the extent of our significance in the universe. (Read Part 1.)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8, and we’ve discovered that stargazing helps us to see how insignificant we really are.
Just think about the size of space for a moment. Imagine you could get into the fastest jet on earth (last time I checked, this was the SR-71 Blackbird). Its official speed record is almost 2,500 miles per hour. Now imagine you could speed it up 100 times to 250,000 miles per hour. Then imagine that you could take it on a trip to space. It would take you an hour to get to the moon—that’s pretty reasonable! It would take you eight days to get to Mars, the closest planet to Earth. It would take you four months to get to the planet Saturn (remember, we’re travelling 100 times faster than the fastest jet ever built). It would take you a year and a half to get to the planet Pluto at the edge of our solar system. To get to the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, it would take you 12,000 years. To get to the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, it would take you 80 million years. To the next closest galaxy, Andromeda, it would take you seven billion years. To get to the edge of the visible universe, it would take you 40 million million years. And they think that the size of the non-visible universe is vastly huger than this: that would take you a million million million million, etc. years.
I’ll quote another modern ‘poet’—this time, the late Douglas Adams, writing The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy:
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.1
The ancient biblical poet was ignorant about billions of parsecs or millisecond pulsars. He just knew that space was big, wonderful, majestic and beyond us. That’s the universe we live in.
So the Bible has a question for you: who are you?
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
(Ps 8:4)
What is man? Who am I in comparison to this world? Who are you? You are one of seven billion tiny organisms, living on an infinitesimally small pinprick of a dust ball, who are giving birth, breathing, eating, maybe reproducing and dying.
But that’s the Bible’s question: what is it to be human? What is your existence—your family, your career, your study, your relationships, your life—compared to this immense universe with its big bang, its nebulas and its millisecond pulsars?
But did you notice something? That’s not quite the way the song puts it, isn’t it. It’s not just the universe that’s big; this biblical song makes an even more profound point. It’s a point about God himself: God is big. See verse 1:
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
We’re not just talking here about how small we are compared to the universe; this is a song about our relationship to the majesty of the Lord—the God who created that universe.
Now it’s important to realize that this ‘God’ spoken about in the Bible has nothing to do with superstition and magical religion. The Bible’s view of God is the opposite of superstition. In fact, it’s the biblical view of God that enabled the early Christians to throw astrology away and promote astronomy instead. Astrology is the belief that the stars have something to do with our lives. Astrology happens when people look out at the stars, see how distant and high they are, and decide that somehow, in some magical way, these stars have a direct influence on their own personal lives.
But just listen for a moment to Augustine, a Christian theologian who was writing in about 425 AD—a man whose influence over western thought has been profound and continues to this day. This is what Augustine says about astronomy and astrology, and their relative value:
Astronomy … makes possible systematic predictions about the future, which are not speculative and conjectural but firm and certain; but we should not try to extract something of relevance to our own actions and experiences, like the maniacs who cast horoscopes, but confine our interest to the stars themselves.2
Augustine rejected astrology because he believed in the God of the Bible—the God we meet here in this very song—a God whose glory is above the heavens. See verse 3: this is the God who made the heavens, and set the moon and stars in place. This is the God who is majestic and great, and above and beyond those stars themselves. He is a God of order who set those heavenly bodies where they should be. But he’s done it for his glory, not for magical speculation about how your week is going to pan out.
So the question of verse 4 is a question about our place before this God:
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Why on earth would this God, who created the stars, be interested in you and me? There are more stars in the visible universe than grains of sand in all the beaches on the earth. According to an Australian estimate in 2003, there are 70 sextillion stars. This is 7 x 1022. Who are we in all of this? I can’t resist quoting Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy again:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.3
Even then, he’s talking about one galaxy amongst quadrillions. And that’s just the visible universe.
There is a God who made it all. So what on earth would he have to do with us? Who are you? What is man?
To be continued …
1 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Del Ray, 2005 (1979), p. 65.
2 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, II.113.
3 Adams, p. 3.
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On the Sola Panel:
In the first instalment of a five-part series, I’m pondering what astronomy has to teach us.
I’m a fan of space. I don’t actually know much about the details of astronomy or cosmology or astrophysics; I just think that the space is really cool.
If there are any real scientists reading this, I want to say thanks. I know that most of your work involves boring and tedious searching, collating and number crunching. Thanks for doing all that stuff so that I can see those fantastic pictures of nebulas on the internet and wonder at it all.
For example, I’m a fan of millisecond pulsars. A gigantic star, millions of light years away, explodes in a huge supernova. It creates a fireball ten million billion billion times bigger than Hiroshima. In its ashes, it leaves behind a neutron star made of dense atomic nuclei, squashed together at a density 10 trillion times greater than steel. A teaspoon full of neutron star weighs about the same as Sydney Harbour. Sometimes this neutron star will steal stuff from a nearby star and start spinning. Some neutron stars spin hundreds of times a second—a whole star rotating as fast as an idling car engine. Many of these super-dense, revving stars send out pulses of electromagnetic radiation, milliseconds apart. And we might be able to use these millisecond pulsars as standard cosmological clocks to help us detect gravitational waves, explore space-time bending, and understand more about the tiniest particles in the universe.
But apart from the wow factor, what’s the point of learning about space?
Some people might say that, in the end, astronomy is a complete waste of time. Sherlock Holmes, that fictional epitome of scientific rationalism, cared nothing for astronomy. When his friend Dr Watson scolded him for being ignorant even of the basic facts of the solar system, he interrupted and said, “What the deuce is it to me? … you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”1
Is Mr Holmes correct? Is stargazing a completely useless exercise?
Well, you could point out that weather and tide and climate predictions need detailed solar, lunar and planetary modelling. You could also point out that car engines need modern mechanics, which is all based on the laws of motion formulated by Isaac Newton, who used the orbits of planets to calculate and build his theories. Or you could point to the humble GPS satellite navigator, which relies on Einstein’s theory of relativity and orbiting satellites. Of course, astronomy is useful; after all, it helps us to work out whether it’s raining, and how to drive quickly to the cricket and back without taking a wrong turn!
But I want to suggest that stargazing is far more important than all this. In fact, the Bible itself gives us a very good reason for considering the stars. There is a song in the Bible about the stars—a song composed thousands of years ago in ancient Israel. This is how the song begins:
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
(Ps 8:1-2)
You’ll notice that this poet believes in God (just like many of the astronomers down through the ages). In fact, this whole song is a prayer to the creator of the universe. We’ll come back to this shortly. But for the moment, let’s look at his exercise in stargazing. Do you see what he says in the third verse of the song?
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place …
When you think about it, stargazing is something that would have been easier and more natural for an ancient Israelite than for us. Yes, we can use our light, radio and gamma ray telescopes to penetrate vast distances, and we can use our complex mathematical and cosmological theories to make determinations and predictions. Of course, the ancients couldn’t do that. But on the other hand, they had a very big advantage over us: they had a clear, unpolluted sky in their backyards. We have so many lights on earth—especially in our cities—that the lights of the stars and the moons are drowned out. When I go into my backyard on a clear night, all I can see are a few pinpricks. But this biblical songwriter could step into his own backyard and see far more than you or I. He could see the glory of it all—the heavens, the Milky Way, the wandering planets.
We don’t tend to look up very much at all, do we. We don’t use the night time to look at the heavens; we use the night time to look down—to watch TV, to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds online. We know cyberspace very well, but this ancient poet sees real space with his naked eyes. We know the intimate details of the lives of rock stars and football stars, but this song is about the real stars. At this point, this biblical poet is far more in touch with the reality of the universe than we are. And knowing these stars—seeing them there before him—what does this do for the poet? How does it make him feel? Look at verse 4:
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
What does astronomy do for this poet? What is the use of astronomy for all of us? Astronomy is very useful. It does something very negative for us, but it’s still very worthwhile: it reminds us how very very very small and insignificant we really are. In case you’re wondering, the words translated ‘man’ here mean ‘all humanity’. The question “What is man?” is an expression of amazement that human beings have any importance at all in the face of the evidence of the stars.
To be continued …
1 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Long Stories, John Murray, London, 1929, p. 17.
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Address at the Funeral of C. Lionel Windsor
28 Nov 1916 – 18 Feb 2008
Based on Psalm 46
Lionel Windsor Jnr, 21 June 2008
St Stephen’s Anglican Church Kurrajong
As far as I can tell, I am now the only remaining Lionel Windsor in Australia, and I am so proud to own the name of my grandfather. Grandpa wanted his funeral to have words of encouragement, words of life. When he died, he owned and cherished the Bible our family gave him on Fathers’ Day, 1988. It was heavily used, read and annotated. Grandpa himself suggested that Psalm 46 should be used in the service, and it is my privilege to speak to you words of encouragement from this Psalm this morning.
The Psalm is a song about a city. A city that is unshakeable, calm and unmoved. All around the city there is confusion, chaos and turmoil: a tottering creation, the earth itself quaking, mountains falling into the heart of the sea, oceans roaring and foaming. There are also enemies at war with the city, surrounding the city and battering against its walls. But the city remains stable, steady, firm, solid, permanent, immovable, strong; a fortress that cannot be shaken, despite the frenzied turmoil going on outside it.
Indeed, not only is the city steady and unshaken, it is a peaceful city, a city full of joy and life amidst the chaos outside, a city with a river whose streams of life make it glad and bring life to its inhabitants, a city that brings joy to others too.
Now just for a moment, you might think the Psalm was speaking about my Grandpa, Lionel Snr. Many of you will know only too well the turbulent events that battered against his life. You will know some of the chaos and turmoil he experienced, and you will know how he carried himself in the midst of that chaos. You will know his constancy, his warm and gentle dignity, his stability, his deep strength, like the unfailing city of the Psalm. More than that, you will know the joy and gladness that he brought to the lives of others. All his life, his strength was a source of strength and firmness for countless others.
But then you only need stop for a moment to see the jarring note of discordance. For despite the strength, despite the firmness of more than nine decades of life, Grandpa is no longer here to give us that strength, is he?
Indeed, this Psalm is about the shaking of the unshakeable. Verse 2 speaks of the earth itself giving way. It’s about firm things, strong things, things that you can never imagine moving; falling, shaking, tottering and trembling. It’s about the world falling apart. It’s about Tsunamis that reach to the top of Bowen Mountain. It’s about the great empires and nations of the earth toppling and crumbling. It’s about the things in life we may think are firm and solid, failing; whether it’s a house, a bank account, a business career; whether it’s those deep friendships that have seen us through thick and thin; whether it’s those family ties that often seem the bedrock of our identity; whether it’s life itself; whether it’s the strength of the human spirit, even one as strong as Grandpa’s. It seems so firm and strong, doesn’t it? Yet here he is in front of us, in this box, shaken, broken. Death has overcome even a life as firm and stable and life-giving as Grandpa’s.
Yet this Psalm speaks of a city that remains firm and solid even when all else is shaken. What is the strength of the city? What makes it different from the mountains and the earth and all those other seemingly unshakeable things? It is the presence of God.
The presence of God. The inhabitants of this city do not sing here about the glory of the city walls or beauty of its gates or the firmness of its foundations. What do they sing? God is our strength and refuge. God is within her, she will not fall. God will help her at break of day. The God of Jacob is our fortress. The LORD almighty is with us. The only final comfort, the only unshakeable fortress that we can rely upon—it’s not the earth or the mountains, it’s not kingdoms or nations, it’s not in family or friends, it’s not in the power of the human spirit.
The only fortress that will not fail us is God’s presence: God himself. God is our strength and refuge.
And while at first, the city seems to be Zion, the mountain on which stood Jerusalem, the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells; this Psalm is not even about Zion, ultimately. It is about the presence of God. The stable, steady, firm, solid, permanent, immovable, strong presence of God himself. Which stays secure when everything else is made to totter and shake.
What shakes you? What rocks your world?
When Jesus Christ heard the news of the death of his dear friend Lazarus, he came to the tomb where they laid him. And when he saw the mourners, the sister of Lazarus and his friends and countrymen weeping, John’s gospel, chapter 11 verse 33, tells us that Jesus himself was deeply moved in spirit and shaken.
When the apostle John reports that Jesus was shaken, the word he uses in the original language is exactly the same word used 4 times in this Psalm 46. It’s the word used to describe the shaking of the world, the world torn apart. The shaking of the earthquake, the shaking and foaming and tossing of the waves in a storm, the shaking of the mountains, the shaking of the nations and kingdoms—when Jesus came to his dear, dead friend, and saw the grief and pain of loss that death produced (which in its own way foreshadowed Jesus’ own coming death), his heart gave way like the earth. He shook like foaming waters.
In one way this shows Jesus’ care, his love, his sympathy, doesn’t it? It shows how Jesus entered in to our sorrow, took part in the grief and loss in our world. Jesus is not aloof or distant from our grief in the face of death. He knows it all too well. And that means he can sympathise with each one of us today.
But it also shows us the profound wrongness, the awfulness, of death. For Jesus does not shake at earthquakes or tsunamis or the armies of nations. He shakes when faced with the great enemy, the great power that itself shakes and tears the world apart. He shakes at death.
Jesus doesn’t just sit back and accept his beloved friend Lazarus’ death as something right and normal, does he? Jesus reflected and experienced what the Bible tells us throughout its pages—that death is wrong. Death, in fact, is the ultimate result of God’s judgment on our world, and on us, for our willful disobedience against him. Death is a tragic reminder of the judgment that each one of us deserves before our holy God; the God who lifts his voice, and the earth melts. And this is why Jesus was so shaken by death—for he understands that it is the obvious and definite sign of a world gone wrong and people out of relationship with their creator. Worse even than crumbling mountains and falling kingdoms.
And yet if you know the rest of the story, you know that that is not all that Jesus did. You know that he did not shake so as to fall. For he had already spoken to his friend, Lazarus’ sister Martha.
And Jesus had said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26)
‘I am the resurrection and the life’, says Jesus. There will be a day, a last day, when there will be a resurrection of humanity. When God will once and for all deal with the terrible problem of death and judgment in our world. Where we will have a new, transformed body that will live a new, better, fulfilled life in a new creation, when God makes the whole world new. A place of joyful reunion with other believers, with no more crying or mourning or pain or death. And like a city, solid, secure and living in the face of death, Jesus says ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. You will only find this security, this resurrection and life, in me, says Jesus.
The Easter story tells us how powerful Jesus’ life was, doesn’t it? Jesus died, and yet he rose to life again. He rose from the dead ahead of time. He came back in a new, transformed body. Death overcomes us all, but death could not overcome Jesus. He is alive. And even more than that, he gives life. He is like city from whom streams of living water flow. The river whose streams make glad the inhabitants of God’s city. Because God is with him. God is with him permanently. Jesus is that city that remains stable, steady, firm, solid, permanent, immovable, strong. Strong enough to provide streams of life. Even in the midst of our greatest enemy, even when faced with assaults from death itself. Jesus is strong enough to bring physical, bodily, life to our mortal bodies. God is with Jesus permanently. He is the man of whom it is absolutely and irrevocably true: God is with him, he will not fall. The LORD Almighty is with him
Grandpa once said something that I’ll never forget. He said: ‘I don’t know how I would have got through my life without a faith in Jesus’. I witnessed that faith in Jesus, that trust in Jesus as a firm and immovable fortress in his life becoming more and more of a reality as his life went on. It was God’s presence with Grandpa, through Jesus, that made him who he was. That gave him the strength and stability to live and to love others. God was his strength and refuge. And we rejoice with him that he now sees that confidence on Jesus vindicated. That he is with his Lord and God now, with a life that can never be shaken.
The Psalm here issues us with a command—did you notice it? It’s there in verse 10
‘Be still, and know that I am God’
The call to ‘be still’, is not a call to quiet contemplation. At this point it’s not a call to sit in a calm place and reflect. That may be a good thing to do, but that’s not what it’s saying here. There is an urgency to this command to be still. It’s a command that is uttered in the midst of earthquakes, giant waves, an approaching enemy army. It’s a word shouted out in the face of the urgency of our own approaching death
It’s a call to stop! Be still! Stop! Know that I am God! Stop shaking. Stop quaking and surging. Stop fighting, stop panicking. Be still and know that I am God! Stop placing your confidence in those other things that seem secure but will all ultimately fall. Stop placing your final hope in family. Stop placing your final hope in friendship. Stop placing your final hope in the strength of the human spirit, or human love, or human power. Be still, stop—and know that God is God. And nothing else is God.
One of Grandpa’s favourite verses came from the book of Ecclesiastes:
‘He has set eternity in the hearts of man’
It means that we know and long for eternity, that we are not satisfied with death. Death is one of those areas where the statistics are 100% against us, isn’t it? Each one of us will end up in one of those boxes one day, no exceptions. And nothing at all in this life can stop it. Yet it is still wrong. Death is 100% normal. Yet we also know death is also 100% wrong. God has set eternity in our hearts.
But Jesus promises that if you trust him, he will grant us everlasting, full life. Jesus is the resurrection and the life.
Grandpa wanted me to speak words of encouragement, words of life. And so I must ask you: Have you stopped? Do you know that God is God? Is God the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ your strength and refuge? Is he your ever-present help in trouble? Is he with you, and is he your fortress? For if so, we will not fear, though everything else in life may give way
Jesus said […], “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?”
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