For twenty-one days, God has been saying two words to me: Be still.
You’d think quarantine would initiate that automatically, right?
Well.
These two words first came as I finished rattling off a long list of requests one morning and paused to ask God what He would say to me: I heard, “Be still.” I opened my Bible and read aloud Psalm 46, from where that phrase comes. The next day, the pastor of the church I attend announced he was beginning a sermon miniseries titled “Be Still,” and that Psalm 46:10 would be his key verse. That week, to give my undergraduate students an example of specific types of sermon outlines for their final project, I used my own outlines from a seminary class in which I extensively researched one psalm: Psalm 46. The high school small groups at my church discuss the Sunday sermon, so I led my group in a conversation about Psalm 46. At the end of the week, I began watching the online stream of my university’s last chapel service, and our president preached on Psalm 46. I asked my mentee friend into which Scripture she would like to dive deeply, and she chose Psalm 46. My mom sent me text graphics of Scriptures, and there was a verse from Psalm 46.
That was all in one week, people. I could go on. And it begs the question: am I being still? Or first, what exactly is being still?
Originally sung in question-answer format with priest, choir, and congregation, this psalm is a structured, specific, bold affirmation of trust in God. Its writers present worst-case scenarios—natural disasters
and wars— in the context of God’s capabilities. At its heart, this psalm is about control. Verses 2 and 3 describe devastating meteorological events like earthquakes that alter the world’s geography and storms of tsunamic proportions. This is followed by a musical pause and God says His presence makes His people immovable.
The psalm then transitions to human-sourced destruction – but all this is reframed through the lens of God’s capabilities.
God can stop global conflict. God can destroy weapons of warfare. He can sustain peace by fighting against the fighters.
The rhetorical question threading through this psalm is, “In the face of the worst possible circumstances, what can a person do?” The implicit answer: “Nothing.” This psalm speaks to the limits of individual human control. And these limits are woefully small.
God speaks once in this psalm – in verse 10: He says, “be still.” In Hebrew, this has the effect of exclaiming, “Enough!” or “Wait!” “Cease striving” will also do. Stop fighting. Calm down. Be in awe.
God out-wars the warrior. He out-shakes the earthquake. If you have pessimistic tendencies that cause you to venture to the Land of What-Ifs, then go there, but find God at its boundary lines.
The psalm ends with a repeated line – a refrain that the worshippers would have echoed in the writers’ time: “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold” (Psalm 46:7, 11, NASB). Why should we be still? Because of who He is. He who overpowers every force of nature is the most peaceable Person in the universe.
What does being still look like for you in this season? For me – as I stare down this last week of singleness and lists of wedding to-dos and stacks of empty moving boxes, not to mention piles of grading and preparations for returning to office life and concerns over the status of the pandemic – for me, it looks like poring over this psalm and responding to the invitation to “come, behold the works of the Lord” (46:8a). That is, it looks like rediscovering what it means to be human. Be still.