I was on the floor of our apartment, unable to get up. My lower back was clenched in spasms of pain. The agony was so great, I could hardly move. When I went to see a chiropractor, I was moving so slowly I couldn’t cross the street fast enough to make it to the other side before the crosswalk signal changed. I had to wait in the median for the little green walking man to light up again.
That was many years ago. But it taught me something I’ve paid attention to ever since. When my stress level gets too high, my body lets me know in no uncertain terms by causing my lower back to seize up in pain.
For other people, back pain is structural — it’s their body itself which is messed up. My back pain is emotional and spiritual — it’s my soul which is messed up.
The chiropractors and physical therapists I visited years ago made no changes to my condition. Stopping my life and getting real with myself and with God did.
Reading and praying the Psalms became an essential part of my healing.
About the time I lay helpless on the apartment floor, Eugene Peterson published his translation of the Psalms as the second installment of The Message. I interviewed him for an article about it and picked up a pocket-sized copy which quickly became a constant companion. I still have and use it, though I’ve had to repair it several times.
It was also during this time that I discovered Psalm 46, a sons of Korah psalm which has been a favorite ever since. (Here is a Michael English song from back then which takes the first four verses as its lyrics.)
The key theme of Psalm 46 is the Presence. God is with us. It’s in the first verse, which is echoed in verse 7 (which is itself repeated verbatim as a chorus in verse 11, the psalm’s final verse):
God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble (Ps. 46:1).
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress (Ps. 46:7, 11).
This theme of Presence pops up a couple more times in the psalm:
… where the Most High dwells (Ps. 46:4b).
God is within her … (Ps 46:5a).
My back pain is caused by the weight of the world pressing down on me. I spent time recently with a man who has had numerous surgeries on his back from carrying too much physical weight. In my case, I cause damage to my soul by carrying too much internal weight.
Psalm 46 offers the Presence of God as the first and most important antidote to human anxiety. Our concerns, our fears, our anxieties build up and weigh us down. But as the first verse asserts, our God is “an ever-present help in trouble.” The trouble comes and goes, but God’s Presence never goes away.
There is no reality we deal with more than God. No one and no thing beside God is ever-present.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging (Ps. 46:2-3).
Although the land of Israel borders the Mediterranean Sea, the ancient Israelites didn’t build their cities along the coast and were not sea-faring people. Instead, they lived along the ridge of mountains running the length of the land. The mountains were fertile and provided protection against enemies.
The sea, on the other hand, was seen as a chaotic, destructive force. Its churning depths were reminiscent of the uncreated Deep of Gen. 1:2 and of the Deluge that flooded the earth in the days of Noah. These primal waters were held back by God’s promise and yet hid the god-monster Leviathan and other obscenities.
So, to have the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea was just about the most fearful thing of all. No human enemy compared. You can fight off a human. You can’t fight the sea, as tsunamis have shown.
(The Jonah story plays on this dread of the Deep, as he’s hurled into the heart of the sea and swallowed by a monster. And Jesus turns this passage upside down when he says that Mount Zion, on which then temple was built, could be tossed into the sea by a simple word of prayer [Mark 11:23].)
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.
Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
he lifts his voice, the earth melts (Ps. 46:4-6).
The word “earth” appears in all three sections of the psalm. In the first, it gives way beneath our feet (v. 2). In the second, it melts (v. 6). And in the third, it suffers the desolations of natural disasters and other acts of God (v. 8). In other words, the the physical world is the setting of so many of our calamities and fears. We struggle with vulnerable bodies, with drought-caused famines, with unexpected disasters, with “nature, red in tooth and claw.”
Nature has a calamitous twin in the nations — the two realms of human suffering. The posing and posturing of politicians and generals ends up crushing so many with wars, with unjust laws, with policies that increase the plight of the vulnerable. But even though nature and nations exert so much power over us, they both fall, “fall” being another key word in Psalm 46.
Mountains fall (v. 2). Kingdoms fall (v. 6). But the city of God will not fall (v. 5). Why not? Because against the earthly calamities all around us, there is divine help (Hebrew: ‘ezer). God is an ever-present help (v. 1). He will bring help at break of day (v. 5).
While the waters roar (v. 3) and the nations are in uproar (v. 6), there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.
Now, if you look at a map of Jerusalem, you won’t see a river. The city sits atop Mount Zion, so you wouldn’t expect there to be a river. But there is a spring, a tunnel, and a pool.
The spring of Gihon lies outside the ancient walls of Jerusalem, but King Hezekiah had a tunnel built through the solid rock to divert the water into the city (2 Kings 20:20; 2 Chron. 32:1-4, 30). It gathered in the pool of Siloam and still does to this day. Because the people of Jerusalem had water and the Assyrians had less, the diversion of the Gihon was key to breaking the siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C., making glad the city of God.
When I was 11, we visited the location of the spring in Jerusalem. My Dad had waded through the watery tunnel a few years before, but it was closed to tourists when I was there, to my great disappointment. My point is: It’s not a lovely river, bubbling over rocks and with a nice walking path alongside it. It’s a tunnel. It’s hidden. It’s underground. It was excavated as a defense against siege, not as a pleasant water feature.
As the psalm has noted, nations and nature roar. They make big noises. They attract our attention. They fill the news. They make us anxious.
God isn’t into roaring. He’s subtle. He does things in secret places. He’s as silent as a spring-fed stream that winds underground and quietly fills the pool of Siloam. He is the source of surprising victories in the face of great adversity.
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
Come and see what the LORD has done,
the desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease
to the ends of the earth.
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire (Ps. 46:7-9).
Desolations are natural disasters and wars are national disasters. Our Lord is a fortress among them all. He is a quiet strength in the midst of their roaring.
And we the people of God are called on to be still, just as he is. Nations and nature will not always been in revolt, will not always be the source of anxiety. God will reign in them as well.
He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress (Ps. 46:10-11).
This stillness is a slowing down of movement, a lack of rushing around like foaming waters and self-important nations. It’s a walk, not a run. It is also a hush, a lack of noise so different from the roaring waters and uproaring nations.
Even before mass media news and social media feeds of today, people in the ancient world lived over-stimulated lives and simply needed to stop. How much more so now?
Life is a tumultuous mess. The world is always threatening to fall into the heart of the sea with a threat of war on one side and social chaos on the other. Strident voices are always shouting out doom and stirring up strife. In every time and in every place, this has been the human way.
We need stillness to be reminded that our Lord is God. As Julian of Norwich wrote, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
God is present. God is our help and he is most certainly at work. It’s not high profile work. It’s born in a manger work. It’s mustard seed work. It’s infertile Abraham and Sarah work. It’s Hebrew slaves under mighty pharaoh work. It’s David forgotten among the sheep work. It’s you work. It’s me work.
When the roaring of the world gets inside of me, my soul gets crazy and my lower back tells me so. My body is wiser than I am, stopping me, stilling me. It reminds me that I’m not God, that I am not going to make things right in all of my anxious running around.
I just need to pause long enough to catch my breath and turn to our Lord, to settle into his Presence and to experience his help.