Our Very Present Help

In the final weeks of pregnancy leading up to the birth of my daughter, I decided to pick a Bible passage to take with me into labor and delivery. Anxious about the impending labor and the postpartum season to come, I was looking for a piece of Scripture that would assure me everything would be ok. I settled on Psalm 46; however, its message led me down a different path of assurance than I had set out to find.

Psalm 46 doesn’t assure us that nothing bad will happen, or that our hopes will be fulfilled. But it does assure us that, in whatever we face, God will be with us.

The passage unfolds the nature of God’s presence that is with us:

When God is in our midst, we are not moved.

While the nations rage and kingdoms totter, he simply utters his voice and the earth melts.

God makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the chariots with fire.

This Psalm strikes me with the magnitude of God’s power. It proclaims that up against large-scale physical catastrophes, the fall of entire kingdoms, and the unrest of global wars, God is stronger and victorious. Likewise, in the face of our family conflict, our financial stress, and the wake of failed dreams, God is stronger and victorious. In his omnipotence, God declares to the chaos around us, “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted (Psalm 46:10).”

This is the assurance Psalm 46 proclaims: God is with us. God is all-powerful. And God will show his glory.

It can be so hard to trust these truths when our circumstances don’t go the way we desire. But even in our frustration and suffering, we can be confident in this – God will reveal his glory to us and through us in our circumstances. His beauty and goodness and holiness will be made known. This is the refuge and help that we truly need in our trials.

In C.S. Lewis’s novel The Silver Chair, there’s a scene toward the end of the children’s adventures in the magical land of Narnia. The great lion named Aslan, who is creator and lord of Narnia, appears before the children. "I have come," Aslan says. “They turned,” Lewis narrates, “and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.”

Like the children experienced standing before Aslan, when our eyes are opened to God’s presence with us, our anxieties and fears begin to fade away within his light. As we behold God’s glory – the beautiful essence of who he is – our attention is held in place on the love and strength of our Savior rather than the stormy trials raging around us.

When we’re longing for something to quench the anxiety within us, God’s Word does not guarantee that everything will turn out as we hope. But it does promise that God, the Lord of Hosts, is with us. In our apprehension, we can pray that God would reveal more of himself to us in our trials. It is encountering God’s glory that delivers the peace our souls long for.