BE STILL, AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD!
Mike Cunningham
September 28, 2014

Sometimes it felt as though God had knocked a stinking 350-pound gorilla off of my back. That’s how heavy my burdens often are. During such times I’m very appreciative of the fact that He has arranged for certain people to help me to carry my load. I know I would have caved in in the midst of these painful ordeals if it weren’t for these folks. The most awesome part of these experiences is that I’m acutely aware of the fact that the Lord is with me every moment, providing all the strength, comfort and encouragement I need to persevere as I make my way through this sin-drenched world. And when I say drenched, I’m not exaggerating. Each of the world’s inhabitants, including you and me are saturated with sin. So much so that there have been times when I regretted being born because of many of the awful things we human beings do and say to one another. I’m reminded of something I wrote in my most recent devotional, “If You Were God,” in which I said, “If we had God’s power we would change many things.” Well for starters I would have prevented each of my painful ordeals.

At this point I would like to tell you about something very interesting that Max Lucado wrote in 2009. He said: I could do without the pharmaceutical warnings. I understand their purpose, mind you. Medical manufacturers must caution against every potential tragedy so that when we take their pill and grow a third arm or turn green, we can’t sue them. I get that. Still, there is something about the merger of happy faces with voice-over advisories of paralysis that just doesn’t work.

Let’s hope this practice of total disclosure doesn’t spill over into the delivery room. It might. After all, about-to-be-born babies need to know what they are getting into. Pre-birth warnings could likely become standard maternity-ward procedure. Can you imagine the scene? A lawyer stands at a woman’s bedside. She’s panting Lamaze breaths between contractions. He’s reading the fine print of a contract I the direction of her belly.

Welcome to the post-umbilical world. Be advised, however, that human life has been known, in most cases, to result in death. Some individuals have reported experiences with lethal viruses, chemical agents, and/or bloodthirsty terrorists. Birth can also result in fatal encounters with tsunamis, inebriated pilots, road rage, famine, nuclear disaster, and/or PMS. Side effects of living include super viruses, heart disease, and final exams. Human life is not recommended for anyone who cannot share a planet with evil despots or survive a flight on airplane food.

Life is a dangerous endeavor. We pass our days in the shadows of ominous realities. The power to annihilate humanity has, it seems, been placed in the hands of people who are happy to do so. Discussions of global attack prompted one small boy to beg, “Please, Mother, can’t we go some place where there isn’t any sky?” If the global temperature rises a few more degrees…if classified information falls into sinister hands…if the wrong person pushes the wrong red button…What if things only get worse? (1)

God answers Max’s question through the Psalmist and says, “Be still, and know that I am God“. Psalm 46:10. That’s not a suggestion; it’s a command.

Commenting on that verse in 1884, Jonathan Edwards says that, “This psalm seems to be a song of the church in a time of great revolutions and desolations in the world. Therefore the church glories in God as her refuge, and strength, and present help, even in times of the greatest troubles and overturning’s, ver. 1,2,3. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefor we will not fear, thought the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters roar and are troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.” The church makes her boast of God, not only as being her help, by defending her from the desolations and calamities in which the rest of the world was involved, but also by supplying her, as a never failing river, with refreshment, comfort, and joy, in the times of public calamities. See verses 4,5. “There is a river, the streams of which shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the Most High. God is in the midst of her; He shall not be moved; God shall help her and do so very early.”

In the 6th and 8th verses are set forth the terrible changes and calamities which were in the world: “The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice and the earth melted. Come, behold the works of God, what desolations he has made in the earth.” In the verse preceding the text is elegantly set forth the manner in which God delivers the church from these calamities, and especially from the desolations of war, and the rage of their enemies: “He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth, he breaks the bow, and cuts the spear in half; he burns the chariot in the fire;” I. e. he makes wars cease when they are against his people; he breaks the bow when it’s bent against his saints.

Then follow the words of the text: “Be still, and know that I am God.” The great works of God in which his sovereignty appeared had been described in the foregoing verses. In the awful desolations that he made, and by delivering his people from terrible things, he showed his greatness and dominion. In doing so, he manifested his power and sovereignty, and so he commands all to be still, and know that I am God. For, he says, “I will be exalted among the heathen; I will be exalted in the earth.” In these words we observe the following,

1. The duty described is, to be still before God, and under the dispensations of his providence; which implies that we must be still as to the words that we say and not speaking against the sovereign dispensations of Providence, or complaining about them; nor darkening counsel by words without knowledge, or justifying ourselves, and speaking great swelling words of vanity. We must be still as to our actions and outward behavior, so as not to oppose God in his dispensations as to the inward frame of our hearts, cultivating a calm and quiet submission of our soul to the sovereign pleasure of God, regardless of what it may be.

2. We can see that the ground of this duty is the divinity of God. His being God is a sufficient reason why we should be still before him, in no way objecting, or opposing, but calmly and humbly submitting to him.

3. We must fulfill this duty of being still before God, with a sense of his divinity, as seeing the ground of this duty, in that we know him to be God. Our submission is to be such as becomes rational creatures. God does not require us to submit to anything that is contrary to reason, but to submit as seeing the ground and reason for submission-Hence, the bare consideration that God is God may well be sufficient to still all objections and opposition against his divine dispensations. (2)

We may find that command to be easier said than done. For instance, Philip Yancey recounts the following: “I have had some personal experience with pain-broken bones, minor-surgeries, a life-threatening auto accident-though I’ve learned far more by listening to others’ stories. When my wife worked as a hospice chaplain, often over dinner she would recount conversations with families who were coming to terms with death. We ate food spiced with tears. And as a journalist, I heard heartbreaking stories from many others: parents grieving over their gay son’s suicide, a pastor enduring the steady onslaught of the disease ALS, Chinese Christians reliving the brutality of the Cultural Revolution.

Because I keep revisiting the theme of suffering, I am sometimes asked to speak on the question of my first book: “Where Is God When It Hurts.” I will never forget the day I toured the makeshift memorials that had sprung up like wildflowers on the campus of Virginia Tech and then stood before a thousand students, oh so young, their faces raw with grief over the loss of thirty-three classmates and faculty. Or an eerily scene the following year I planned to speak on an unrelated topic of Mumbai, India, until the terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Hotel. And other sites forced a change in venue and a change in topic-back to the question that never goes away.

In 2012 I spoke to groups on that question three times, in the most daunting circumstances. One event followed a catastrophic natural disaster; one took place in a city ravaged by war; the third was closest to home and, for me, the most poignant.

In March I stood before congregations in the Tohoku region of Japan on the first anniversary of the tsunami that slammed into land with the velocity of a passenger jet, snapping railroad tracks like chopsticks and scattering ships, buses and houses, and even airplanes across the ravaged landscape. In its wake, with 19,000 dead and whole villages swept out to sea, a busy secular nation that normally has no time for theological questions though of little else.

In October I spoke on the question in Sarajevo, a city that had no heat, fuel, or electricity and little food or water for four years while sustaining the longest siege in modern warfare. Eleven thousand residents died from the daily barrage of sniper fire and from the shells and mortars that fell from the sky like hail. One survivor told me, ”The worse thing is that you get used to evil.” If we knew in advance how long it would last, we would probably have killed ourselves. Over time, you stop caring. You just try to keep living.”

The weekend after Christmas I addressed the community of Newtown, Connecticut, a town reeling from the senseless slaughter of twenty-first graders and six of their teachers and staff.

A first responder captured the mood, “All of us are volunteers,” he said. “I’ve seen some awful things but we don’t train for something like this-nobody does. And my wife is at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She knew all twenty children by name, as well as the staff. She was three steps behind the principal, Dawn Hochpsrung, when Dawn yelled, “Go back, it’s a shooter!’ After hiding out during the shootings she had to walk past the bodies…”

He paused a moment to control his voice, then continued. “Everyone experiences grief at some point-in the worse case, the terrible grief of losing a child. I see its impact in my role as first responder, especially after suicides. You live with the grief as in a bubble, and only gradually re enter the world. You go to the grocery store. You go back to work. Eventually that outer world takes over more and more of you and the grief begins to shrink. Here in Newtown, we’re small community. Everywhere we go reminds us of what happened. We go to the store and see memorials to the victims. We walk down the street and see markers on the porches of those who lost a child. We can’t get away. It’s like a bell jar has been placed over the town, with all the oxygen pumped out. We can’t breath for the grief.” (1)

Later in his book Yancey calls our attention to the fact that: Adam Lanza was a lonely twenty-year old who lived with his mother in Newtown Connecticut, having cut off all contact with his father and brother a year after his parents divorce. Early on, Adam had shown signs of Asperger syndrome, a form of autism, and after first grade at Sandy Hook Elementary; he was shuffled around from public to private schools, interspersed with stints of homeschooling. Nevertheless, he performed well academically in high school and also in college, which he entered at the age of sixteen, earning A’s and B’s before dropping out after a year.

On the morning of December 14, 2012, Lanza retrieved two pistols and a semiautomatic rifle from his mother’s gun collection in an unlocked closet, clipped in ammunition, and walked into her bedroom where he proceeded to fire four bullets into her as she lay in bed. Then he drove to his old elementary school, shot his way through the locked door, and began a rampage that would shock the world.

The principal and school psychologist, who rushed from a conference room when they heard shattering glass and a commotion in the hallway, were his first victims. An alert school secretary left the intercom system on, and so teachers throughout the school heard the popping sounds of gunfire as well as screams, prompting them to call out “Lockdown!” and barricade their students behind bolted doors. Lanza passed one first-grade classroom and entered that of Lauren Rousseau, a substitute for a teacher on maternity leave. He shot Rousseau and her fourteen students as well as a special education teacher who had been employed for just over a week.

In the classroom the police would find fourteen small bodies huddled together, each shot at least twice. Officers found one little boy still alive. He would die in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. Incredibly, one six-year old girl had survived by playing dead. She walked out of the school covered in her classmates’ blood. “Mommy, I’m ok but all my friends are dead,” she said, when she finally rejoined her mother.

In the next classroom, teacher Victoria Soto had hidden her twenty children in a closet and cupboard. She tried to divert the shooter by telling him all her children were in the auditorium at the other end of the school. Then the closet door opened and some of the frightened children made a run for it. Lanza killed six of them, and while he paused to load another ammunition clip, six more escaped, fleeing to the front yard of a retired psychologist across the street. Soto’s body was found on top of the children she tried to protect, along with the body of another teacher who specialized in autism. Students’ drawings hung on the bulletin board with captions like “I love my teacher Miss Soto.”

Other teachers called 9-1-1 as soon as they sensed trouble, and police arrived within ten minutes of the first shot. Law enforcement had been well trained, learning from past mistakes such as when police surrounded Columbine High School and waited too long as more students died. (3)

The following is my most recent devotional.

PRAISE, REJOICE & BE STILL

If you and I had God’s power we would change many things, but, if we had God’s wisdom, we wouldn’t change anything!

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,
4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 (NIV)

3 And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience;
4 And patience, experience; and experience, hope: Romans 5:3-4 (KJV)

4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!
5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near.
6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:4-7 (NIV)

If you and I had God’s power we would change many things, but, if we had God’s wisdom, we wouldn’t change anything!

Listen carefully while your all-loving God whispers softly into your ear and says:

10 “Be still, and know that I am God; ” Psalm 46:10 (NIV)
AMEN! (4)

As I said earlier, that’s a lot easier said than done.
Lord willing, next week….

Fearless, copyright 2009 by Max Lucado, pages 151-152.
The Works of Jonathan Edwards, First published 1834, Reprinted 1992 by The Banner of Truth Trust, P. O. Box 621, Carlisle, Pennsylvania 17013, U. S. A. Pages 107-109.
The Question That Never Goes Away, Why? Pages 107-112.
If You Were God, copyright 2014 by Mike Cunningham, Sr.