Stillness in the Confidence of God’s Triumph

“Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.”—Psalm xlvi. 10.

There is a class of persons Divines and Church historians call Quietists. They have formed no community of their own, but are found in all communities, marked less by doctrine than by a certain temper. They have perhaps abounded most among two bodies utterly opposed to each other, Roman Catholics and Quakers. It is hard to say what age or circumstance has favored them most: they turn up among the Religious Orders of the fourteenth century, amid the Protestant tumults of the sixteenth, in our own Civil Wars, in the splendor and corruption of Louis XIV’s Paris, in the restlessness of our own day.

It is unfair to judge these Quietists from their opponents’ account, or even from their own, without knowing the whole context of their lives — their education, and whatever led them to overvalue one kind of character and undervalue another. But so far as they show dislike of energetic qualities, of conflict, of mixing in the business and perplexities of their fellow men, their spirit seems alien to that of the holy men the Bible shows us. Those men live in an element of perpetual contention, and confess that this is what they are meant for. Enemies surround them; they can neither stand still nor flee; they must keep advancing, winning ground, or else be led captive in a triumph. A Quietist who imagines every day should be a Sabbath must find the Psalms a most uncongenial book. He cannot see how a warrior like David could be a man after God’s own heart, or could have given the Church its thoughts, prayers, and music for all time.

And yet there surely is a Sabbatical character in these Psalms, a quiet of their own that all have felt — the very charm weary, storm-tossed pilgrims have found in them. To meditate on the Law day and night, to commune with one’s own heart upon the bed, to wait patiently for the Lord, to rest in Him — this is the continual effort of the very man who is engaged with hosts of visible and invisible foes. He learns the delight of rest through ceaseless labor, and how vain and hopeless labor is when it is not grounded in rest. Only one who feels he has a home can venture abroad bravely into the world’s bustle; only one who knows the secret of stillness can toil like a man.

Here, then, is the true quietism of the Psalms: quietism in the midst of action, understood only by one who hears the call to act and obeys it. The ground of this quiet is in the verse I have read: “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.”

The 46th Psalm opens, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” It must have been written in such a time — no Psalm bears clearer traces of struggle and suffering. Many refer it to Hezekiah’s day, seeing in “there is a river whose streams make glad the city of our God” an allusion to Sennacherib’s stopping of the watercourses when he besieged Jerusalem, and finding in it a likeness to Isaiah’s language, so that some have guessed Isaiah wrote it. Certainly the whole tone fits such a season. Its recurring burden, “The Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge,” recalls that passage in Isaiah — belonging, however, to the time of Ahaz — where those confederated against Jerusalem are told they will be broken in pieces, for God is with us.

That idea of Emmanuel, God with us, which comes out so strongly there, is truly felt to be the pervading idea of Isaiah’s prophecy, giving it all its sublimity. It is also the pervading idea of this Psalm: “The Lord of Hosts is with us.” He is not a heathen god descending to help in an emergency — He is with us, not visible, but really present, the strength and refuge of our hearts. “Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”

And therefore “Be still.” The thought of possible help arriving from some propitious Divinity when other aid fails may lift the spirit and keep it from utter collapse, but it cannot bring stillness — it can only produce a flutter of expectation, a feverish anxiety, until the hoped-for vision appears. Only the belief in a Presence near us, with us, can inspire lasting awe, keep us steady while all things rock around us, and take away both the eagerness to move and the cowardice that paralyzes movement.

“Be still and know.” You cannot know this truth unless you are still. Keep the waters of your spirit forever stirred, and you will see nothing in them but the reflection of your own troubled self. To know is not to gather scattered fragments of information or ingenious speculations; it is to find a center to which we can refer ourselves and everything else, to feel the ground we stand on, what we did not create, what is and must abide. Such knowledge comes only in stillness — but it also, in turn, produces stillness. Without it, or without seeking it, we must be restless; so far as it is given us, it brings tranquility.

For “Be still and know that I am God.” Notice how often Scripture shifts between speaking of God and letting God speak. We would lose much if it did not: this change of form expresses more than a more “natural” mode of speech could. It teaches us that it is God who reveals Himself to us. He says, “I am God” — not a notion of our minds, not something we make Him by how we think of Him, but a living Person, saying to us what He said to Moses at the bush, “I am”; teaching us that we could not exist if He did not, that all our thoughts and apprehensions were given by Him and are meant to lead us to Him. Not a mere Being, not a mere Ruler, but the perfectly Good Being, the perfectly Righteous Ruler — “the Lord, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, plenteous in mercy, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin” — the God from whom every dream and image of goodness we find in ourselves, in others, or try to embody in our own works, has come; who alone can show us what perfect goodness is, and open our eyes to the image after which we are formed, to see whose it is, and that from its fullness all creatures receive grace for grace.

The Jew was taught, by a wonderful discipline, to turn from every likeness of things in heaven or earth, from the works of his own hands, from whatever he was most prone to worship, to this Living God who had chosen him and his fathers to know His Name and confess Him Lord. They were trained in a school of suffering to feel the emptiness of all visible creature-worship, and to feel that if they were to be preserved in trouble, delivered from the curse of their own follies, made a wise and righteous people, they must return to the unseen King and Deliverer, seek Him in stillness, and confess Him Lord even of the spirits that had revolted from Him and, in seeking independence, become slaves to all that was earthly.

But the lesson would be incomplete without what follows: “I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.” They were not withdrawn from visible things in order to despise them, nor separated from the surrounding nations in order to count their thoughts and acts and lives as worthless. The Lord they worshipped, whom in stillness they knew, who was their refuge in trouble and to whom they returned after forgetting His covenant, was the Ruler of all nations, who had made the earth and its treasures for His own service. To despise the heathen, or to despise the earth, was to despise Him; the Jew existed to assert the sacredness of both by claiming both as His dominion. Even as comfort in disaster, belief in God’s presence and goodness would have been unsatisfying without the further belief in His power — the assurance that it would one day be manifest over the whole universe and crush all that opposed it. For the heathen powers threatened them, insisting that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was no different from the gods of Hamath and Arphad, of Hena and Ivah, and that His rule might be swept away as theirs had been. The dynasts of the earth, the powers of nature, measured their strength against Him. They must have triumphed as tyrants forever, had there not been a sure witness and prophecy that the God of Righteousness and Truth would establish His Kingdom over them all, a Kingdom without end.

Those Israelites who had learned these lessons, who had truly sought in stillness to know God, were prepared to receive the Only Begotten Son as the Express Image of His Person. But it was hard to see how One who came in such humility, however that humility showed forth the Father’s righteousness and grace, could ever be exalted over the heathen and the earth. It took the death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord to reconcile that conviction which gave the heart its rest with the hope that gave it its expectation. It took the descent of the Holy Spirit to let men feel at once that the Lord of Hosts was with them — that knowing Him was peace and rest and eternal life — and yet go forth as conquerors of the heathen and the earth. Their need of a refuge from surrounding trouble drove them to seek God in His secret dwelling; the love for their fellow men that grew from communion with Him drove them to carry His name into all lands, claiming all peoples as His servants and children. They found the Church had no ground to stand on except “I am God,” and so its true home was the unseen world — yet it could not claim that home unless it also said that every corner of earth, every creature on it, all that was done in it, had been redeemed for God and was subject to His rule. If the Church ever forgot it belonged to the invisible world, it would lose its influence on the visible world; if it ever forgot to exalt its Master over the nations and the earth, it would also lose its own fellowship in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Brethren, it is worth asking whether both these dangers assail us now, from the same cause. “Be still and know that I am God” sounds strange to most of us. How can we be still while all things are unsettled and in motion — while everyone hastes to be rich and to outstrip his neighbor, while the political world is full of slumbering fires, while the religious world is full of controversy and hatred? The answer must be: because of all this upheaval, this is exactly the time to obey the command, Be still. For if we do not, we shall never know that the Lord is God; we shall not really believe, whatever we pretend, that He abides and is with us though the earth be removed and the mountains carried into the sea. And without that belief, what other belief is worth anything to us?

There is, however, another question: why do we have all this tumult and confusion to complain of — this hasting to be rich, this eagerness to trip up our neighbors, these convulsions in governments, these deeper rendings in spiritual bodies? Why is it so hard to be still, so hard to rest in the faith that the Lord is God? Surely because we have not believed His other words, “I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.” We sometimes think we ought to make great efforts to Christianize the nations, to put down the false worships defiling the earth. But we cannot agree what efforts to make — whether to offer rewards for conversion, to penalize other faiths, merely to keep arguing as we have done with so little effect, or to trust the gradual spread of knowledge and civilization, which so far seem to have worked no moral change and leave the masses undisturbed in their superstitions.

My brethren, if we have no faith that God designs to exalt Himself among the heathen and in the earth, if we do not believe He is working to bring men from darkness to light, from communion with evil to communion with His truth, then it seems to me we must despair of one of these methods as much as the other. For us to expect that our clever arguments or our machinery, religious or political, will shake the belief of ages, for us worms to imagine we can exalt Him whom we proclaim Lord of Heaven and Earth — what vanity and madness! What restlessness in the struggle, what despair in the outcome! But if we truly believe that every glimpse of knowledge of the Living God is His own gift, that we are not bowing to stocks and stones because He has redeemed the world and sent His Spirit to guide us from falsehood to truth, if we remember that those who preached His Gospel to the heathen — and to us — lived, fought, and died believing they were His servants doing His will, then this faith will remove some of our disturbing questions and let us look more steadily at those that remain. Penalties and persecutions may indeed be effective means of enforcing a religion we wish to root out: if we want to convert men to worship a Destroyer, in his name let us destroy. Bribes are excellent means of tempting men to certain kinds of service: if we confess Mammon to be the God of the English, in his name let us scatter promises, gifts, and offices among Hindus and Muslims. We shall not be disappointed — with such inducements they will press in crowds to that altar.

Or if we aspire instead to exalt a God who is merely the negation of the gods the heathen now serve, wishing to strip them of all trust and hope, let us spend our time arguing over their follies and scoffing at what they revere. We shall have our reward for that too — experience assures us of it. We shall turn idolaters into atheists.

But if we do believe the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to be the Lord, if we worship Him as revealed at the Cross, then proclaiming that God is still, now as of old, the instrument for putting down the false, establishing the true, scattering the darkness, and gathering in the scattered light. The preacher who secretly regards the devil as truly Lord of the Universe can only fight feebly and hopelessly; but let him be assured he goes in the name of the real Lord, to beat down a usurper whose head is already bruised, and he will strike deadly blows. He will tell the heathen how God is speaking to them, acting on them, turning them to Himself. In calmness and stillness he will perceive how everything around him that seems most to contradict God is actually bearing witness to Him. All God’s works, all men’s works, all science, ignorance, sorrow, sin, and death will supply arguments no human wit could devise. He will hear every hill and grove and idol temple echoing the words, “Know that I am God. I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.”

And if you say, “This is for the preacher — but can the statesman, the soldier, the trader, do anything?” Yes, indeed. Let each say in his own heart: “I, for myself, do not worship the Destroyer, the Money-God, the negation of all other gods. I worship Him whom Jesus revealed. In my quiet thoughts and my open acts I will do Him homage. I will show, in my earthly dealings as much as in my words about unseen things, that I renounce every lord but Him. I will bear witness to Him as the Friend and Deliverer of all men, by justice in asserting right and punishing wrong — whether toward Christians or despisers of Christianity — by sympathy with human beings, by zeal to free them from whatever fetters keep them from being righteous, brave, noble, and free as God would have them be. And because I find myself tempted to speak and act lies, apt to become at heart like these poor idolaters, I will ask that God whom I serve to exalt Himself in my heart and reign over me; I will ask Him, by the Spirit of Truth and Freedom and Unity He has promised, to overcome the spirits of Falsehood, Slavery, and Division that have led these idolaters captive, and may lead us captive too.” Let the statesmen, soldiers, and servants of the Queen of England, in lands where the heathen dwell, take up this language and form this resolve. The Gospel asks nothing more of them than that. God asks nothing more than that. He will exalt Himself in the earth. We have only to ask that He not let us strive to exalt ourselves, or any vile thing, into His holy place.