Mountains Fall, God Stands
Pastor Andy Hill | Bismarck Associate Pastor
Psalm 46:1-3
God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
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.
I want to encourage you today. But we need to start with a little nerdy history. In the Hebrew poetic imagination mountains and seas had meaning beyond terrain.
Let me give you a frame of reference with the American poetic imagination. The heart is not a muscle that pumps blood, but the center of your emotions and being. Accepting Jesus into your heart, loving with all you heart, and being heartbroken each have approximately nothing to do with the cardiac muscle.
And in a similar way mountains weren’t just big piles of dirt and rock; they were places of safety and as close to heaven as you could get on earth. And the sea wasn’t a low-elevation area filled with water, it was chaos and danger.
So, for a mountain to fall into the sea is just about the worst thing imaginable. A place a security and confidence collapses into chaotic peril. The rock a person had confidence in, falls apart and leaves them without a foothold in a churning ocean.
But the Psalmist is not afraid. Because God is our refuge. He never falls into the disordered mess. And when we take our refuge in him, neither do we. If our feet are firm on the mountain, we will fall with it, but if stand in God, we need not fear the sea.
James tells us to rejoice when troubles come (1:2), and part of why is when the mountains we have trusted collapse, it helps train us to trust in God rather than in the physical things we can see.
It seems to me that in the last several years a great many mountains that people have stood firm on for ages have crumbled into the raging sea. And that scares me, I am not too good of a Christian to not be worried about it. But at the same time, my faith does not rest on and of the mountains in the land, it rests on God. And in Him, I will continue to stand. Even as more and more things that I would have called unshakeable bedrock a scant few years ago crumble into dust in the ocean.
