A Very Present Help

v. 1Refuge, strength, help very present

The Hebrew puts God first and us second, before it says what he is: God — for us — a refuge. The Authorised Version’s our refuge is the same sense in smoother English, but the word order is worth keeping in the ear, because the psalm is going to spend eleven verses taking things away and it starts by saying which way round the possession runs.

מַחֲסֶה is a place, not a mood. It is the crag or the shelter you run into when the weather turns, and the Old Testament uses it that way without apology: “the eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut. 33:27); “I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress” (Ps. 91:2); “the name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe” (Prov. 18:10). You cannot be in a mood; you can be in a tower. Beside it stands עֹז, strength — so the hiding place is not a weak one. Moses sang both words together on the far side of the sea: “The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation” (Ex. 15:2).

Then the phrase the AV renders a very present help. The Hebrew is נִמְצָא מְאֹד, found exceedingly — the niphal of מָצָא, the ordinary verb for finding a thing you looked for. It is the verb of “seek ye the LORD while he may be found” (Isa. 55:6), of “if ye seek him, he will be found of you” (2 Chr. 15:2), and of “ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13). The writer to the Hebrews puts the finding and the helping in one clause: “come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16). So verse 1 is not the claim that God is nearby in principle. It is the report of a congregation that went looking in a bad year and came back saying he was there. The catechism keeps the same tense: God “will also make whatever evils he sends upon me in this valley of tears turn out to my advantage” (Heidelberg Q. 26).

vv. 2–3Mountains carried into the midst of the sea

Therefore. The fearlessness is a conclusion, not a temperament — it is drawn from verse 1 and it would collapse without it. And notice the person: Psalm 27 says I, Psalm 46 says we. This is a congregational nerve, held together by singing.

What is conceded is total. מוּר is the verb for swapping one thing for another — “they changed their glory into the similitude of an ox” (Ps. 106:20), “hath a nation changed their gods?” (Jer. 2:11) — so the AV’s though the earth be removed means something closer to when the earth is traded in. Then מוֹט, to totter, to give way underfoot, and it is the mountains that do it: the standing things, the things a man points at when he wants an image for permanence, sliding into לֵב יַמִּים, the heart of the seas — the phrase Ezekiel uses for the place where Tyre goes down (Ezek. 27:26–27) and Jonah uses for where he was (Jonah 2:3). The sea in Scripture is not scenery. It is the un-place, the old chaos, and the prophets use its noise for the noise of the nations: “Woe to the multitude of many people, which make a noise like the noise of the seas” (Isa. 17:12). Verse 3 finishes the picture with the waters roaring and foaming and the mountains quaking at the sea’s גַּאֲוָה, its swelling — the same noun the Psalter uses for human pride (Ps. 10:2). Then Selah: stop, and let the room hear that nothing has been promised about the mountains.

Which is the strophe’s argument. The psalm does not say the mountains will hold. It says that when they do not, the singers will not be afraid — and Hebrews says why that follows: “Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven … that those things which cannot be shaken may remain” (Heb. 12:26–27). The shaking is not the end of the world’s order; it is the sorting of it. Our Lord described the same two responses to the same water — “the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear” (Luke 21:25–26) — and told a story about two houses in one flood, where the only difference was the rock (Matt. 7:24–27). John, at the end, records the sea’s abolition: “and there was no more sea” (Rev. 21:1).

v. 4There is a river

Jerusalem has no river. Nineveh had the Tigris and Nahum taunts Thebes for being “situate among the rivers” and falling anyway (Nah. 3:8); Babylon had the Euphrates; Egypt had the Nile, and a whole theology with it. Jerusalem has a spring outside the wall and a conduit, and in the year Assyria came Hezekiah cut a tunnel through rock to bring the water inside (2 Chr. 32:2–4, 30). So when the psalm says there is a river, it is not describing the geography. It is making a claim.

פֶּלֶג is not wild water: it is a channel, a cutting, water directed — the word in “a tree planted by the rivers of water” (Ps. 1:3) and in “the king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will” (Prov. 21:1). Set that against the strophe just finished. Outside the city the water roars and foams and heaves the mountains; inside, the water is quiet, cut to a course, and its only recorded effect is gladness. Isaiah put the two waters side by side in this very crisis: because the people “refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go softly,” the LORD brings up “the waters of the river, strong and many, even the king of Assyria” until it reaches “even to the neck” — and then breaks off mid-flood to say “for God is with us” (Isa. 8:6–8). The little conduit and the imperial river are the two waters of Psalm 46.

The river also has a history in both directions. One went out of Eden (Gen. 2:10). One runs out from under the temple threshold in Ezekiel, getting deeper the further it goes, so that “every thing shall live whither the river cometh” (Ezek. 47:1–9). Zechariah says “living waters shall go out from Jerusalem” (Zech. 14:8). Our Lord stood in the temple at the water-drawing feast and said the river was a person and would be in people: “out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38). And the last page of the Bible shows it arriving: “a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev. 22:1). The city’s water supply has always been small, hidden and enough.

v. 6The heathen raged; the earth melted

Both verbs are borrowed. הָמוּ is what the waters did in verse 3, and מָטוּ is what the mountains did in verse 2. The psalm is not changing the subject from nature to politics; it is telling you they are the same subject. The nations are the sea. Isaiah says it outright — “the rushing of nations, that make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters” (Isa. 17:12–13) — and the second Psalm opens on the same noise: “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?” (Ps. 2:1).

Against all of which God does exactly one thing. He uttered his voice. No army is mentioned on his side of the verse; the idiom נָתַן בְּקוֹלוֹ is the one used for thunder (Ps. 18:13), and the result is תָּמוּג — the earth melts, goes soft, like wax (Nah. 1:5; Amos 9:5). Put the two halves side by side and the proportions are the point: an uproar of nations answered by a sentence. The church in Acts had this verse’s grammar exactly right. Hauled in front of the council, they quoted Psalm 2 back to God and then asked, not to be rescued, but “that with all boldness they may speak thy word” (Acts 4:25–29).

v. 7The refrain: with us, our refuge

The AV says refuge here as it did in verse 1, but the Hebrew has changed the word. מִשְׂגָּב comes from a root meaning to be high, inaccessible: not the cave you hide in but the crag nothing can climb. It is David’s word — “the LORD also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble” (Ps. 9:9), “my high tower” (Ps. 18:2), “the God of my mercy” who is “my defence” (Ps. 59:9, 17) — and it stands behind Solomon’s “the name of the LORD is a strong tower” (Prov. 18:10). It is also, as the next section will show, the word a German monk turned into a hymn.

The first two words of the refrain are the ones to sing slowly. עִמָּנוּ — with us — is half of עִמָּנוּ אֵל, Immanuel. Isaiah had given that name to a child in the same reign and the same emergency (Isa. 7:14), and then flung the phrase at the invading coalition: “Take counsel together, and it shall come to nought; speak the word, and it shall not stand: for God is with us” (Isa. 8:10). Matthew picks the name up and translates it for anyone who missed it: “God with us” (Matt. 1:23). The choir of the sons of Korah is singing Isaiah’s defiance as a chorus.

And the two titles are deliberately unmatched. The LORD of hosts is the God of armies — the name David threw at Goliath (1 Sam. 17:45), the horses and chariots of fire around Elisha that the servant could not see until his eyes were opened (2 Kgs 6:16–17), the name Hezekiah used when he spread the Assyrian letter out before him (Isa. 37:16). The God of Jacob is the God of a man on the run with a stone for a pillow, who woke and said “this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:11–17). The armies and the fugitive are the same God, and the city needs him under both descriptions. Selah.

vv. 8–9What desolations he hath made

Two imperatives: go and look. The psalm takes the congregation outside the wall and shows them a battlefield. If the occasion is the one the lesson sketched at the start, the morning after was a camp of a hundred and eighty-five thousand men who did not wake up (2 Kgs 19:35). A siege lifted does not look tidy. It looks like wreckage, and the psalm calls the wreckage מִפְעֲלוֹת יְהוָה, the works of the LORD. There is a pun under it that no English version carries: שָׂם שַׁמּוֹת, he has set desolations — the same consonants twice, the deed and its result rhyming.

Then verse 9 names what the desolating was for, and the verb is a surprise. מַשְׁבִּית is the causative of שָׁבַת, the sabbath verb: God makes the wars keep sabbath, and not locally — unto the end of the earth. And he does it by disarmament rather than by superior armament. The bow is broken, the spear cut in two, the chariot burnt; the arsenal is itemised and destroyed. It is the same future Isaiah and Micah saw with the swords beaten into plowshares (Isa. 2:4; Mic. 4:3), the same as “there brake he the arrows of the bow, the shield, and the sword, and the battle” (Ps. 76:3), and the same as Zechariah’s messianic king who “shall cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem … and he shall speak peace unto the heathen” (Zech. 9:10). This peace is not negotiated between powers. It is imposed by taking the weapons away, and the psalm is content for that to be visible, in the earth, at the end of it.

v. 10Be still, and know that I am God

This is the most quoted line in the psalm and the most often turned upside down. הַרְפּוּ is not a word for tranquillity. It is the hiphil imperative of רָפָה, to slacken, to drop, to let fall — the same form as Moses’ “let me alone, that I may destroy them” (Deut. 9:14) and the Psalter’s own “cease from anger, and forsake wrath” (Ps. 37:8). It means drop it. And the second half of the verse says who is being told: I will be exalted among the heathen — the raging nations of verse 6, whose weapons verse 9 has just broken. Verse 10 is the order that follows the disarming. It is a cease-fire, shouted across a field.

That does not make the verse useless to an anxious Christian; it makes it sterner and better. What it offers is not a technique for calm but a command to stop fighting, on the ground that the outcome is already settled — which is exactly what Moses told a cornered people at the sea: “stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD … the LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace” (Ex. 14:13–14). Notice too the order of the clauses. The knowing comes after the dropping. The hands have to be empty before the eyes work.

And the verb of the second half is future twice over. אָרוּם — I will be exalted — among the nations and in the earth; not withdrawn from it, not instead of it. Isaiah says the day is coming when “the LORD alone shall be exalted” (Isa. 2:11, 17), and Paul says where the exalting began: God “hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name” (Phil. 2:9). The psalm expects the sentence to become visible on the same earth that was melting in verse 6.

v. 11The refrain returns

Not one word has changed, and that is the whole point of a refrain. The sentence that was true before the earth was traded in is the sentence that is true after the bows are broken. Between the two singings of it the psalm has emptied the sea onto the mountains, set the nations roaring, melted the ground and burnt the chariots — and then it says the same thing again, in the same words, at the same length. The congregation sings it twice; the second time it carries more, though it says no more.

Notice what the psalm never does. It does not describe the city’s walls. It does not count its soldiers, name its king, or once mention the temple’s gold. Its entire case for the city is the sentence it repeats. Paul reaches the same end of the same argument — “if God be for us, who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31) — and Hebrews makes it a quotation the believer is authorised to say back: “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me” (Heb. 13:5–6). The Confession states the doctrine underneath it: God’s providence extends “to all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least” (WCF 5.1), which is why the refrain can afford to be short.

It is also, in the end, portable. A city cannot be carried, but a sentence can, and this one has been carried into a good many bad centuries — as the next section shows.