Introduction: A Psalm for the Fearful

Good evening — I'm Matt, head of emerging generations here at Above Bar Church. Tonight we're in Psalm 46, and we're talking about fear.

If I asked you what your biggest fear is, we might all have a gentle laugh about classic phobias — spiders, clowns, the dark. But then someone might bravely say failure, loss, losing a friend, losing a parent. Someone might think broader — world war, or global sea level rises. And we'd all be forced to admit that there are anxieties that sit heavy on our hearts a lot of the time.

Psalm 46 has been God's answer to those fears for perhaps as much as 3,800 years. For all that length of time, this psalm has been relevant to fearful people like us. So as we come to God's word today, we join with his people throughout the centuries, expecting God to speak comfort to us. Whatever world-shaping or world-shaking fear you might have, God is speaking to you through his word today.

The Structure of the Psalm

The psalm is rich and dense, but the psalmist has made life easier for us by dividing it into three parts, each marked by the same word — selah — appearing in verses 3, 7, and 11. Its precise meaning isn't known for certain. It might be a musical direction, or it might mean something like exalt or lift up, inviting the reader to worship. It might also mean reflect, pause, or meditate.//

Whatever its precise meaning, the psalmist clearly wanted to draw our attention to three specific points of pausing and reflecting on something worth reflecting on.

Part One: Fear of Chaos and Calamity (vv.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. Selah.

That picture is vivid — the English Channel bursting over the Isle of Wight and rolling on up through Hampshire and the South Downs crumbling into the sea. Even imagining that, there's loss and destruction that makes our stomachs churn. We only need to look around the world — look at Venezuela — to see how disastrous a calamity like that can be.

In the Bible, surging seas and chaotic waters are a symbol. They communicate chaos — the messing up of God's good and ordered creation. Here they are both a description of natural disaster and a picture of the worst calamity you could imagine — your house being taken away, the loss you can't bear, whatever it might be. The fact that verse 2 begins