What a Friend We Have in Jesus
Our Refuge of Rest in the Lord of Heaven and Earth
Good Morning,
As we walked through Psalm 46 on the Lord’s Day morning I was struck again by the beauty of the phrase, “God is our refuge”. While Solomon in the Proverbs says that the wicked man runs when no one chases, those moved by the blessings of the Holy Spirit to hear their Master’s voice are like those who see the rainbow and want to know where the gold is. The simple idea that we who are fleeing from the devil, his minions, and the old man within us into the safety of the arms of the Most High is such a wonderful picture of the statement Christ makes in Matthew 11 when He bids all to come unto Him for rest. The whole concept of refuge presents us with some terms that need defined. Refuge is a goal, an end, and place. But even more than that it is a word which encapsulates the warm peace of knowing what it means to be safe, without fear or anxiousness.
There are times when we need to let big theological words like providence and justification help us to explain what our feelings recognize as being the graciousness of God to us in our daily life. A quote from John Calvin is helpful here, “But they who commit themselves to the protection of God, although in the estimation of the world they are exposed to every kind of injury, and are not sufficiently able to repel the assaults made upon them, nevertheless repose in security.”. It is vital that Believers understand that they are specially gifted in two particular ways by grace through faith alone. What Calvin describes as commit and repose is in fact the first fruits of the work of the Holy Spirit when the gospel is received in Christ. As we are made new creatures through redemption our hearts and souls are geared so that our eyes look towards a different home, away from the place where we had been dwelling in exile. As we journey towards the promised land, the house of refuge, what can we do but run to arms of our Great Shepherd as He seeks to bring us the green pastures of spiritual blessing, or as Psalm 46 would say, the rivers which flow in the abundance of mercy to nourish us in the love of God forever and ever.
As we consider once more what it means to be a Christian at its most fundamental the glory of God’s providence is that as He cares for us in the love of a Father to whom we have been reconciled by the shed blood of the lamb, there is a joy unspeakable as we learn more of it. There is a hope built on the rock of salvation that no storm can drive away. It is why when we read this and other like psalms that our strength is built up and encourage regardless of what outward circumstances we are dealing with. The world, as Calvin notes, will mock you and revile you just as the enemies of Jesus did on the cross, or Job’s friends telling him to curse God and die instead of wallow in the pain of his boils and loss. However both the Son and the son knew that despite what things may have looked like to the untrained eye they were in the best place for both of them at that moment because they were there under the gracious hand of God’s providence. The one who has made the Heavens and the Earth, had made this moment just as much. We can trust the Lord in the little things for He has taken care of the big things with such majesty.
If God can harness a hurricane, He can watch over me in the midst of disease, imprisonment, and even death itself, for He is the author of life. When Jehovah reveals Himself to Job He does so with a series of rhetorical questions that say the same. The encouragement the Sons of Korah give in the forty-sixth psalm speaks to these truths. Why is God our refuge? Because He is our LORD. The covenant of grace engages both the Trinity and those bound by that covenant into a mutual remembrance of the support that the former gives to the latter both in Christ and for Christ’s people because of the fulfilment by Christ of the word given to Eve in Genesis 3:15.
When the apostle John says, “. . . And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” he is not directing his readers to believe that the Old Testament no longer has anything to teach us as those who live on the other side of the empty tomb. It is to help us to know that as believers when we go back and read of the experience of our Israelites in the face of the Assyrian’s we can know that not only was it Jesus who was helping the Jews in Jerusalem in 701AD, it is the same Second Person of the Godhead who is helping us today in power and in glory. If He can protect the people from a hundred thousand man army, why would we live in doubt of His goodness?
In closing, as Paul confesses his own understanding of the way Christ had been with him in the darkest of his day he gives this advice to the people of Corinth:
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed— always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.
What we hear in these words is what the Sons of Korah are expressing in Psalm 46. The refuge we have in Christ is due to our union with Him. We are safe in the life of the King of Kings because we are alive in Him, it is in Jesus that we move and have our being. We must ask ourselves and meditate on this idea: why would we need to worry and be anxious for anything if our souls can testify of our being knit in love with God? For our hope is built on nothing less.
Another thought:
https://reformedperspective.ca/learning-to-be-anxious-for-nothing/
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church