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Psalm 46:4-5  There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.  God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.

This is a wonderful promise to God’s people in the middle of this Psalm.  The basic theme of the Psalm is stated in verse 1: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” and the Psalm calls on God’s people in the midst of an ever hostile, sin-affected, perishing world to “Be still, and know that I am God; Iwill be exalted among the nations,  I will be exalted in the earth” (verse 10).

God calls on his people in every age not to dwell on their pressing, seemingly overwhelming troubles, but to remember that he remains sovereign over all that he has made, and that nothing and no-one can prevent him from carrying out allhis plans for his world.  His “Be still” is the same as his plea at the edge of the Red Sea during the Exodus: “The Egyptians you see today you will never see again.  The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Exodus 14:13b-14).

Yes, the main message of Psalm 46 is a call to God’s Covenant People, his Church in every age, to trust him fully to protect them always .  But the whole message is for much, much more.  It is for the overflow of unlimited blessing like a rich everflowing stream to all who would turn to him in faith.

In due course, the Lord Jesus Christ would come and give substance to all these promises throughout his public ministry: “Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.  Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13-1);  “On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within him.’  By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive” (John 7:37-38).  “I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Behold I freely give the living water; thirsty one, stoop down and drink, and live.’  I came to Jesus, and I drank of that life-giving stream; my thirst was quenched, my soul revived, and now I live in him” (Horatius Bonar).

– Bruce Christian