A verse I find particularly life-giving is one I first heard spoken almost three decades ago, when Sam Leonor began his chaplaincy at La Sierra University. I was sitting in a center-left pew of the same sanctuary in which we sit today, under the same stained-glass windows I love seeing on Sabbath now.
“Be still, and know that I am God,” declares Psalms 46:10 (NIV).
These words—part of a biblical hymn to be sung by soprano voices—caught my attention because, like many, I was struggling to adapt as a college freshman. At age-18, I had just moved across country and was trying, clumsily, to fit in despite feeling woefully out of place and unsure of myself. Fear and self-consciousness lurked beneath every encounter as I navigated a different culture on the West Coast, new friendships, advanced Honors courses, complicated family dynamics, unexpected financial pressures, and an unknown future—all on my own.
The command to “be still” was a welcomed interjection during that era of my life, which was as characterized by my growing thirst for adventure as my life’s constant motion, moving a million directions at the same time like Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.” I was unsure where I was headed but determined to not slow down or look backward.
As the sun streamed through the stain-glass windows that Tuesday afternoon, I remember the verse speaking to my soul in a language I was not used to hearing, but one I knew I needed to learn.
“Thank goodness God is in charge,” I thought, feeling relieved. Born into Generation X, I’d been raised amid shifting values within the Adventist Church and the changing societal norms of the 1970s and early 1980s. I was involved in everything during academy—the yearbook, student newspaper, select choir, local church board, and student body association. By the time I got to college, I felt like a “recovering Type-A”—someone driven to succeed, but exhausted.
This verse was a balm because it meant I didn’t have to do everything, be everything, know everything. God was in control, not me. It was a lesson that would take years to sink in and fully understand.
Psalms 46 begins with another verse I learned in my youth, which is equally encouraging for people of all ages. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Taken together, verses 1 and 10 can suggest that the Divine is at work in our individual lives; however, as verse 6 says, God’s influence is also active at broader levels: “Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall; he lifts his voice, the earth melts.”
Each person reading the Psalms brings new meaning to the Scriptures, and that meaning changes over time. For me, Psalms 46:10 speaks more now to the aspects of generational trauma that I see in my extended family, Seventh-day Adventist history, and the Abrahamic religious traditions, than the personal lens through which I first interpreted this text decades ago. I sense collective anxiety at those levels, which would also benefit from more people “being still” and letting God be God, rather than trying to control the narrative, fill the silence, or bend God’s Word toward their own—too often tragic—ends.
Psalms 46:10 goes on to say that God will be exalted “among the nations” (read: people) and “in the earth.” The verse references a “desolation” that God brought, to emphasize that God’s power on earth is even greater than that of natural forces like foaming water and the sea, yet the Psalmist is not afraid. Instead, God’s power is like a “river whose streams make glad the city of God.” Strong, but safe.
No less than the Augustinian monk and great reformer himself, Martin Luther, claimed these promises when he wrote in 1527 the beloved anthem of faith that we sing today, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (#506 in the SDA Hymnal).
Cast as an outlaw and a heretic by the papal elites and Holy Roman Empire, Luther struggled less against individual temptations and personal battles than against the enormous political and religious power that Rome held and was misusing among Christians in early 16th-century Germany. He was a person of deep conviction whose voice and commitment to faith continue to reverberate over time.
Luther’s hymn describes God as “unequaled” and a “shield.” It was not Rome, Luther said, but Jesus Christ who “holds the field forever,” drawing on the Psalmist’s military imagery. “Though devils all the world should fill, all eager to devour us, we tremble not, we fear no ill: they shall not overpow’r us.”
After Luther’s death in 1546, his hymn was reportedly used as a battle anthem during the Thirty Years War in Europe, which ended with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. That treaty established the concept of modern nation-states, as opposed to the feudal kingdoms that had until then reigned in Western Christendom. The treaty also provided a foundation for religious tolerance and the Enlightenment values on which our country, as a secular (non-sectarian) democracy, was built.
Reading Psalms 46 today — amid the many political wars and religious battles currently raging in the world, and against the backdrop of climate change and the increasing frequency and impact of natural and man-made disasters here in Southern California (from drought, earthquakes, fire, flooding, and mudslides, to the pestilence affecting our citrus trees and pandemics like COVID-19) — I can’t help but think that this biblical hymn could have been written yesterday. As could Luther’s hymn have been.
As a community of faith, we are participating in a centuries-old conversation and spiritual practice of engaging with the Scriptures through this blog, which dates not just to Luther but to the Psalmist(s) and his antecedents. This conversation about God’s power and influence—in our lives and the world around us—is made new each time we engage with the text. Our stories, like those handed down from biblical eras and the Middle Ages, continue to be meaningful and relevant as we grow, seek, and perfect our journey of faith as individuals and as a community. They have been a blessing to me already.
Indeed, the Lord Almighty and the God of Jacob is with us today, waiting for us to be still and know (that is, to remember) that God is God and we are not. Praise be to God!
Sasha Ross lives in Woodcrest with her husband, Harold Thomas, and their daughter, Madeleine.