How wonderful it is that the Lord should give such a message as this to His people: “Be still and know that I am God.” Notwithstanding the unrest round about them and the dangers that beset them on every hand, He calls them to be still. In the very midst of circumstances fitted to disquiet and alarm even the strong hearted the Lord says, Be still. When the Lord’s Cause is threatened, when His people are faced with unlooked for trials and afflictions He still says, Be still. So, too, when inwardly perturbed, agitated or distressed, as His people sometimes are through their conflicts with sin and Satan, the Lord’s message to His tried ones is the same, Be still.
Be still, He says, and know that I am God. Consider that all power in heaven and earth is mine. How far short men come in recognising this. How much disquiet and even rebellion against the providence of God this consequently brings. How ready we are to repine at those acts of God which we reckon are disadvantageous to us or which appear positively contrary to our good. How foolish are these thoughts and those repinings when we remember that God is good, that all He does is good, and that, so far as His people are concerned, “all things work together for their good”.
Oh what unrest and dispeace sin has brought into the world. How little of quietness and rest do ungodly sinners know. While sinners live out their life in sin they have no ear to hear the Lord’s voice to them calling on them to be still. We know, too, that in hell there is no stillness under the wrath of the Almighty but only positive rebellion and gnashing of teeth against the justice of God. There, in an undone eternity, there is no submission to God’s just displeasure against sin, no reconciliation to the will of God as He executes the fierceness of His anger on the children of disobedience. “The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, unto the wicked”.
How different it should be with the people of God — a people who have known His gracious dealings in bringing them near to Himself. Surely they have no reason to quarrel with Him, or to question the working of His providence. They have every reason to say in every dispensation of His Providence: “It is the Lord: let Him do what seemeth Him good”. Yet how often it is otherwise. They begin, like the world, to say, Oh, if only matters had been different. I could have borne this trial or that other difficulty but this trial that is come upon me, I cannot bear. How vexatious to themselves and how provoking to the Lord is this lack of submission and rebelliousness.
How different it is with the people of God when in the midst of the storm, they hear His voice saying to them, Be still and know that I am God. Christ, they discover, is not only able to still the storm as He did on the sea of Galilee but is able also to give calmness of mind and heart in the midst of the storm. They experience a quietness of soul, a resting in God, in His love, even in the midst of the greatest trial or affliction. They have discovered in their experience the meaning of this word of His to them: Be still and know that I am God.