God is our Refuge

 God is Our Refuge

Psalm 91[1]

I’d like to share with you another in my occasional stories of my personal interaction with Scripture. Psalm 91 has been a companion on my journey for almost 45 years. I still remember reading it the first time it made an impression on me. I was a 19-year-old sophomore ministerial student in college. I can still picture in my mind the first time the words of Psalm 91 really sank in for me. I was sitting at my desk in my dorm room, and the words of this Psalm “jumped off the page.” It felt like God was speaking the promises of this Psalm to me personally. The one that stood out was “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you” (Ps 91:7, NRSV). I found that deeply reassuring as I wrestled with the uncertainties and fears I faced as I was trying to find my way as a young man.

Fast-forward twenty years, and my relationship with the promises of this Psalm became complicated by the disappointments of life. I had lost my marriage, my family, and my career. It was a time when I felt like I was living through my worst nightmare, only it had somehow become real. I wondered, oftentimes out loud (literally) what those promises of protection from harm meant in light of all I had lost. “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you” seemed an empty promise at best. At worst, I wondered if it offered false hope. In my mind, it felt like all the calamites Psalm 91 promised God’s protection from had come down on me in one fell swoop. I felt (and said out loud in prayer) that God had somehow let down his end of the bargain.

What I know now is that this was a necessary step in my relationship with this Psalm, with the Psalms, and with the Bible as a whole. Simply taking a particular Bible verse as if it were promising that I would not have to endure the hardships of life was not realistic. What I discovered is that the Psalms themselves, and this Psalm in particular, address that very issue. One of the major themes of the Psalms deals with a person who has done everything in their power to live out their faith in God and yet finds themselves in dire straits, suffering loss or grief or pain so great that makes it feel like God has abandoned them. One of the Psalmists actually asks God (out loud) “Why are you sleeping?” (Ps 44:23, GNT). And then, of course, there’s the Psalm Jesus quoted from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps 22:1, NRSV). Long before Jesus uttered that cry, it was the prayer of someone who felt like God had let them down.[2]

The Psalms as a whole deal with this troubling question. To be clear, it’s not just the question of “why do bad things happen to good people?” That’s a hard one, but the Psalms wrestle with a different question: “why do bad things happen to people who put their trust wholly and sincerely in God?” At times, the Psalmists lay the blame for these calamites at the feet of the “wicked.” In the Psalms, the “wicked” are not people who have typically been singled as “immoral” or “sinful.” The “wicked” in the Psalms are deemed so because their only value, their only “moral compass” is about gaining power, influence, or wealth. God’s purposes, God’s truths, God’s ways mean nothing to them. And they demonstrate that attitude precisely by taking advantage of the most vulnerable people.[3]

But not all of life’s hardships have a single, clear-cut cause. There are times when those who put their trust wholly and sincerely in God, who are called the “righteous” in the Psalms,[4] simply find themselves in dire straits. In a very real sense, the suffering of those who trust in God is just part of the mystery of life. That’s an essential perspective I had to learn. Despite the language of this Psalm to the contrary, the promise is not that hard times won’t come. The promise is that that the hard times that inevitably come won’t last forever. The “righteous” may “fall,” but they will not “be utterly cast down.” The reason for this is because the Lord “upholds” them him with his hand (Ps 37:24 KJV). Or, as the Good News Translation puts it: “If they fall, they will not stay down, because the Lord will help them up.”[5]

That brings us back to Psalm 91 and the affirmation of faith that “the Lord is my refuge.” One thing we have to keep in mind as we read this Psalm is the human perspective of the Psalms as a whole. We’re used to dealing with Scripture as “the Word of the Lord,” and we sometimes forget that all Scripture also has a human component. That’s particularly on display in the Psalms, because they’re prayer-songs that came from the life experience of the people who lived out their faith in God. Sometimes we find very human hurt and anger expressed in the Psalms. Other times, like in Psalm 91, we find the personal testimony of someone knows the joy of having been delivered by God from suffering. And those testimonies of personal faith were incorporated into the worship of the people as a whole and became a part of the collection of the Psalms. I would say that there are times however, when the psalm-singers may have gotten a bit carried away. That’s understandable. They’re expressing thanks to God for deliverance from suffering and they’re trying to praise God in the highest ways they can. But at times they promise more than God has promised. And throughout the ages, sincere people have staked their faith on the promise of protection from any and all harm that we find particularly in Psalms like this one.[6] When life doesn’t turn out that way, it leaves us wondering what comfort this Psalm actually offers us.

I think we find a clue in Psalm 91 itself. Much of it reflects the Psalm-singer promising God’s protection to other faithful people by using “you”: “a thousand may fall at your side, … but it will not come near you.” And those promises reflect an honest but human perspective on the assurance of God’s protection. But the last couple of verses shift to a declaration of God’s intent with “I”: “I will rescue those who love me.” In order to keep a balanced perspective on what this Psalm promises and what it doesn’t, we have to read the whole Psalm. At the end, when God “speaks,” he says: “I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name. When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them” (Ps 91:14-15, NLT).

The bottom line for our faith is that God doesn’t promise anyone what they will never have to deal with hard times.[7] Notice, when God “speaks” at the end of Psalm 91, he acknowledges that those who trust in him will have times of trouble. But the promise is, “I will be with them in trouble.” That’s what it means to trust in God as our “refuge” in life. Trusting in God as our refuge, as this Psalm calls us to do, is something that takes place in the midst of the hard times we face in life. It means trusting those hard times will not last forever, and in the end God’s love will have the final word: “I will be with them”; “I will protect them”; “I will rescue them.” God is, and always will be, our refuge!

Learning to take what I would consider a balanced perspective to Psalm 91 didn’t happen for me overnight. I still cherish the promise, “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.” But it took years of experience to come to a more balanced perspective on what that promise actually means. I had to learn the hard way that it doesn’t mean that God will somehow exempt those who trust him from the hardships of life. I learned that from my experiences, but also from reading this Psalm more carefully, and from reading this Psalm in light of the rest of the Psalms, as well as the witness of Scripture as a whole. What I also learned was that with promises like the ones made in this Psalm, we have to hold our faith in tension with the challenges of life. We may not see God’s promises fulfilled immediately, but the assurance of Scripture is that we will see them ultimately. That may feel like small comfort while we’re struggling, but it is a comfort nevertheless. As we take our journey through Lent this year, we’re going to continue looking at what the Psalms teach us about faith. I hope that it will make the promises in the Psalms, and in the Bible as a whole, make sense in the light of the experiences in life that often contradict them. I hope that it will help us all learn more fully what it means to affirm that God is our refuge.

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[1] © 2025 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 3/9/2025 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Another example is Psalm 77:9: “Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger withheld his compassion?” (NIV). I think it’s important to remember that “merciful” and “compassionate” are two of the essential characteristics in the basic declaration of who God is in the Hebrew Bible, Ex 34:6: “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in faithfulness and truth” (NASB). Essentially, the Psalmists asks whether God has forgotten to be “God”! Cf. Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, rev. ed, 183: “The Old Testament writers are very realistic about the contradiction between what their life was really like and what they believed about the God who chose and promised to help them. The psalmist expresses it most clearly. Over and over again throughout the Psalms he complains about the distance, silence, absence and hiddenness of God… .”

[3] Cf. Hans-Joachim Krauss, The Theology of the Psalms, 129, the “wicked” is “not only one who denies God in some sense yet to be defined; he is above all a person who has no shame before God or humans when he carries his evil, deceitful, deadly murderous plans into action. … With unshakable confidence he goes his way. He relies on the destructive power of his words and asks in his hubris and sense of superiority, ‘Who is our master?’ (Ps. 12:4).” See further J. Clinton McCann, Jr, “Book of Psalms” in New Interpreters Bible IV:667, where he defines the “wicked” in the Psalms as those “who consider themselves autonomous, which means literally ‘a law unto oneself.’” He continues, “Self-centered, self-directed, and self-ruled, the wicked see no need for dependence upon God or for consideration of others.”

[4] They are also called “the poor” in the Psalms. Cf. Krauss, Theology, 150-57. The “poor” in the Psalms are those who “find comfort and support” in God, and who “rely on Yahweh alone” (ibid., 152). On the “righteous” in the Psalms, see further McCann, “Book of Psalms” NIB IV:667, where he defines “righteousness” or “the righteous” in terms of “fundamental dependence upon God for life and future” which he observes is definition of happiness in the Psalms: “To be happy is to entrust one’s whole self, existence, and future to God.”

[5] This reminds me of St. Paul’s affirmation that “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:7-8, NIV).

[6] James Luther Mays, Psalms, 297, puts it even more bluntly: “The Psalm itself poses a danger. Because its assurance of security is so comprehensive and confident, it is especially subject to the misuse that is a possibility for all religious claims, that of turning faith into superstition.” He points out that “bits of the text have been worn in amulets that were believed to be a kind of magical protection for those who wore them”! McCann, “Book of Psalms” NIB IV:1048, picks up on this and insists, “We must not use Psalm 91 as a magical guarantee against danger, threat, or difficulty. Rather, this psalm is a reminder to us that nothing ‘will be able to separate us from the love of God’ (Rom 8:39 NRSV).” He continues, “In fact, Jesus’ and Paul’s faithfulness to God and to God’s purposes impelled them into dangerous situations” and he points out that “when Jesus did claim the assurance of the Psalms, it was from the cross” (emphasis original)!

[7] Cf. Mays, Psalms, 298, where he says in response to the misuse of Psalm 91 in the temptation of Jesus that “Real trust does not seek to test God or to prove his faithfulness”! Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 3.3:518: “we must remember that the protection of angels consists in the fact that by their witness to God they keep those committed to them in fellowship with God” (when he says “those committed to them, he clear means those angels [plural!] to whose care individuals may have been entrusted by God). Cf. also John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.14.12, p. 171, where he insists that “whatever is said concerning the ministry of angels” the purpose is that “our hope in God may be more firmly established.”