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The Safety of God’s Shadow Keith McFarren September 28, 2025 Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16 We live in a divided world. No matter where we go or what we do, our divided world not only follows us but the divides seem to keep getting wider and wider. Families are divided among themselves. What used to be good strong relationships have now wavered. The public sphere around us is divided. The political sphere is divided. Even the church is divided. As the divides grow wider and deeper, we as a people are growing further and further apart from one another. And as we grow further apart from each other, the more suspicious we become of one another. The more suspicious we become of one another, the more alienated we become, which causes us to turn inward, caring only for ourselves and less about the lives and the concerns of others. The is not a phenomenon that is going to go away soon. This is an unhealthy condition for us as individuals, it is an unhealth condition for us as a world, and it is unhealthy for us as a church. Division among ourselves in any form is not good for humanity nor is it good for the soul. In both Jewish and Christian theology, we associate the concept of separation or division with sin. That’s because sin separates us. Sin divides us. Sin divides us among one another…and it separates us from God. Together, sin and separation cause our souls to become unhealthy. As unhealthy people the divides we have created between us are hazardous to our physical health, to our mental health and hazardous to our spiritual health. In an unhealthy world, a world that is torn apart and has us running in all sorts of Helter-skelter directions, we turn to Psalm 91, a psalm created to bring us peace of mind and to bring us back together again. It is a psalm that tells of safety and security. It gives us a feeling that despite all that is going on in our lives and in the world around us…everything is going to be okay. Verse one of our scripture reading acts as the thesis statement for the entire psalm, the lens through which everything else should be read. God ultimately delivers because God is our shelter. God is like the logo for Traveler’s Insurance…he’s like a big umbrella that is designed to cover us and to protect us and keep us safe from anything the world throws at us. He covers us and shelters us because as his followers, we try to stay close to him and at the same time, we know that he will be there to rescue us when we call out to him in time of trouble and in times of need. God wants nothing more than for us to feel safe and secure, just like the psalmist, so that when we face pestilence and arrows and destruction like the psalmist did, we can stand upright and be brave because we live within the shadow of almighty God. God is all about love. Jesus is all about love. I try to impress that upon you every week in some way or another. We are constantly surrounded by God’s love…a love that can be defined as being indescribable. It may not always feel that we’re surround by God’s love because we go through periods of our life often feeling disconnected from that love. Maybe it’s because we’ve turned away from God for some reason or another or maybe something’s going on in our lives that causes us to doubt our faith. Feeling disconnected from God is like finding ourselves lost somewhere out there aimlessly wandering around in the wilderness. Not a wilderness that’s like a well taken care of national forest…not like a forest full of lush green trees and flowers. I’m talking about the kind of wilderness Jesus found himself in…a desert with nothing but rocks and sand with a hot sun beating down. A sun that literally saps the strength and the life right out of you. You’re parched and you’re dry. You feel vulnerable and exposed and you’re not sure which way to turn next. If you have ever found yourself in the wilderness. If you have ever felt vulnerable and exposed. If you have ever felt lost and all by yourself out in the middle of nowhere…then Psalm 91 was written for you. It was written to be a blessing. It was written to provide a shadow of relief for you or for anyone who finds themselves lost, out there in the middle of nowhere with the hot sun beating down upon them. The constant love of God provides a cloud that covers the hot, dry sun, a cloud that is meant to bring relief to those whose throats are dry and parched. Relief from the feeling of abandonment. Relief from the feeling of isolationism. Relief that allows us to gain the strength we need to stand up straight and tall instead of being bent over from the weight of our own inner emptiness. This is the God who promises to rescue me. This is my fortress. This is the God in whom I can trust. Sometimes we have to wonder. Sometimes we have our doubts. Because sometimes we feel abandoned by God. Other times, we feel inadequate, like we’ve disappointed God in some way or another. But in our minds and in our hearts we know better. We know that God’s love is constant and unconditional. And Psalm 91 tells us that there is nothing that can happen to us or nothing we can do to take that love away. The last two verses explain the promises he makes. “When they call me, I will answer them; I will be with them in trouble, I will rescue them and honor them.” Verse 15 says God promises to answer whenever we call. But we don’t always hear his answer because we’re not willing to wait long enough for it. We’re in a hurry for a quick fix and if we don’t hear from God within a certain amount of time, we move on. Maybe we don’t hear from him because we haven’t learned the language of God yet or because we’ve set up all sorts of hoops for God to jump through so we’ll get the answer we want from our prayer. So many things can keep us from hearing God’s answer. But the promise remains…God will always answer…in his own way. The second promise of this verse is that God will always be with us. “I will be with them in trouble.” It would be nice if we wouldn’t get into any type of trouble to begin with. But we need to remember that a lot of the trouble we get into is our own fault. Even though God always gives us the freedom to walk away from trouble and even though we fail to do so, we should still celebrate the good news that even in our stubbornness, even in our bad choices, even in our attempting to take God’s place with some of the decisions we make, none of this keeps God from being with us. It’s about trusting God in every circumstance, even the very worst of circumstances. Walter Brueggemann points out that God provides the psalmist both a “safe place” and a “safe journey;” [Meaning that] God’s protection is continuous and God’s protection is effective everywhere (Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms; A Theological Commentary, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984, 156). We are assured that God will protect us at all times during the night and during the day, in the darkness and in the noonday sun. Every manner of danger and difficulty is covered. We don’t have to identify word for word everything that we’re protected against but to trust in the promises of God means that there is no place, no time, or no circumstance that we can be faced with anything that is beyond God’s ability to protect us. “I will rescue them and I will honor them.” So, there you go. It’s like playing Monopoly with God and God gives us our own get out of jail free card! We’re home free…almost. “I will honor them” means that God is not a dictator; instead, he will honor us by allowing us the gift of free will. Which means that we are always free to make our own choices in life…but at the same time we then have to live with the consequences of that decision. But even then, we still have that get out of jail free card that he gave us. God will still rescue those who trust in him. No matter what happens to us, even because of the choices we have made, we will still be rescued. He gives us that get out of jail free card and then he tells us in verse sixteen that, “with long life I will satisfy them and show them my salvation.” “With long life”…with eternal life, I will satisfy them. That’s what he’s telling us. That’s the promise. That’s the rescue we can be assured of. As humans, we are always concerned with the here and now…but God is always looking beyond the here and now. God is always looking at the big picture…always wanting our lives to be better, always wanting our lives to be more full, more alive…always looking at living life in the kingdom of God today…and at living life in the kingdom of God in the future. The modern world is concerned about the pursuit of safety and security. Man has tried to provide for every stage of life and has tried to remove every cause for fear. But time and time again, man has failed. We work and work to gain wealth…and our money loses value. We invent multitudes of defense weapons to protect us and yet we find that entire cities are still destroyed. We discover all sorts of new medicines and major surgical skills and all are overridden by new diseases appearing one right after another. No victory on the battlefield, no success at the polling place, no ingenuity in modern medicine can save the world. What is needed above all else, is a faith in God. What is needed is the belief that through all the chances and all the changes that life sends our way and through all that the world has to offer us is a divine protector in whose wisdom and grace we can find hope and we can find peace. That protection…that security can only come to us through God, who comes to rescue us through Jesus Christ. |
Bethel United Methodist Church
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