Heavenly Treasures Continued: “A City and Hope Unshaken – Part 1”
In the midst of the broken world,
God is IN the tumult with His people,
he is for them, and the city of his glory will remain forever.
A Heavenly Treasure by Eric Blick, November 14, 2025
This Psalm was composed in faith during intense crisis. It’s one of my favorites, one we have come back to countless times as a family, and one that has three parts to it. This week we will focus on the first two parts and finish part three in an upcoming Heavenly Treasure.
Part I. God’s power over nature: He is IN the tumult with his own.
Read this out loud if you can today as you see this. The Psalm starts like this:
Verse 1-3: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling. Selah”
This is a picture of perfect creation being undone. Some have called it “de-creation”. Isn’t that how it feels sometimes as we trust God in this broken world? Remember in Genesis 1 the waters gave way to land. This Psalm, written in our post-Genesis 3 world, shows the reverse happening: land gives way back to water. However, even here God’s people are shown to be safe in Him. This does not mean that they will have full safety here in this present earth, though one day we will. While we wait, we are ultimately safe in Him and his loving rule over all things for his own.
This speaks of God as our refuge and strength. He, “as the Unchanging One and Shelter, is both ready to be found and enough in and for any circumstance, empowering the weak with his power.”(1)
Part II. God’s power over attackers to His city: He is IN His city.
The Psalm continues to move forward in verses 4-6: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved; God will help her when morning dawns. The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; He utters his voice, the earth melts.”
This broken world is not the end of the story. The same water that was destructive in verses 1-3 is now seen as a life-giving, refreshing river. The previous part shows the chaos of water over stable, unmovable objects as mountains. Then the same water is being ruled by God to refresh his people and to flow at his command.
Even here in the Old Testament, we catch a glimpse of what Christ tells more fully to John on the Island of Patmos regarding the city that will come as he writes the book of Revelation. God has a city. Zion or Jerusalem as the city of God. This is the community of God’s people rather than merely a place as the storyline of Scripture unfolds, and one day it will be a place in the new heavens and new earth.
When the Psalmist writes that God will be with her when the morning dawns, he is making a reference back to God’s miraculous rescue of the Israelites fleeing Egypt. After the 10 plagues, the fleeing Israelites were trapped by mountains and water on all sides with the ensuing Egyptians coming to kill them (Exodus 14). It is at the dawn after a dark night that God parted the Red Sea and defeated the Egyptians bringing salvation to his people. That is how God saves. That is who he is. He delivers us now by the same power.
Do we believe his presence is with us as we make our way in this broken world to our forever home with him? Do we live in expectant hope that one day we will be at home with the Lord in this city, the holy habitation of the Most High?
We learn here that God cannot be moved or shaken. It is in Him that our hope lies, in this sovereign, unshakable God. See how in contrast to all that moves in this psalm, God cannot be moved. In verse 1 the impregnable mountains are moved, and in verse 6 the nations display the inherent instability of evil. But God is the one who causes his people to not be moved because he cannot be. The same voice that spoke the world into being in Genesis 1, will one day decisively speak in dissolving the world to restore it to his order through his Son. And, in the meantime, he is WITH us and his presence goes with us.
Prayer: Father, great and mighty are you, the Creator who cannot be moved. Thank you that you are have not abandoned us in our sin and brokenness and left us on our own, but in Christ we are pursued and forgiven, and one day fully restored in the new heavens and earth. Oh God, give us the comfort of your presence that walks with us in just how broken and undone this world is and bring us to your everlasting home.
AMEN!
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Source 1: Kidner, Derek, The Psalms part 1. Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois, 2025, commentary notes based on this passage and quote from p192.
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