The City That Cannot Be Shaken

The singers in the family of Korah
knew what it meant when the ground gave way.
Back in Moses' day, a man in their family named Korah
turned against Moses and Aaron, the leaders God had chosen,
and the earth split open under his tent
and swallowed him, and he died.
Korah's sons did not go down with him.
They lived, and their children lived,
and hundreds of years later
Korah's family sang in God's house in Jerusalem.

Their song begins with the worst shaking anyone could picture.

"God is our safe place and our strength,
a helper who is right here when trouble comes.
So we will not be afraid,
even if the earth gives way,
even if the mountains tip over
and slide into the middle of the sea,
even if the waters roar and foam
and the hills shake at the crashing waves."

After that comes one odd word: Selah.
(Nobody knows exactly what it means.
It may mean "stop and think about that,"
which is good advice after a mountain falls into the sea.)

The song turns from the sea to a river.

"There is a river
whose streams make God's city glad,
the holy place where the Most High lives.
God is in the middle of her;
she will not fall.
God will help her when the morning comes."

(Jerusalem had no river,
only one spring outside the wall,
so everyone singing knew this river meant something more than water.)

"The nations roar. The kingdoms wobble.
God lifts his voice, and the earth melts.
The LORD of armies is with us.
The God of Jacob is our fortress.

Come and see what the LORD has done!
He stops wars to the ends of the earth.
He snaps the bow,
he breaks the spear in two,
he burns the war chariots in the fire."

Picture a whole army in a field,
every soldier holding two halves of a spear
and nothing to fight with.

And God himself speaks:

"Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be honored among the nations.
I will be honored in all the earth."

The words for "be still" mean something like
"Stop! Let go!"
It is what a grown-up says to two children
wrestling over one toy,
and here God says it to the whole roaring world.

The chorus comes once more:
"The LORD of armies is with us.
The God of Jacob is our fortress."

But Jerusalem was a city of stone,
and stone can fall.
Years later an army from Babylon
broke down its walls
and burned God's house.
When God's people came home, they built his house again, so small that the old men who remembered the first one cried,
and the song waited five hundred years for its river.

At last God came to live in the middle of his people in another kind of house,
a house that walked and talked.
God's own Son had become a man,
and he called his body God's house.
When he died on a cross,
the earth shook and rocks split apart.
Early on the third day the ground shook again,
an angel rolled the stone away,
and Jesus was alive, never to die again.

Now he is building a city out of people.
One day a river will run down the middle of its street,
God will live in the middle of it,
and nothing there will ever be shaken.