Those Who Trust in God, Don't Need to Fear the Arrows - Psalms 91 Praying the Scriptures

 

 We are still in Psalm 91, as Nick talked about, and we’re going to be there for a little bit. We’re going to actually just be there today, and we’re going to finish out on the 29th, on Palm Sunday, this little sermon series, “Walking Through Psalm 91.” We’ve talked about living under the shelter of the Most High. We talked last week about this kind of bird language that’s used here that is all about God’s protection. This week we’re going to start in verse 5; we’re going to go through verse 10, as he talks a lot about fear and God’s protective hand from visible and invisible threats.

So here we are, Psalm 91, starting at verse 5, and it’s just a continuation, obviously, of the psalm that he’s been talking about. This is what Psalm 91:5–10 says: “You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only observe with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked. If you say, ‘The Lord is my refuge,’ and you make the Most High your dwelling, no harm will overtake you, no disaster will come near your tent.”

Fear is one of the most powerful forces in the human heart. In fact, I had an experience long ago with something that I believed maybe was supernatural, and it was a scary experience, just to be honest with you—to feel darkness and to sense that near you. I remember going to someone I respect, especially spiritually, and they told me words I’ll never forget: if the enemy can get you to fear, he can paralyze you. If the enemy can get us to fear, he can paralyze us. It’s true that fear is one of the most powerful forces in the human heart. If we fear something, we will redirect our entire life because of that fear, won’t we?

I know people who are afraid to fly. Anybody afraid to fly? I mean, there’s some sarcasm there—I’ll try not to—but afraid to fly. I know this person who is afraid to fly won’t even step foot on a plane, would rather go to Alaska in a car. People fear all kinds of things, and it’s paralyzing to us. We’ve seen it, and it’s true. People fear disease. I know a person who is afraid that they’ll hear the word “cancer” in their life; it’s a deep, hard fear for them. People fear violence—that’s a fear that a lot of people live with. People fear uncertainty; we’re not sure what’s going to happen in the future, and that becomes a fear in our hearts. People fear the future; people fear the unknown. In fact, turn on the news and you see that danger is everywhere. But the psalmist gives a remarkable promise here in Psalm 91. He describes a person who lives under the shelter of God, and because they live under the shelter of God, they can live without fear.

I want us to imagine what it would be like to live a life where we’re not controlled by fear. Some of us would say, “Pretty easy, I live my life that way, I’m not really afraid of much.” But a lot of us, if we’re being honest, fear some things that make us redirect our lives a little bit. So you hear these words of Psalm 91, verses 5 through 10. The message of this passage is simple but powerful: those who trust in God’s protection do not have to live in fear. So I want us to walk through this passage like we’ve been doing and then really pray a prayer, as we’ve been talking about—trying to pray this Scripture out a little bit as we pray Scripture. Psalm 91 is a great one to pray.

The first thing I see is in verse 5: God’s presence removes fear. This is what the psalmist says: “You shall not be afraid; you shall not fear the terror of night.” Those are interesting words, aren’t they? “You will not fear the terror of night.” Night has always been a symbol of fear. In ancient times, night meant vulnerability—no streetlights, no security systems, no protection. Darkness magnifies fear. How many of us, as a kid, remember being afraid in the dark? I think it happened to most of us. Darkness magnifies fear because at the root of fear is a feeling that we have no control. If we cannot see what is there, if we do not know what is there, then our imagination can drive us to fear.

Many of us do remember being afraid of the dark as a child. A child hears a noise in the hallway and immediately, what does the child imagine? Monsters. The room feels unsafe, but the moment a parent walks into the room, everything changes for the kid. The room hasn’t changed; the darkness has not changed; but the presence of someone they trust and see as stronger removes the fear. That’s what God’s presence does for us. The psalmist is saying you do not have to fear the terror of night because God is present with you. God is with you. You live under the shelter of the Most High. You live in this relationship with God. Fear fades when we remember that God is with us.

I don’t know how many times you’ve felt in this life that you’re just walking it alone. Some of us feel that. We live a life of spiritual loneliness or even physical loneliness, and we have a hard time imagining that anyone would want to be near us. The psalmist here gives us this amazing promise—that he’s near to us. I want you to know that we don’t have to live in fear. We don’t have to let fear guide our life because we have a God who is present with us.

Verses 5 and 6 also tell us that God protects us from visible and invisible threats. The passage continues: “nor the arrow that flies by day.” So first he’s saying we won’t fear the terror of night, “nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that walks in darkness.” I like the NIV that says, “the pestilence that stalks in the darkness.” Doesn’t that just sound like scary-movie kind of language? It kind of does to me. Maybe we should have done this at Halloween—probably not. The psalmist describes different types of dangers. The first one is arrows. We don’t have to fear the arrows, do we? An arrow here is really a word picture of the sudden attacks that happen.

Then there’s the word “pestilence.” We know pestilence as another fancy English word for disease. This is another kind of danger that lurks in our world. Yes, sudden attacks—those violent attacks—are one thing. Then we have these unseen diseases, the pestilence. And then there’s another type of danger: destruction—“the plague that destroys at midday.” Notice they’re all in the dark, in the sense of being beyond our control. Some threats are visible, the ones “in the day.” We don’t fear the arrows in the day in the sense that we can see them coming; the things that are danger to us that we can see are one category. Other threats are invisible: a plague that destroys at midday, a pestilence stalking in darkness. We don’t see it coming. We just get the news of it: “Hey, we’re sick,” or “Someone has gotten sick,” or “Something has happened that we didn’t see coming.” It was in the darkness—and yet, God says there’s no reason to fear.

So some threats are very visible—we can see them coming at us. Others are very invisible—they happen in the dark. Think about how people react to a major storm. When a major hurricane approaches, what do people do? They board up their windows, they buy supplies, they prepare. “Where will we go? How will we get there? When will we leave?” But the storm that people cannot see, like a virus spreading through a population, often produces even greater fear. Isn’t that true? I have a cousin who lived for many years in a hurricane area in Florida, and they would post when a major, huge hurricane—not just an Amarillo wind, right?—was coming and the nation was watching. They’d say, “This is what we did. We parked our van and our car in front of our front door so nothing could happen there.” They just made it sound like it was no big deal. They didn’t really fear what they could see coming. But when disease hits, when there’s something spreading, a plague that’s destroying silently, it’s something that’s hard not to fear. It produces greater fear. Why? Because unseen threats make us feel powerless.

The psalmist reminds us that nothing is unseen to God. What we cannot see, God clearly sees. What we cannot control, God still rules over. The third thing here is found in verse 7: God’s protection is greater than the surrounding danger. “A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand.” This verse paints a dramatic picture. The world around the believer may be in chaos—people falling, danger everywhere—yet the psalmist says it won’t come near you. This is not a promise that believers will not face hardship. This is one of those verses that people take out of context, and they will pray it over themselves as if sickness cannot come upon them because they’re shielded by some magical force. That is not the intention of what the psalmist is saying. Rather, this is a promise that God is sovereign over every circumstance—that God is in control.

During the Passover in the book of Exodus, destruction passed through Egypt, but every home marked with the blood of the Lamb was protected, if you remember that. Judgment was moving everywhere, yet God made a distinction between those under his covering and those who were not. In the same way, God is with us. God is with those who belong to him, who live in the shelter of the Most High. I can tell you as a hospital chaplain, I see the difference in people with faith in crisis and hardship. It is hard, difficult, crushing—but there’s something that’s an anchor in their story. There’s an anchor there; there’s a hope. Then you compare that to someone going through the exact same thing without that same hope, without that same anchor, without living in the shelter of the Most High, and it is chaos, fear, and hardship.

Verse 8 tells us that God allows us to witness his justice. He goes on to say, “You will only observe with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked.” We see the psalmist do this a couple of times here in this psalm. He shifts his perspective a little bit—from one theme to another—and instead of being victims of chaos, God’s people become witnesses to his justice. History repeatedly shows that evil always collapses. I know we don’t always believe that in the moment, but history plays it out. Evil always collapses. Empires rise and they fall. Every empire that’s ever been around has had a great rise and a great fall. Tyrants seem powerful at the time and hard to live under, but they only live as tyrants for a time. Eventually their power crumbles.

The Bible reminds us that God has the final word in history. The believer does not have to take revenge or live in panic or do anything other than live under the shelter of the Most High, because God sees, God remembers, and God judges rightly. We can read things like, “You will only observe with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked,” and we can hear this punishment and judgment language in the Psalms and it may turn us off a little bit. But what a great hope here—a reminder that in our world, God sees what’s happening, that God is not ignoring what’s happening, and that what is happening is only for a moment. God’s justice will reign supreme.

The fifth thing is found in verses 9 and 10: the secret of our security. The passage reveals the key: “If you say, ‘The Lord is my refuge’…” In some versions it says, “Because you have made the Lord your refuge.” It becomes a key verse for us. The protection described in this psalm is not random protection; it belongs to those who choose God as their refuge. A refuge is a place we intentionally run into during danger. It’s your tornado shelter—that’s your refuge. For most of you, when you’ve had a hard day or you’re just tired of whatever you’ve been doing, where do you go? You go home. You shut the door and it’s your refuge. Whether you like your home or not, it’s your place of safety. That’s who God is for us. He is the place we run intentionally when we feel we’re in danger.

In medieval cities there were fortified towers where citizens could run when enemies would attack their cities. It was their shelter, their city stronghold. When the alarm sounded, people rushed inside these strongholds. The tower protected everyone inside of it, but those who chose to stay outside remained very vulnerable. The psalmist is saying God himself is our strong tower. Security is not found in our money; it’s not found in our government; it’s not found in our human strength; it’s not found in our intelligence. True security is found in our relationship with God—the only place that we are truly safe.

I want to tell you, I was with an older woman not long ago who was passing away. When I say older, I mean she had three digits in her age, okay? So don’t think I’m calling 58-year-olds old. This was really a saint of the church. She was suffering, and she told me that she had really been suffering for more than 30 years. Thirty years. I’m not even 30 years old—can you believe that? No, not really. That’s a long time to suffer. She felt like she didn’t have much purpose in her life, and she struggled those last 30 years.

A lot of times, you know this: we’re created body, mind, and spirit. This is how God created us. In our country, we do really well diagnosing the body. We don’t do as well with the mind. Sometimes we ignore the spirit. But they’re all three connected. When you struggle physically, you can really struggle mentally. Have you ever experienced that? You’ve been sick for a long time; your thoughts are not good. When you struggle physically, you can struggle spiritually. People do it all the time: “Why is God punishing me?” When you struggle spiritually, it can affect your body; it can affect your mind. All things are connected.

This lady had really suffered for 30 years. In conversation I asked her, “How did you not give up?” She kept going through treatment, kept going through this doctor, that doctor, everything. “How did you not give up?” She had such a positive attitude. She said, “I have a God who is always there when I need him.” She said that throughout these 30 years, that’s the only thing she’d known. Some of her family hadn’t really been there when she needed them. But her God had always been there. He’s really our strong tower, which is what the psalmist is trying to say.

He’s not trying to tell us, “Just live in a relationship with me and you’ll never have hardship,” because we know that Jesus said the opposite: people are going to hate you because of me. Is that true? Yes, it is—still true today. People will hate you because of your faith. Yes, that’s going to happen. Hardship will come in this life. It’s just part of life. Disease, famine, war, hardship, violence—these are part of our crazy world full of evil. It is what it is. But our hope is found in our shelter, our anchor within the storm.

So how do we live this psalm out? First, we replace fear with trust. Fear grows when we focus on circumstances; faith grows when we focus on God. I think that’s what that lady was doing. She wasn’t focused on her circumstance; she was focused on her God, with whom, by the way, she said she is going to live forever. We’re going to look back and see that this life is such a small part of forever, isn’t it?

First, we replace fear with trust. Secondly, we run to God as our refuge daily. Through prayer, through worship, through Scripture, we stay anchored in his presence. Third, we remember that God’s protection is ultimately eternal. It’s an eternal kind of protection. Even when we face hardships in this life, our ultimate safety is in God’s eternal promises.

The message of Psalm 91:5–10 is not that life is never dangerous, because none of us in this room could ever say that. The message is that God is greater than every danger that comes our way. No matter if it’s arrows in the day or darkness, pestilence, or plague that stalks in the darkness, God is greater. He’s in control. Because of him, we do not have to fear the night. We do not have to fear the unseen. We do not have to fear the chaos that is around us. Those who make the Lord their refuge can live with a deep, unshakable confidence—not because the world is safe (it’s not), but because God is faithful. The safest place a person can ever live is in the presence of God.

I want to pray for us as we close today. Maybe today you want to give God some of your own fears—the things that really make us reorder our lives. Not the silly fears; I always feel like I have some of those. You know I’ve confessed my fear of bees before—silly, right? But the deeper fears. Let’s go to the Lord in prayer this morning.