The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe.
Uncertainty, worry, and fear are three companions everybody walks alongside for a time, barring insanity. The world is big; people are complex; we ourselves oscillate between self-certainty and a realization of our own inability to control what happens. Fear rises within. Worry obtrudes itself. Uncertainty leaves us wobbly, looking for a firm footing. To all this, the Lord provides answer.
To uncertainty? He is the Lord who decides (Rom. 8:28). To fear? He is the Lord who protects (Ps. 23). To worry? He gives a course (Ps. 119:1-9) and bears the weight of everything beyond that (Matt. 6:25-34), gives even the strength for its walking (Is. 40:29).
The man who does not know God is left adrift. Here on earth, “wealth is fleeting, here friends are fleeting, here man is fleeting, here woman is fleeting,” as the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer (trans. R. Liuzza)1 puts it. His center will not hold (as per Yeats’s The Second Coming).2 The anchors which this world offers are many. We have wealth. We have philosophy. We have pleasure. We have other people. We have ourselves. We have nothing at all, when we come down to it, because by rejecting the Creator, we reject His creation. We cannot receive eternal aid from the temporal, and we have rejected even temporal aid, insofar as it is true and heaven-ward.
Thus, without God “All is vanity” (Ecc. 1:2), declared the Preacher, and Solomon ought to know. Ecclesiastes is Solomon’s careful consideration of various worldly anchors, finding whether any one of them has the weight to hold a man steady, to found him against the storm. He tries philosophy (ch1), hedonism, wisdom, hard work (ch2), and wealth (ch5). He considers the world thoroughly, through the process of the book, and he finds in the end that God alone is a sufficient foundation, our only strong tower.
Men try to lift towers to rival God and replace Him, of course. The most famous was at Babel (Gen. 11:1-9). Yet Babel’s downfall was not a unique event in character, however unique in scale. Isaiah 2:12-18 declares as much: “For the Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and loft, against all that is lifted up—and it shall be brought low… And the haughtiness of men shall be humbled….” Men propose to stand for themselves, Godless and supported by the “work of their hands” (v8), and God disposes: that “the Lord alone will be exalted in that day (v17).
The emptiness of mankind’s autonomy is a blessing, besides being the necessary nature of things. It declares to the sinner his hope’s vanity in order that he may turn from that hopelessness to the Hope of Israel (Jer. 14:8). Thus, though the Lord gives us over “into the hand of a hard master” (Is. 19:4), in the end, when we “cry to the Lod,” He “will send to [us] a savior and defender and deliver [us]” (v20). Thus God says of Egypt, “The Lord will strike Egypt, striking and healing, and they will return to the Lord, and He will listen to pleas for mercy and heal them” (v21). A man must break of his self-reliance before he can rely on God, and therefore His true love is to break man’s pride.
Of course, sometimes the suffering is not meant for the benefit of the sufferer, whom God has condemned to damnation (Acts 12:23). Sometimes, as we well know, a bad example does not heed his own life-story, and he is an example to others rather than himself. So the poet of Beowulf3 spoke through the mouth of Hrothgar, who commends to Beowulf’s eye the evil end of King Heremod, who “grew bloodthirsty,” who “ignored the shape of things to come.” The verdict is this: “He suffered in the end.” This example is a chastening, even in its limitation to this world (for Beowulf’s pre-Christian characters never consider Him in light of eternity). How much more terrible an example we have for our instruction in the emptiness, self-destruction, and damnation of any sinner unrepentant!
All this, and we Christians are slow to learn. We worry, worry, worry, desperate to control. We yank that little lever in our heads marked ‘control the world,’ and we carefully ignore that the only thing it does is distract us from honoring Him and loving our neighbors. Fear mixes with a desire to rule, and we neglect dominion. Dominion ought to be our true goal: to bring forth fruit from His creation for His glory, in His name, in reliance on Him (Gen. 1:28), who fulfils his promises.
The Lord is my strong tower, even when I shut my eyes to Him, and by His grace I will turn to that tower in every moment. As the song says, “Though troubles assail us and dangers affright…, the promise assures us, ‘The Lord will provide.’”4
God bless
Written by Colson Potter
1 – The Wanderer. Trans. R. Liuzza. <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159113/the-wanderer-636eba2a8c60b>.
2 – Yeats, W.B. The Second Coming. <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming>. See also: <https://truthscript.com/church/the-worlds-center-cannot-hold/>
3 – Beowulf. Trans. Seamus Heaney. Sections quoted are from lines 1700-1800.
4 – Newton, John. Though Troubles Assail Us. <https://hymnary.org/text/though_troubles_assail_and_dangers_affri>.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
