Be Still and Know That I Am God

Psalm 46 gives us one of the most quoted lines in all of Scripture, and we usually reach for it when life is loud and we need a little calm. But there is more in it than comfort.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

Psalm 46:10 (KJV)

The stillness God calls for is not only about quieting your nerves. It is about silencing the lies — arresting everything in you and around you that stands in the way of truly knowing who God is. Because knowing God accurately is not a luxury. Your life depends on it.

Eternal life is knowing Him

We all know the promise: God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. The antidote to perishing is eternal life. But we often mistake eternal life for eternity in heaven, and the two are not the same. That is like confusing the seeds inside an orange with the orange itself. Eternity in heaven is contained inside eternal life; it is not the whole of it.

Jesus Himself defined the term, and we should let His definition stand.

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

John 17:3 (KJV)

Eternal life is to know God — the only true God — and Jesus whom He sent. Which means if you do not know God, or if you carry an inaccurate picture of Him, you do not yet have eternal life in its fullness, and something in you is quietly perishing. This is exactly what the prophet warned.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

Hosea 4:6 (KJV)

Not lack of effort. Lack of knowledge — the proper, accurate knowledge of who God actually is.

You become what you worship

Here is why a wrong picture of God is so dangerous: you become like what you worship. What people revere, they come to resemble.

What people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or for restoration.

Gregory Beale

The Scriptures say the same thing plainly about idols.

The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, but they hear not… They that make them are like unto them: so is every one that trusteth in them.

Psalm 135:15–18 (KJV)

If you worship a false god, or even a false image of the true God, you will be conformed to the wrong version of who you were meant to be. That is what it means to perish — not first to end up in some far-off place, but to become a distorted, counterfeit version of your true self here and now. And this is exactly what Jesus came to save you from.

It is also why the enemy works overtime to hand you a caricature of God. His number one strategy is not to stop you from worshiping — it is to get you to worship a wrong image of God. He is content to let you worship, as long as the God you picture is not the real one, because he knows you will become like what you worship. So we have to be still. We have to arrest every lie. Think of it as saying to those distortions, “Be still. Be silent. I bind you.”

The first enemy: false teaching about God

There are three enemies to a true knowledge of God, and the first is false teaching about who He is toward you. So hear the truth. God is your Father. God is your rescuer, not your punisher. When you stand on trial, He is not the judge against you; He is your advocate, on your side. He is better than the best father and better than the best mother.

We carry this idea that God has two sides — a good side and a dark, vengeful side that comes out when He is angry. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus came and showed us a God who was consistently good to people no matter how badly they had lived. The ones who received His harshest words were not the sinners but the religious, who assumed God owed them goodness because of how good they were.

So settle this: the goodness of God toward you is not measured out in proportion to your own goodness. The Lord is good to all, because the Lord has no bad in Him. Religion teaches the opposite, and it leaves us like a frightened child hiding in the closet from her own mother, certain that the love coming through the door is a monster come to harm her. Arrest that view. Command it to be still.

The second enemy: father wounds

The second enemy is more personal: father wounds. The first person meant to model who God is to you was your earthly father. Jesus almost never called God simply “God” — He called Him “Father,” His most common name for Him. So the picture of God as Father that you carry has been quietly shaped by the father you actually had.

Many of us believe God is harsh because our father was harsh. We assume He is aloof and uninvolved because our father was distant. We feel He is absent because ours was not around. We are sure nothing we do satisfies Him because we grew up under a father nothing ever satisfied. Some of us cannot bear intimacy with God at all because of how we were treated by the very men who should have shown us His heart. Instead of introducing us to the Father, those wounds became a wall.

But those wounds can be healed, and today is a good day to begin. This is not a formula; it is an honest conversation with God. You might quietly pray your way through something like this:

• Father, are there lies I believe about You because of my earthly father? Say them out loud.
• Show me what I need to forgive my father for — then, softly, forgive him for each thing You bring to mind.
• I renounce the lie that You would treat me the way I feared — that You would abandon me, be harsh with me, or expect more than I could give.
• If those things are lies, Father, then what is the truth about You? Show me how You feel about me.

As you pray honestly like that, the lies get exposed, the old agreements break, and the love of the Father is poured into places that have been guarded for years. He wants to be known by you as He truly is, not as your fears have painted Him.

This is not a side matter. Paul told the Ephesians that the way we are filled with all the fullness of God is by coming to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. In other words, the road to being transformed into a godly person runs straight through being filled with the love of God. You cannot become like a Father you are still afraid of. But when His love reaches the wounded places, the fear loses its grip, and you begin to resemble the God you now trust.

The third enemy: disappointment with God

The third enemy is our disappointment with God. We prayed. We trusted Him for something specific. It did not happen, and quietly we took offense. We did not stop being Christians, but we stopped being intimate. We lost the desire to pursue Him.

But the only way to know God is through intimacy, and intimacy cannot survive an unspoken offense. So when disappointment rises, you have to press through it rather than around it. Name it, bring it to Him, and say to it, “Be still. I have to know my God.” Do not let a wound you never talked to Him about become the reason you stop drawing near.

Be still, and know

This is what the psalmist meant. Be still — silence the false teaching, the father wounds, the old disappointments. Arrest every lie that has kept you from seeing God as He is. And in that stillness, know Him: not know about Him, but know Him, the only true God, better than the best father, always and only good toward you.

Ask Him today to show you where your picture of Him has gone wrong. Then let Him replace it with the truth. Because you will become like the God you worship — so more than anything else, come to know the real One.