Psalm 93 runs to five verses and almost nobody preaches from it. It holds a tension most of our worship songs cannot.
It does not pretend the waters are calm. "The seas have lifted up, LORD, the seas have lifted up their voice; the seas have lifted up their pounding waves" (Psalm 93:3). Three times in one verse. The waters are loud. The waters are loud. The waters are loud. The psalmist is not denying the storm. He is naming it, with an insistence the storm itself seems to demand.
If you live with anxiety, you know that verse from the inside. The roaring is a near-perfect description of what an anxious mind sounds like at 3 a.m. If you live with depression, the heavy waves are not a metaphor but the actual weather of your interior. If you live with bipolar or PTSD or intrusive thoughts, with any condition that makes your inner world unreliable, the roaring is what you have been hearing.
The psalm is on your side. It does not require you to pretend the water is quiet.
The psalm opens like this. "The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed in majesty and armed with strength; indeed, the world is established, firm and secure. Your throne was established long ago; you are from all eternity" (Psalm 93:1-2).
The waters are loud. The throne is older.
Both are true in the same psalm, and the psalmist never resolves them. He does not say that because God reigns, the waters are not really roaring. He does not say that because the waters are roaring, God does not really reign. He says both in the same breath and lets the contradiction stand.
The church has not always known how to make that move for the mentally ill. We have taught, in too many places, that faith requires the silencing of the waters. That if the storm is still roaring in your head, your faith must not be deep enough. That the believer who has truly grasped the sovereignty of God will, in some measurable way, stop hearing it.
The psalmist did not believe that. He could hear the storm and see the throne at once. Faith, in his telling, was not the absence of the roaring. It was noticing that underneath the roaring, the throne had not moved.
Their feelings are not reliable narrators.
In certain seasons, perception lies. The internal weather tells a person they are alone and abandoned and beyond reach, and the internal weather is wrong. The internal weather is the roaring. The throne, which they cannot feel, is the bedrock the psalm points to.
"Your statutes, LORD, stand firm; holiness adorns your house for endless days" (Psalm 93:5). The psalm ends with the throne still standing rather than the storm calming. The waters keep roaring on the page, and on the same page the Lord keeps reigning.
If you are in the flood right now, the psalm does not offer you a way to silence the water. It offers you something to remember underneath it.
The mind lying to you today is not the final reality. The tightness in your chest is not the final reality. The depression whispering that nothing will ever be different is not the final reality. The throne is. You may not feel it, and the psalm does not ask you to. It asks only that you let the throne's existence be the thing your weight rests on while the rest of you rides out the storm.
You do not have to calm the waters to be faithful. You only have to remember whose throne stands above them.
The waters may still be loud tomorrow, and for many tomorrows. The throne, older than every flood that has ever risen, will be exactly where it has always been.
