I do not need to tell you it has been a heavy year.
You have been reading the news the same way I have. The strait closed. Tankers stranded. Twenty-two thousand mariners trapped on ships they cannot leave. A ceasefire that holds for a few days and then does not. The price of oil moving with every headline, and the price of food moving with the price of oil, and the small mathematics of your household budget being redone again at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night.
You are not imagining it. The world is, in a real and measurable sense, less stable than it was. Inflation is not in your head. The war is not in your head. The quiet dread you feel when you open the news app and brace yourself before the headlines load — that is not weakness. That is your body keeping accurate score of the times you are living in.
Yet this uncertainty is the world the Bible was written for.
We have to sit with that for a moment, because most of us, if we are honest, have been quietly working with a different assumption. We have been working with the assumption that stability is the baseline and instability is the disruption. That ordinary life is the long stretch of peace, and war and famine and inflation and uncertain futures are the interruption. That the news app is bringing us bad days inside an otherwise good era.
That is not the historical witness. That is not the biblical witness. The era of cheap oil and uncontested borders and predictable supply chains, in which most Western Christians have done most of their formation, was the interruption. It was the unusual stretch, not the normal one. And what we are watching now is not the world breaking. It is the world returning to the conditions in which the church has lived for most of its two thousand years, and inside which most of the Bible was written.
Which means the Scriptures are not, in this season, a comfort offered from a safe place to those of us in trouble. The Scriptures are letters written from the same trouble, by people on the same ground, who learned something in it that we are now being given the chance to learn too.
It is one of the psalms many of us reach for in seasons like this. God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble (Psalm 46:1). What we tend to skip is the next sentence. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging (Psalm 46:2–3). The psalmist is not describing weather. He is describing the picture, in his cosmology, of the entire created order coming apart. The mountains, which were the picture of solidity, falling into the sea, which was the picture of chaos. He is naming, in the most extreme imagery available to him, the unsettling of everything stable.
And his answer is not therefore the earth will not give way. His answer is therefore we will not fear, even if it does. The psalm is not a promise that the world will hold. The psalm is a promise that the God who is our refuge will hold, even if the world does not. These are very different promises. The first one we wanted. The second one is the one we have been given.
Habakkuk goes further. He stands at the end of his small book and says, Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls — yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation (Habakkuk 3:17–18). The economy of his world has collapsed. The vineyard, the orchard, the field, the flock — every source of his livelihood named and itemised and crossed out. And in the empty space where his security used to be, he discovers that joy in God is not a function of the harvest. It was never the harvest. It was the God who, harvest or no harvest, was still his.
This is the territory the church has been on, again and again, through plague and persecution and economic ruin and the rise and fall of empires. It is not, in any biblical sense, abnormal. The abnormal thing was the half-century in which the Western church mistook a particular geopolitical arrangement for the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God was always something else. It was always a kingdom whose stability was located, irreducibly, in a person rather than a polity.
That person, on the night before he was killed by a state, said something we are perhaps now able to hear in a way we previously could not.
In this world you will have trouble. But take heart. I have overcome the world (John 16:33).
He did not say the trouble would not come. He did not say his followers would be insulated from the chaos of their moment. He said two things, in the same breath, and we have to hold them both. The trouble is real. And it does not, in any final sense, have the last word.
The overcoming he was talking about was not the overcoming of empires by other empires. He was about to be killed by an empire. The overcoming he was talking about was deeper. It was the overcoming of death itself, of the power that the unstable world holds over the human heart, of the fear that says if the conditions go, I go with them. He was about to demonstrate, in his own body, that there is something in the universe that goes through the worst the unstable world can do and comes out on the other side, alive, with the wounds still visible, and offers his hands to be touched.
That is the only refuge that has ever finally held.
It is the refuge the Christians of Smyrna had when their city burned. It is the refuge the desert mothers had when Rome fell. It is the refuge the believers had in occupied Holland and in Soviet prison camps and in famine-stricken villages where the harvest did not come. It is the refuge available to you, in the small flat where you read the news this morning, with the price of bread doing what it is doing and the headlines doing what they are doing.
The strait may close again. The ceasefire may not hold. The inflation may not ease. I cannot promise you that the world is about to settle.
I can promise you what the saints have always been promised. That the Lord who walked through his own unstable hour, and came out the other side bearing the marks, is here. Not after the conditions improve. Now. In the conditions you actually have.
The mountains may fall into the sea.
He will not.
