Refuge For The Righteous

Most of us live with the nagging sense that we are behind.

We are behind on our work, behind on our rest, and—most significantly—behind on our souls.

We imagine God as a disappointed coach standing at the finish line, looking at His watch, wondering why we’re still struggling somewhere back at the three-mile mark.

Because we are frantic, we assume He is frantic.

Because we are reacting to every crisis, we assume He is in a state of constant emergency management.

We think that if we could just find a moment of silence—if we could just get our lives "ordered" enough—we might finally catch up to Him.

The Psalms speak about the throne of God in a very different way than we usually imagine.

Psalm 9 says,

“The LORD shall endure forever;

He has prepared His throne for judgment…

The LORD also will be a refuge for the oppressed,

A refuge in times of trouble.”

Notice the order.

The throne is established first.

And because it is established, it becomes a refuge.

The righteous do not run from the throne.

They run to it.

The vision of heaven tells a different story.

When the curtain is pulled back, we don't find a God who is pacing. We don't find a God who is scrambling to fix what we’ve broken, or a God who is stressed about the future.

We find a God who is seated.

There is a profound, almost offensive stillness at the center of the universe. In a world where everything is moving, God is at rest. In a world where everyone is trying to prove their worth, God is simply, radiantly there.

This means that your spiritual life is not a race to catch up to a moving target.

If God is seated, it means He isn't going anywhere. He isn't "ahead" of you in time, waiting for you to become a better version of yourself. He is the fixed point. He is the shore that doesn't move, no matter how hard the tide pulls at your feet.

You don't need to find more "time" to get into His presence. You can’t "get into" something that already surrounds you. You don't bring the light into a room by working for it; you just open the blinds.

The "rest" we are looking for isn't something we manufacture by being more disciplined. It’s something we fall into when we finally realize that the One who holds the world isn't tired.

If you are exhausted tonight, don't try to run toward Him. You’ll only tire yourself out more.

Just stop.

Recognize that while you are spinning, He is steady. While you are worried, He is certain. He is not waiting for you to arrive; He is the ground you are already standing on.

The throne is occupied. The King is at rest. And because He is not pacing, you don't have to either.

---000--- The Sea of Glass — Ending the Scramble

We are a generation of scramblers.

We scramble to keep our jobs. We scramble to keep our kids on the right track. We scramble to protect our reputations and manage our futures. We live in a state of high-alert, convinced that if we let our focus slip for even a moment, the "sea" of our lives will rise up and swallow us whole.

In the ancient world, the sea was the ultimate symbol of chaos. It was deep, dark, and unpredictable. It was the place where things were lost. For most of us, that is exactly how life feels—unstable and threatening.

So we spend our energy trying to build walls. We try to "master" the water. We think that if we work hard enough, we can finally make the waves stop.

In the vision of heaven, something impossible has happened to the sea.

John says it has become a "sea of glass, clear as crystal."

This isn't just a poetic detail. It’s a statement about authority. Glass is what happens when you take the wild, shifting elements of the earth and subject them to intense heat until they are fixed, transparent, and still.

The sea in heaven isn't gone; it has just lost its power to be chaotic. It has been stilled. It is so subdued that the King can literally walk on it, and the elders can sit beside it without fear.

The great irony of our exhaustion is that we are trying to still the sea ourselves. We think our "scrambling" is what keeps the chaos at bay.

It’s the other way around.

The chaos is stilled because the Throne is occupied. The waves don't obey your effort; they obey His presence.

When you realize this, the "scramble" loses its meaning. You can stop trying to manage the outcomes of your life as if you are the one holding back the tide. You aren't. You never were.