He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress;
My God; in Him will I trust.
For He will deliver thee from the snare of the fowler,
And from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover thee with His pinions,
And under His wings shalt thou take refuge:
His truth is a shield and a buckler.
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night,
Nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
For the pestilence that walketh in darkness,
Nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
A thousand may fall at thy side,
And ten thousand at thy right hand;
But it shall not come nigh thee.
Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold,
And see the reward of the wicked.
Because thou hast made the Lord, who is my refuge,
Even the Most High, thy dwelling-place;
There shall no evil befall thee,
Neither shall any plague come nigh thy tent.
For He will give His angels charge over thee,
To keep thee in all thy ways.
They shall bear thee up in their hands,
Lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.
Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder:
The young lion and the serpent shalt thou trample under foot.
Because he hath set his love upon Me, therefore will I deliver him:
I will set him on high, because he hath known My name.
He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble:
I will deliver him, and honour him.
With long life will I satisfy him,
And show him My salvation.—Psalm 91:1-16
Let us have a word of prayer.
Dear Lord, we want to thank Thee again for Thy everlasting love. Truly, Thou hast loved us to the very end—to the uttermost. What we are, even now, is all because of Thy love.
Lord, how grateful we are that Thou hast offered us Thy Word to comfort us, to encourage us, and to beckon us to follow Thee. So, Lord, we pray that Thou wilt breathe upon Thy Word this morning and make Thy Word living and working in each of our lives.
Create within us a trust, a confidence, unto Thyself, O Lord. As Thou hast promised, Thou wilt keep us until that day when we shall see Thy face. And it is all for the praise of Thy glory. We ask in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
Probably you will wonder why I read Psalm 91. As a matter of fact, that first verse in Psalm 91 has been my prayer almost daily these months:
He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
How we need that prayer.
We know that Psalm 90 was written by Moses because, in that psalm, you have an inscription, a heading: “A Prayer of Moses, the man of God.” But in Psalm 91 there is no inscription; there is no heading.
According to the usage, if you have an inscription in one psalm but in the next psalm there is no heading, usually the writer is the same person. Not only that, but when you read Psalm 90 and Psalm 91, you can see there is such a similarity. The spirit is the same. It is very clear that it is the spirit of Moses in both psalms.
The contents are actually the same. They are describing almost the same thing: what happened to the children of Israel when they passed through their terrible and great wilderness, even though the results were very different.
Even the format—the way these two psalms are written—is exactly the same psalm form. You have a proclamation at the very beginning, a response to the proclamation, a description of the dangers of the wilderness and of what happened in the wilderness, and then you find a prayer.
How can you pass through that terrible wilderness?
Now, you know the children of Israel. They were slaves in Egypt. Not only slaves, but they were destined to die. That race was to be entirely wiped out, because Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, ordered that every male baby must be drowned in the River Nile. The race of Israel was to be completely annihilated.
They were in such a desperate position. But thank God, in His mercy and because of His faithfulness, He sent Moses to Egypt to deliver His people out of slavery.
But it was not only a matter of delivering them out of Egypt and out of slavery. It was more a matter of leading them into the promised land, the land that flows with milk and honey.
Now, that is always the way of God. He never does anything halfway. He never does anything merely negative. His will is always positive. So His purpose in delivering the children of Israel was to deliver them out of Egypt, but into Canaan, the promised land. That is God’s purpose.
But God has a way that is closely related to His purpose. He has a way to accomplish that purpose. He led the children of Israel out of Egypt, not by the usual route by which people travelled from Egypt to Canaan—the way of the Philistines.
The Philistines were originally from Egypt, from Africa, but they migrated to Canaan by the way of the land. When God’s children were delivered out of Egypt, however, He did not lead them in the ordinary way by land. On the contrary, He led them to the Red Sea.
Why? Because God knew His people. God said, “If I lead them by the way of the Philistines, by land, they will meet war and enemies. When they meet their enemies, they will want to go back to Egypt, because it is possible for them to return.”
So, in order that there would be no return, God led them to the Red Sea, to the side of the Red Sea. The Egyptians thought that they had lost their way.
You remember how Pharaoh and his chariots rushed toward them, thinking they would be completely destroyed because there was no way of escape. But thank God, God opened up the Red Sea and let the children of God pass through on dry ground.
But when Pharaoh and his chariots followed them, the water came back, and they were all sunk to the bottom of the sea. That is God’s way of deliverance.
After the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea, they were not in the promised land yet. According to the way people travelled at that time, it would have taken them about two years. But unfortunately, we find that the children of Israel spent forty years wandering in the wilderness.
After they wandered for forty years, by the mercy of God, finally they arrived on the east side of the Jordan, in the land of Moab. It was at that time that Moses wrote Psalm 90, and we believe also Psalm 91.
So, actually, if you want to understand Psalm 91, you need to know Psalm 90. You have to know both psalms. Psalm 90 and Psalm 91 are the reflections of Moses when he was about one hundred and twenty years old.
He was with the children of Israel at the border of the promised land. Before they went in, Moses reflected; he looked back upon the forty years’ experience in the wilderness. Out of that spirit, he wrote these two psalms.
Now you will say, “Why two psalms? Why not just one?” The reason is the wilderness. The children of Israel passed through the wilderness in the same way, but when they passed through it, you discover that the whole generation of the children of Israel passed away in the wilderness. In other words, the wilderness swallowed them. They all died in the wilderness.
But thank God, two in that generation were able to pass through and enter into the promised land. Who were they? If you know the Bible, you know they were Joshua and Caleb.
So actually, Psalm 90 speaks of that generation of the children of Israel who died in the wilderness, and Psalm 91 speaks of Joshua and Caleb, who overcame the wilderness and entered into the promised land. That is roughly what these two psalms are about.
The Bible tells us that the wilderness through which the children of Israel crossed was a great and terrible wilderness. There was no road. You could not plant anything. There was no food and no water. There were serpents and scorpions, heat, darkness, and cold—no shelter and no protection.
Sometimes they had enemies, like Amalek, who came to attack them in the wilderness. In the wilderness there were plagues, pestilence, and all kinds of dangers that you can think of.
And yet God let them go through that wilderness. During those forty years, God supplied their every need.
They had no food; they cried for food, and God gave them manna—angel’s food from heaven. They even wanted meat, and God sent quail to them to supply them with meat.
They had no water. They murmured, and out of the rock water flowed. The river followed them all the way through the wilderness.
There was no road, but God Himself—the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire—led the way for them.
After forty years in the wilderness, their feet did not swell, and their clothes did not wear out. You know the wilderness. You find how faithful God was. God protected them. God supplied their every need. God did everything for them.
How lovingly, how gently, God dealt with them. There was no problem with God. But we find big trouble with the people, because they did not believe.
Even after crossing the Red Sea, you would say their faith must have reached heaven and would never come down. Yet whenever they met a little trouble, they murmured, they rebelled, and they wondered whether God was with them. “Where was God? Why did He not come?”
They were just like babies. When a baby is hungry, he will cry, no matter whether it is morning, evening, or midnight. If he is hungry, you have to feed him immediately. He will not wait for you. That was the situation of the children of Israel in the wilderness.
To enter into the promised land, you need some growth, some maturity. It is not a place for babies. The inheritance is for sons, not for babes. So God, in a way, used the wilderness to test them.
You find that in Deuteronomy 8. It tells us why God led them through the wilderness: because God knew them, but they did not know themselves. They were saved out of Egypt. They crossed the Red Sea. They thought there was nothing they could not do. They forgot that it was God who did it, not themselves.
They still lived in their old flesh. They believed in themselves more than in God. So God used the wilderness to test them, to bring out what was in their heart—not that God did not know what was in their heart, but God wanted them to know what was in their heart.
Even when God was testing them, God was patient. God still supplied their needs. God still took care of them.
But even so, after two years they arrived at the southern border of the promised land, at Kadesh-barnea. They were supposed to go into the promised land. But everything stopped. Why? Because they did not believe in God.
They sent spies to spy out the land. The spies came back after forty days, bringing abundant fruit from the land to show how abundant it was. It was surely a land flowing with milk and honey.
Yet they said, “We find that the cities are walled up to heaven”—an exaggeration. “The people are Anakim. These people are giants. They look at us as grasshoppers. We cannot go there; we will be eaten up.”
They would not believe in God and enter into the promise. Because of that, after they had tempted God ten times, God said, “It is enough. This generation has to die.” So they wandered in the wilderness forty years, until that whole generation died.
Only Joshua and Caleb had a different spirit. They believed in God. They said, “True, we met giants there. The cities were high and strong. But God is with us. We are able to go up. They will be our food. Do not fear them.”
But the people did not believe. They wanted to stone them. Yet God preserved those two, and they entered into Canaan. That is the background of these two psalms.
Now, we do remember that all that is written in the Bible, in the Old Testament, is for our admonition. In other words, these are not merely histories to read about. Behind the history, there is a spiritual lesson that God wants us to learn.
Brothers and sisters, I believe we all know that the children of Israel were God’s earthly people. Everything that happened to them was physical. Even God’s promises to them were physical, and God’s blessings to them were physical.
If you kept the commandments, if you feared God, then you would have many sons and many daughters. But if you disobeyed God, you might have no child. But this is not true in the New Testament.
In the New Testament, we are all God’s heavenly people, and all God’s blessings are spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ. The same principle applies, but the application is different.
Now, I do not say that if you have many children, you are not blessed by God. What I am saying is that whether you have many children or no children, we are all blessed by God. God knows.
But anyway, you will find that the history of the children of Israel gives us a glimpse into the spiritual history of the spiritual people of God. We who are saved by the grace of God are God’s spiritual children.
When we were born into this earth, we were like the children of Israel at that time. We were born with a sentence of death over us.
With the children of Israel, the male babies had to be thrown into the River Nile and drowned. But with us, everyone who is born into this world is destined to eternal death. No one is an exception. In Adam all die—no exception.
As a matter of fact, the moment you are born, you are travelling toward death—not only physical death, but eternal death, hell—because we were all born sinners.
But thank God, He loves us. He sent His only begotten Son, our Lord Jesus, into this world to be a man just like we are, yet without sin. He who has no sin is qualified to be our substitute.
Remember, when our Lord Jesus was crucified on the cross, He was not crucified for Himself. There was no reason for Him to be crucified or to die. But He was there representing all mankind. He took all mankind in Himself and died.
That is the Passover Lamb that was killed. But not only did He die for us to save us from eternal death; actually, He also took us out of the world as a system.
Because, you remember, in Colossians 1 we are told:
Who delivered us out of the power of darkness,
And translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.
So, brothers and sisters, we who have believed in the Lord Jesus—not only are our sins forgiven, and eternal death has passed over us, so that we shall never die—but we have also been delivered out of this world. We came out.
This is typified by baptism. Crossing the Red Sea is baptism. The children of Israel, crossing the Red Sea, were baptized unto Moses. But we who are baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, unto the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are baptized into Christ.
In other words, the world is behind us. We belong to Christ, and we are now travelling toward our eternal home, the New Jerusalem. That is our salvation.
But the way of God is always higher than our way. You know, sometimes I have thought, “The moment I was saved, why did He not rapture me to heaven? How good that would be!”
I would not need to live even one day on earth. I would not need to face any temptation, all the trials, the suffering, and the things that go on in the world that affect me. Sometimes I slip and fall again and again, and I repent again and again.
Why did God do it this way? If He loved me, why did He not take me immediately after He saved me? Then there would be no problem. Have you ever thought of that?
Oh, God’s ways are always higher. His thoughts are higher than ours. He does not want to fill the heavens with babies. Only grown-ups have the privilege of inheritance. Inheritance is for sons and daughters, not for babies.
So, you know, the way of the Lord with us is the same as His way with the children of Israel. He saved us out of the world, but He leaves us in the world. We have to live in the world.
But remember: we are not permanent residents. We are strangers. We are sojourners. We are travellers. We are just passing through.
The world is behind us. So far as the world is concerned, I am crucified with Christ; and so far as I am concerned, the world is crucified. That is what Paul says.
We are in the world, and yet not of it. We have to pass through it, not as permanent residents and not as citizens of earth, but because our citizenship is in heaven. We are crossing over.
So the world to us today is a wilderness. Too many young people may think the world is paradise—it is Hollywood. Ah, brothers and sisters, the world is a great and terrible wilderness.
The children of Israel crossed the wilderness, and we find even in Psalm 90 and Psalm 91 how terrible it was. In the wilderness, you have the snare of the fowler. You have destructive pestilence. You have terror by night and the arrow that flies by day.
You have pestilence that walketh in darkness, destruction that wasteth at noonday, the lion, the adder, and the dragon—all these dangers and problems. There is nothing there to support your fleshly, natural man.
You know, sometimes I think: what is the snare of the fowler? If you want to catch a bird, what do you do? You make a trap. You put food in the trap to attract the bird. When the bird gets in and pulls the spring, the trap is shut.
We often say—this is a Chinese proverb—“A bird dies because it is greedy for food; a man dies because he is greedy for money.” That is a Chinese proverb.
You know, the world is full of temptation. Is that not true? Temptation is like this: it is full of attraction.
The Bible says, “What is the world?” The world is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. That is the bait.
In the world, you find so many beautiful things, so many attractive things. “I must have it.” It stirs up your fleshly desire. It seems able to satisfy your life. It catches your eyes; you cannot forget it. It boosts your ego. “If I had it, I would be somebody.”
Do you know who is behind the snare? Satan is behind the snare. If you are enticed by it, you are caught. That is what the world is.
Forgive me for saying that. Because I am older than you are, I have passed through so much. So, in a way, I understand a little.
And then there is destructive pestilence that comes in by night and destroys by day. Now, what is that? I think that, for Christians, it is false teaching.
You remember that the apostles, toward the end, in their epistles, all warned us that in the last days there would be false teachings, false teachers, false prophets, false apostles—everything false.
But they are so tricky that they can deceive people. If you tell a lie and it is one hundred percent lie, nobody would believe it. But if you make a lie fifty-fifty, people can believe it. That is false teaching.
We are now living at a time when false teachings are sweeping over the Christian world. If you have itching ears, it sounds smooth. But if you really want to hear God, go back to the Word of God.
How dangerous these false teachings are. They sound good. They seem to work. But where will they lead you? If they lead you away from Christ, they are false teaching. If they lead you back to Christ, thank God for the truth.
So, brothers and sisters, this is only an illustration. We are today living in this world, and it is a world full of danger everywhere. If you are careless, if you are not watchful, you will easily be swallowed by it.
If you live for yourself, you will be caught in the snare. If you take your eyes away from the Lord, you will pass out. You are out of Egypt, but you are not yet in Canaan.
What does it mean to us today? Brothers and sisters, thank God, out of the miry clay He has lifted us and put us upon the solid rock. Thank God, we are saved. He has not only saved us from our sins; He has saved us from the world. We belong to Him.
Thank God, He is putting us on the course, and that course leads to the New Jerusalem, to the dwelling of God. But we are faced with so many things every day, every hour. It happens by day; it happens at night.
Now, how are you going to cross that wilderness and reach that goal? That is what Psalm 91 is about.
In the first verse, He tells us:
He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
Oh, I just love that verse. We need to abide under the shadow of the Almighty. Is that not true? How are we going to pass through this world? We need to be sheltered under the Almighty.
If you are under His shadow, He is protecting you. Then you will go through. If you are left to yourself, you will fall down. If you try to live your Christian life by yourself, you will fail.
But if you live your Christian life under the shadow of the Almighty, no matter how dangerous it is around you, you are safe.
You know, the word Almighty occurs in the Bible for the first time in Genesis 17:1, when Abraham was ninety-nine years old. God revealed Himself to him and spoke to him.
And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am God Almighty; walk before Me, and be thou perfect.
—Genesis 17:1
How can you be perfect? How can you be mature? Walk before the Lord, before Him who is the Almighty God.
The word Almighty in Hebrew is Shaddai. It means all-possessing, abundant, and all-sufficient. In other words, God is the One who is all-sufficient, able to supply your every need.
It is like a mother’s breast. That is the background of the word. The mother’s breast is almighty to the baby. Everything that the baby needs comes from that breast. It is as if you are lying at the breast of God. That is the meaning of Almighty.
So, if you are under the shadow of the Almighty, shadow means a shelter, a covering.
You know our Lord Jesus, the last time He came to Jerusalem, looked at Jerusalem and cried:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto her!
How often would I have gathered thy children together,
Even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings,
And ye would not!—Matthew 23:37
Brothers and sisters, that is the heart of God. He is like a mother hen. When she sees danger, she calls those little chickens, “Come under my wings, and you will be protected. You will be safe.”
Sometimes a little chick is so stubborn, believing in itself. Here comes a hawk, and it comes down and gets it. Oh, we need to be under the shadow of the Almighty.
Do you need to be covered by the Almighty God in your daily life? Can you, for a moment, live without Him and live on your own? I think it is evident.
The reason why Caleb and Joshua were able to cross over the terrible wilderness and enter into the promise was not because they were better than anybody else. In themselves, they were just the same.
But they had one difference: they believed in God. They put their trust in God, not depending upon themselves.
Brothers and sisters, we who are all saved by the grace of God—no one is better than another. So far as we ourselves are concerned, we are just as rotten as everybody else, just as weak as everybody else. There is no difference.
The life is the same: the life of Christ. Now why do some Christians become overcomers? They overcome the world and enter into the kingdom when Christ returns, while others fall in the wilderness, as it were?
It is not that they are not saved. They do not lose eternal life. But they cannot rule and reign with Christ during that thousand years. That is the issue.
So the problem is: how can I dwell? How can I abide under the shadow of the Almighty? I want to be under His shadow. How can I do it? How do I enter into the shelter?
The Bible says:
He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
In other words, there is something for which we are responsible. With God, everything is ready. Everything is open. He is like a mother hen stretching out her wings and saying, “Here, come in.” There is no problem with God. The problem is with us.
Are you willing to run into that shadow and abide there?
The secret place—“He that dwelleth in the secret place”—means that you need to dwell in the secret place of the Most High. If that is where you live, you are under the shadow automatically.
Now, the first time the title of God as the Most High occurs is in Genesis 14. You remember when Abraham fought against the four kings and delivered Lot and his family.
When he came back, Melchizedek, the priest of God Most High, met him and gave him bread and wine. He said, in effect, “This is God’s doing. Do you think that it is your doing?” And Abraham recognized the Most High.
Melchizedek is the priest of the Most High God. The word Most High in the original Hebrew means the supreme One, the highest One.
Our Lord Jesus—God has given Him a name above all names. After He accomplished the work, God highly exalted Him, high above all, to be the Head of all things, especially the Head of His Body, the church.
What is the secret place? In the Old Testament, there is an illustration. You remember the tabernacle. In the tabernacle there are three sections.
The first section is the court, the outer court. Everybody can come to the outer court because the altar was there. Then there is the holy place. Only the priests can go in and minister to God.
Then, behind a veil—a heavy veil—there is the holiest of all. In the holiest of all there is only the ark with the mercy seat above it. That is where God dwells, and God speaks to His people between the wings of the cherubim.
That is the secret place of the Most High in representation. Only the high priest, once a year on the Day of Atonement, with blood and incense, could enter behind the veil and offer atonement for the children of Israel for that year.
In other words, in that representation, the way to the holiest of all had not yet been opened. Nobody could go in. Who can dwell with God?
God is light. He lives in unapproachable light. If you try to approach Him, you will be immediately struck to death. He is so righteous. Who can appear before Him? Nobody can.
When Moses said to the Lord, “Show me Thy glory,” God said, “Nobody can see My face and live. You can see My back, but not My face.”
Now, who can dwell in the secret place? There is a heavy veil there. But do you remember when our Lord Jesus was crucified on the cross outside the gate of Jerusalem? Before He died, He shouted, “It is finished.”
When He shouted that, the heavy veil in the temple in Jerusalem was rent from top to bottom. The way into the holiest was opened.
Brothers and sisters, thank God. We today not only can enter into the secret place of the Most High, but we can even dwell there and make it our permanent residence. What a privilege! What a blessing!
That is good. But very few Christians seem able to appreciate and dwell in the secret place of the Most High.
In John 15, our Lord Jesus said:
Abide in Me, and I in you.
As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine;
So neither can ye, except ye abide in Me.
…Apart from Me ye can do nothing.—John 15:4-5
The Lord also said, “I do not call you servants; I call you friends, because what I have heard I have told you.” Our Lord is telling His secrets to us. He is telling all that is in His heart to us.
Have you heard? Do you understand? Or is it because you are so far away that you cannot hear? If you dwell in the secret place of the Most High, you know God’s secrets.
So what we need is very simple. We need to dwell in the secret place of the Most High—every day, every hour. Learn to go there. Do not depart.
You know Joshua. When the children of Israel worshipped the golden calf, Moses came down and smashed the two tables of the Ten Commandments.
Then, you remember what the Bible says: Moses moved the tent out of the camp and put it outside. It became the tent of meeting. Whenever he wanted to meet God, he went out of the camp to that tent, and God came down.
But Joshua—the Bible says—remained. He dwelt in the secret place. That is why he was able to cross over the terrible wilderness and possess his inheritance.
Yes, brothers and sisters, this way is open to all. Our Lord Jesus has opened a new and living way through His body, His flesh. When His flesh was broken on the cross, the veil was rent.
So today, where is our home? Where is our rest? Christ. He is our secret place.
May we all live in the secret place of the Most High. Then we will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. There is no danger, nothing, that can keep us from entering into the fullness, the riches, and all that is in Christ.
So the Lord has put upon my heart to pray this prayer:
Dear Lord, You know how weak we are. But You are the Almighty. You are able to lead us through.
If You will, bring us into the fullness of the riches of Christ, even to have a share with Christ in the coming kingdom.
Lord, grant that we may be willing to let go and rush into the secret place of the Most High, and there dwell.
And this is not for our sake; it is for Thy glory. We ask in the name of our Lord Jesus.