It Is Well With My Soul

Margin Notes - a brief word from One Passage at a Time

There is a peace that makes no sense.

Not the peace that comes when the storm passes and the water settles and life finds its footing again. That peace makes perfect sense. We understand that peace. We wait for it, work toward it, pray for it, and when it comes we receive it with gratitude and move on. That is the peace of resolved circumstances. It is real, and it is good, but it is not the peace the Bible is most interested in.

The peace the Bible is most interested in is the other kind. Paul describes it in Philippians 4 as a peace that surpasses all understanding, a peace that stands guard over the heart and mind in Christ Jesus regardless of what the circumstances are doing. Not after the storm. Not instead of the storm. In it. Through it. On the worst water you have ever crossed.

Horatio Spafford knew that water. In November of 1873 he lost all four of his daughters when the steamship Ville du Havre sank in the North Atlantic. His wife survived. As he later crossed the ocean to join her, he wrote words the church has been singing ever since.

When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.

Whatever my lot. That is the line. Not when things are good. Not when the grief has lifted and the wounds have closed and life has found its way back to something resembling normal. Whatever my lot. Spafford was not writing from the far side of his suffering. He was writing from inside it, and he was testifying to something that his circumstances had no power to produce and no power to take away.

That is the peace of God. Not the peace of resolved circumstances but the peace of an unshakeable Person. Jesus said plainly in John 14, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.” The world gives peace by removing the trouble. Christ gives peace by entering it with you.

Spafford knew this. He had lost everything a father can lose, and he sat down over the water and wrote a hymn not because the pain wasn’t real, but because the God who holds us in our pain is more real still.

That is not optimism or resilience, or the power of positive thinking dressed in Christian language. That is a man who had been to the bottom and found that God was already there.

Whatever your lot today — He is already there too.