Castles on the Rock: Edinburgh, Stirling and I

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Sun, 17/03/2019 - 08:06

Last summer, I visited a number of Scottish castles. That country’s violent history and suffering on account of repeated English invasions (the traffic went both ways, to be fair) means the Scots became skilled builders of fortified buildings. Even the great Oliver struggled to capture the first- Edinburgh. Dominating that beautiful city’s skyline, this evocatively grim fortress crowns the basalt remains of an extinct volcano.

The second is Stirling, another great stronghold and symbol of Scottish strength. Perched upon a large quartz-dolerite intrusion, the castle commands stunning views in all directions and must have been difficult to capture and ignore.

 

Tough though stone walls might be, it’s the solid rock foundations and sheer drops which makes these holds so strong and capture so unlikely. In Psalm 40: 2 we read ‘He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings’. The believer is safe, not because of the walls he builds or the battlements he constructs, but the solid foundation upon which his life is built. In Matthew 7:24, Jesus said:

Whosoever then heareth of me these words, and doeth the same, I will liken him to a wise man, which hath builded his house on a rock:

And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell not: for it was grounded on a rock,

But whosoever heareth these my words, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which hath builded his house upon the sand:

And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell, and the fall thereof was great. (Geneva, 1599)

 
 
My heart, though sometimes besieged and frequently under attack, is safe. This is not because of my cleverness, faithfulness or anything else that I do, but because of the great Rock upon which it rests.