The Psalm of Praise

Psalm 148:8 Fire, and hail; snow, and vapour; stormy wind fulfilling his word:

The news media warned of it; the dark and greenish colored skies announced it's coming; the birds at the feeder left in anticipation of it, the rains accompanied it's entrance. And it came.

One of our summer windstorms swept through parts of our area in northern Wisconsin yesterday afternoon. Sixty foot trees were toppled over like sticks, others were snapped at mid-point, some with a thirty inch girth; still others had their tops broken off hurling them as missiles toward the ground. And the result was considerable damage to possessions and homes.

The Pastor's house was not spared. His house is closely bordered on the west side by tall, one hundred year old, white pines - and the wind was from the west. One tree was uprooted leaving a three foot hole in the ground. Two other trees lost their tops sending them crashing onto the roof of his house and doing damage beyond. Branches and debris covered the yard. The electrical service to his house was torn from it's mooring and bent to the ground. Electrical power went out throughout the area.

What a display of God's Sovereign control over the elements. As Dr. Gill commented on the elements fulfilling His Word,

"He (God) creates it, brings it out of his treasures, holds it in his lists, and lets it go out at His pleasure to fulfil His will; either, as at some times in a way of mercy, as to dry up the waters of the flood, to make a way for Israel through the Red sea, to bring quails to them in the wilderness, and rain to the land of Israel in Ahab's time; and sometimes in a way of judgment, to drown Pharaoh and his host in the Red sea, to break the ships of Tarshish, to fetch Jonah the disobedient prophet back, and to distress him afterwards (see Psalm 107:25); to do all this is an argument of divine power, and a proof of deity, as it is of our Lord's (Matthew 8:27)."

And perhaps to reveal His Mercy.

As the Pastor recalled the event later he stated that when the storm struck he remembered his car was outside the garage parked in the driveway. He thought it wise to move it into the garage parked a few feet away. As he began to exit the house with car keys in hand a large tree top whizzed over the house and struck the drivers side of his car at the mid-point of the door. The impact shattered the glass sending shards inside the passenger compartment, destroyed the door, and damaged other parts of the vehicle. If he had been but a few seconds faster and was in the car at the moment the tree top struck he could have been seriously injured. But he was spared.

As we discussed the incident during the latter part of the evening our conversation turned to a topic that had been on some young people's minds after the church service that morning; does God intimately and personally control and intervene in His creation or did He create it and let it operate by intrinsic laws? In other words, is deism (the belief that a supreme God exists and created the physical universe, but does not intervene in its normal operation) true? Did God create all things but now withdraws Himself and let it run itself?

The events of yesterday confirm the Word of God. The deist is weighed in the balance and found wanting.