April 30

Accountability day ... send me the date you are on and one truth God has taught you over the past week.

May 13, 7:00 pm Bible Readers celebration dinner at my house.

Psalm 29 starts with these words: “The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord thunders over the mighty waters.” Let me set the scene for you. David is describing a thunderstorm brewing over the Mediterranean Sea. It’s a powerful storm beginning to develop. This storm is then going to move on shore and it’s going to rumble through the desert. David was a shepherd, which means he knew what it was like to be by himself in the middle of the desert, when a desert storm roared through. It is an awesome breathtaking experience to be in the midst of a desert storm. He’s using a word picture to describe and to liken God's power to a desert storm.

He says, “The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is majestic. The Lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.” How big are the cedars of Lebanon? They are so big they can be thirty feet wide and they can be twelve stories tall. David is saying that a mere whisper from the lips of God is powerful enough to turn that huge tree into mere kindling wood.

Then he goes on to say, “He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, (Mount) Sirion like a young wild ox.” Mount Sirion is a 9000-foot mountain. It’s also called Mount Hermon. In other words, he’s saying God's voice is so powerful that it can make a mountain quiver and dance.

“The voice of the Lord strikes with flashes of lightning.” Think how powerful lightning is. Within a fraction of a second, a bolt of lightning releases one hundred million volts of electricity, 13,000 million horsepower at a temperature five times hotter than the surface of the sun. David is saying one word from the lips of God is far more powerful than all the lightning in the 1800 thunderstorms that are taking place at this very moment around the planet.

“The voice of the Lord shakes the desert; the Lord shakes the Desert of Kadesh.” Kadesh is in the south. Sirion is in the north. So what he’s saying is that God's power flows across the entire land. There’s nowhere we can go to get away from or to escape the power of God. But he says the voice of the Lord twists the oaks, and strips the forests bare. I love that imagery because if you’ve ever seen a picture of the aftermath of Mt. Saint Helens or on a small scale the 650 trees knocked down in Greenwich last month, you know exactly what he’s talking about. He’s talking about twisting the oaks and stripping the bark off of trees. The explosion of the volcano at Mt. Saint Helens was equal to the power of 500 atomic bombs and it knocked over millions and millions of trees, over 230 square miles of trees. And they were all stripped of their bark. Enough trees to build 300,000 homes. Yet David is saying that is child’s play compared to the power of God. He’s saying just one utterance from God would be enough to flatten 815 million acres of the Amazon rain forest. That’s how powerful God is.

What is our response to that? What is the natural response a human being would have in the face of this breathtakingly awesome power of God? David says, “And in His temple all cry glory.” In other words, they can’t help in the face of this but to worship God for being a powerful and a strong and a breathtaking deity.
But then something amazing happens in this poem that David is writing. He’s been talking about the power of God. Then it’s like a surprise ending. It takes a completely different turn. He closes this poem by saying “The Lord gives strength to His people. The Lord blesses His people with peace.” He’s saying not only is God powerful, not only is he omnipotent, but God does not hoard His power. He is a power sharing God. He wants to equip and empower you and the result is that we can find peace when we’re panicking. And we can find endurance when we’re empty. We can find courage when we’re cowardly. Draw on his power today.