Part 6: WARNINGS OF LOVE
The rain falls on the just and the unjust, Matthew 5:45, so why does it flood upon some areas, drought upon another, fire on another, earthquake and volcano on others? What criteria does the Lord use to determine what weather will fall where?
I am not going to second guess the Lord. That would be evil of me but I can look at what he has said in Scripture.
What happened to Nineveh is interesting. God told Jonah to give a warning to Nineveh ‘for their wickedness is come up before me,’ Jonah 1:2.
Jonah was terrified. He ran in the opposite direction and we all know the story of how he boarded a boat to go anywhere but to Nineveh.
A great storm blew up and they drew lots to see who should be cast overboard to stop the storm. Jonah drew the short straw and they questioned him as to why he was the problem. He said, ‘I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord,’ and he told them he had fled from the Lord.
They tossed him overboard, the storm stopped and Jonah was saved by God’s plan to keep him alive.
God calls to each of us to come back to him and there are all sorts of warnings thus far. I pray you will heed them.
Eventually, Jonah went to Nineveh, crying out, ‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.’
What people did with the message decided what action the Lord would take. The king took the lead, called on his people to repent, to fast, and ‘turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands.’
And God noted ‘that they turned from their evil,’ and they were not overthrown.
Yes, the rain does fall on both the just and the unjust, and like a Father, God longs to cover us with his own robe if only we will come back to him and accept it.
Part 7: RAINBOW OF REMEMBRANCE
I opened my Book on a foggy morning and looked towards the far horizon. I could see nothing of my world, everything in it was under the blanket of silent, white fog.
Yet in my mind, far, far away, I could see a family, up in barren mountains, moving out of a huge ship, gathering loose boulders and building an altar.
Their household animals and birds hovered around wondering where their lush, rolling hills and plains had vanished to, shocked at the craggy cliffs about them, the clouds still scudding across the sky and the lack of food.
They were well fed in the ark but they longed for the sweetness of fresh grass, the taste of ripening fruit and the smell of ripening grain. They must eat, but Noah’s commitments were in order.
Firstly, he ‘builded an altar unto the Lord,’ and offered a sacrifice of each of the precious clean beasts and clean fowls.
Under changed conditions, the Lord gave to Noah the same covenant he had made with Adam about inhabiting the earth he now ruled. Then God shared the rainbow with Noah as a promise he would not again flood the entire earth, but to the Creator himself the rainbow meant much more.
Solemnly, he said, ‘I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant, which I established between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth,’ Genesis 9:16.
The everlasting covenant made between Father, Creator and Holy Spirit, says ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion …everything bring forth after his kind …,’ Genesis 1:26. The covenant has not changed and the rainbow is his guarantee.
Later, our weather history confirms that Noah’s descendants, the sons of Israel, sold their brother into slavery, and lied to their father about it. Again, the Lord spoke through the weather. ‘The famine was over all the face of the earth,’ Genesis 42:56, until eventually the brothers confessed their sin to their father and the relationship with their father and brother could be restored.
How much suffering and how many floods, droughts, fires, earthquakes, volcanoes and famines will it take to bring us back to our Father and the embrace of our Brother?
Elizabeth Price
(To access the entire “Weather” mini-series, please click here.)