Snowball fights on the motorway

When two stretches of motorway near Wigan were closed due to snow, news came in of snowmen being built and friendly snowball fights taking place on the actual carriageways as stranded motorists awaited help. Events like that seem bizarre, as normally no vehicle is allowed to stop and no pedestrian may walk on a motorway. Usually, on these through routes, drivers keep determinedly within their little boxes, and certainly do not socialise with each other! But on that rare day the usual course of life was turned topsy-turvy.

I love it when the Bible in its poetry sees nature acting in ways never expected in the general run of things. There is a lovely little psalm (114) about what it was like for the waters of the Red Sea and the River Jordan to part and let God's emigrating people cross:

When Israel came out of Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a people of foreign tongue,
Judah became God's sanctuary,
Israel his dominion.
The sea looked and fled,
the Jordan turned back;
the mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.
Why was it, O sea, that you fled,
O Jordan, that you turned back,
you mountains, that you skipped like rams,
you hills, like lambs?
Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord,
at the presence of the God of Jacob,
who turned the rock into a pool,
the hard rock into springs of water. (NIV)

Isaiah talks in similar style about strange happenings in the days of the Messiah:

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them (Isaiah 5:6).

In all these Bible passages the writers teach us a lesson that they know full well but we all too often overlook. We assume that nature carries on in predictable ways that we can record, analyse and then control. We forget that nature is God's creation and He can change the course of it when He pleases. The apostle Peter criticises those who scoff that everything carries merrily on just as it has done since the beginning and that God never intervenes. in fact He judged the earth once at the Genesis Flood and will do so again at the day of judgement.

To those who like to keep everything as it is and deprive others of hope, this is bad news. As for those who have committed their case to the Lord Jesus Christ, it is music to their ears. The Great Reversal is on its way, and will empower the powerless.