Forecasting the Weather

As I prepare to move down south any time now, I am keenly following the weather forecasts to see what the conditions will be like when furniture is going into the van and coming out of it. Will it rain? Will it be windy? Both of those things could drastically affect the way the move goes.

It's all part of a lifelong interest in the weather. I love to learn about changing weather patterns mean. I enjoy identifying the various types of cloud and getting to know what they indicate. I once read the book The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. He used to spend hours and hours apparently whiling away time but was in fact intently studying cloud formations and everything connected with them. I also own a weather station that enables me to gather all the relevant information together and try to make my own forecast.

In fact simply making sense of other people's weather forecasts is hard enough. I think of the airport weather forecasts. Their detailed, coded data are supposed to help pilots of aircraft who need to be sure of weather conditions before they fly. Understanding them is often a question of trying to work out what it is indicated by probabilities. Say they give a 30% chance of rain. Well, does that mean it will rain or doesn't it? I find the whole approach very frustrating. 

In fact most forecasting involves percentages. It's a way of hedging your bets!

I am intrigued by a weather forecast in the Bible. It comes when Jesus confronted some of his opponents over their narrow-mindedness and foolishness and inability to see what was coming the way He could. You can find that story in Matthew's gospel chapter 16.

And the Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” So he left them and departed (Matthew 16:1-4 ESV).

The Pharisees were looking for some spectacular demonstration of Jesus' power, as if they hadn't seen enough of those already. Jesus points out the inconsistency of their position. They are instinctively able to tell the weather to come from the weather lore. Yet Jesus' coming should give thoughtful hearers a pointer to the state of God's world now and where it is heading. Jesus' opponents are blind to the signs - signs that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, that new conditions are approaching where God is seen to be in charge, where wrongs will be seen to be righted and a new order of things put into place.

We too can be guilty of looking at the world around us with blinkers on. I hear people obsessing about which news item fulfils which Bible prophecy. We may well be wasting our time looking for these often fanciful connections while the real signs go tragically unnoticed.

Jesus counsels the Pharisees and Sadducees to study the sign of Jonah. That presumably means the way that prophet was three days in the belly of the big fish before emerging into daylight again. This would be paralleled spectacularly by the way the Lord Jesus would be three days dead and then after that time rise again to newness of life, to bring about conditions of forgiveness and healing for all who believe.

Let's be keen on understanding the future - as God sees it. That will mean gaining Holy Spirit wisdom to sift out the relevant from the irrelevant in our quest for signs.

(By way of a footnote: moving day, 9 November, started off wet but ended much drier. After a very long day I was finally and happily installed in my new home in Wiltshire.)