seas and rivers bless the lord

The World stands on land, its natural home: altering only slowly, stable until you work it a bit, dry. Here it is comfortable.

It smiles at calls to the water. Excepting the wild night, when one can wet dayclothes or disrobe, the World smiles and prudently keeps away. When it wants to dip, it brings a special quick-drying suit so that the water experience can stay maximally temporary, maximally demarcated from real life.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

The Lord’s home is Water. From out of water, He speaks. The biologists say He birthed life there but that our kind escaped. He has been gradually drawing His People back.

He deluged the World and instructed Noah about the ark that would float him over the flood, that would keep him dry until the windows of Heaven closed.

Moses, receiver of God’s Law, was kept dry too as he led the People across the Red Sea while the soldiers of Pharaoh drowned. Moses drew water in the desert from a stone. Moses, so named because, said Pharaoh’s daughter:

I drew him out of the water.

How funny was Jonah to flee from the Lord by sea! Even the pagans sailing the ship could not believe his foolishness. He was returned to His Maker when they cast him into the depths, where the Lord’s waves and billows could surround Him, where in the dark and in the solitude and in the proximity to death the man could whisper to God in his weak voice and be heard and receive the Prophet’s tongue.

And the generation received Jonah’s sign when another man went into water so that Heaven might be heard.

The Lord Jesus, the Living Water, began his great work beneath the Jordan River and in six stone water jars. Life started in the sea and crawled up onto land: this was the point toward which it all aimed.

The World, of course, wants it all to stay the same. The adventurous ones want just enough change to stave off their boredom. It is unfortunate for them that the Body of Christ is Living Water. It is impossible for us to stay still, to stay in the same form, to not flow down into the world’s dankest crevices and make newness breed. It is unfortunate for the World that we must destroy their worthless old things.

The cautious believers, friendly with the World and identifying with it in their confusion, would keep this Water vesseled up. Of course they will not succeed. The World itself plays a role in its own cleansing: the World itself pierces the skin holding the New Earth. The Living Water and the Blood of the Everlasting Covenant will submerge all of this. In our day a river will be flowing,

the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.