Mountains

This was written a few weeks back while I was on Wilderness Trek...hope ya like it.

As I write this I am at High Camp of our Mountain Journey. We are up at 11,000 ft. in the beautiful Colorado Mountains. This whole business of mountains being shaped and formed is truly a spectacle to me. It is like God sculpted whole mountain ranges with the corner of His pinkie finger and we all behold His majesty.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across a Psalm which fascinated me. Psalm 97 speaks of God's enormous power, and how much He is exalted over every single outstanding thing we know and can see. Verse 5 is especially stirring to me because it describes an image of God melting the mountains like wax.

I love candles. I realize that's probably an unusual thing for a guy to admit or enjoy, but I do. There's just something about the way that wax melts and gives off unique aromas & scents that I just really find neat. I think I would much rather have a house full of candles in a storm than a bunch of flashlights. Candles create mood, ambiance, romantic flair, religious presence, and so on. Yet at the end of the day, they are just hardened wax.

When I compare the candles fragility of wax and the Rocky Mountains, which seem solid, my mind is awestruck at God's power. Elohim could melt these gigantic land masses like I can melt a candle, except I'd have to speculate He could make it happen much faster if He wanted to!

Now, if that same God gave us wax candles to melt and can obliterate the most gargantuan structures the world has ever seen in the same way, what can He do with our hearts if we choose to let Him?

We sing a song in our student ministry called, "Break my heart." It is a beautiful song about restoration and renewal. In the song we ask God to gently break our hard hearts so that we can become His again. I love this song a lot, as it has moved me closer to God through the years. Yet in light of Psalm 97, maybe the break image isn't enough. When I was a youngster, I would often get very upset when one of my toys would break. It was as though "break" had a negative connotation, as it most often does. I would cry and plead with my father to fix it. And really through some fancy superglue, tape, or device he would restore my toy and my happiness.

But when something is melted, it has lost its shape completely. It cannot be repaired with almost any contraption that has been invented. And so God melting our hearts is an incredibly powerful image. In fact, Scripture uses this image in a few select places. Psalm 22:14 communicates the despair that David feels, and it is very personal and heartfelt the renewal he seeks from the Lord. The same Hebrew word is referenced in Joshua 7 when because of Achan's sin the small army of AI kills 36 of the Israelites. Verse 7 of that chapter states that their hearts and their courage melted away.

I realize it would not sound right to create a devotional song that asks the Lord to melt us and our hearts...and yet that is exactly what I am suggesting we ask God for. To take a melted object and restore it to its new state again, well, that would be special and magical. And when God melts our hearts, like He melts the mountains and we melt candles, that is truly special and magical, too.