October 1927
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God’s Messages From the Ocean B y R ev . F red H. W ight Pastor First Baptist Church, Banning, California
In some places glaciers have left boulders along the floor of the sea and the sea has deposited sand, and gradually a breakwater of defense grew into a peninsula. If the sea seems to conquer the land at one point, at another point the latid forces take the offensive and conquer the sea. At Cape Henry, Virginia, the land forces have defeated the sea and driven it back nearly half a mile. The gov ernment has had to build a new lighthouse a half mile farther out. So the land and the sea continue to be equalized.
VER and over again I have marvelled as I have looked out at God’s great spectacle—the ocean. Its greatness and its beauty have fascinated me. But does God have any messages for us from the sea? Surely the great ocean is not without its lessons for mankind. If you will get out your Bible you will discover many passages bear ing on this subject, and it is our purpose to examine some of these and thus listen to God’s messages from the ocean. _ JSPg First, Psa. 93:4: “The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.” The psalm ist measures the power of God in two ways, by jppi _
The attack of the sea is not mightier than the resistive power of the land. Even so, God has seen to it that the attacks ,of the Evil One upon us shall not be fiercer than we can resist. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man, but God is faithful who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will with the temptation also make a way of escape that ye may be able to bear it” (1 Cor. 10:13). No temptation, no difficulty, no obstacle, no attack by the enemy, but God will give us corresponding grace to enable us to bear :it and come out victorious. As land and sea are equalized, so God sees to it that our resistive force is sufficient to be a match for the enemies of our soul. Let us take cour age, then, for God watches over and protects ■His own. - , V astness of th e S ea Perhaps the first impression one gets of the ocean, is its vastness. As one woman ex pressed it, upon seeing the ocean for the first time, “At last I have found something there is enough of.” The Apostle Paul’s prayer was (Ephesians 3:17-19): “That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowl edge, that ye may be filled with all the fulness of God.” .
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the ear and by thè eye. He stands upon the seashore and listens to the thundering roar of many waters, and proclaims his God to be mightier than it all. He watches the waves as they beat against the rocks with relentless energy, and is reminded that Jehovah excels in power all the natural forces of the universe. But I am wondering if we realize just how mighty the waves of the sea are. We cannot appreciate the full force of the psalmist’s state ment, until we begin to grasp the stupendous power of the breakers. The shore-line has been aptly called, “a battle-ground of Nature.” From time immemorial the sea has been carry ing on a teriffic war with the land. Each drop of water within a wave is a tiny soldier battling against the forces of the land. Billions of these soldiers are marshalled together, and their com bined force is used to hammer away at the rocky coast-line. If all that tremendous energy could be harnessed, it would make the electric power plants of the world look like a tiny bead on the side of a mountain. But these forces of the sea go to battle in air fleets as well. The sun comes to their rescue, and through evap oration they form themselves into a cloud and fall upon the land. The rainfall of the United
The love of Christ surpasses knowledge even as the length and breadth of the sea is too great to fully grasp. The fulness of God is vaster than the fulness of the sea (Psalms 139:9-10): “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” “The wings of the morning” here refers'to the rays of dawn, and light travels at the rate of almost 200,000 miles a second, and comes from the sun in 8 minutes and 12 sec onds. The psalmist is imagining a speedy journey across the vast waters of the ocean, but even with such speed and crossing such a vast area, he cannot take himself away from God’s presence and God’s protecting care. “Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” “A little child was playing by the shore of the broad blue sea, And oft he looked away across the waves, so wonderingly. It was a new entrancing sight to him, that watery waste, The tossing billows breaking on the sand with foam wreaths graced.
States is estimated at about 30 inches a year. Thus every acre of ground is attacked, by 3,000 tons of water. And then as these soldiers march by way of streams and rivers back to the sea, they carry captive some 25 billion tons of material. Such power as this beggars description. And yet our God is so much mightier than this vast army, as to sink it into insignificance when the two are compared. What kind of a God do you worship? Is he mightier than the waves of the sea ? W aves U nder G od ’ s C ontrol These waves of the sea, however, mighty as they are, are limited in power. In Jeremiah 5 :22 we read : “Fear ye not me? saith the Lord : will ye not tremble at my pres ence, which have placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it: and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail ; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it ?” For centuries the waves have pounded upon the shore line, but the shore-line has had its forces to protect itself.
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