Psalm 89:9

Psalm 89:9

Ruler of the surging sea

The footnotes of my Bible, for some reason, describe this verse and its successor as “Poetic imagery borrowed from ancient Near Eastern myths of creation.” I wonder where the Near Eastern myths came from and why the Lord wanted them incorporated in His Holy Word!? Do we not have a God who brought order to a formless and empty planet, covered in darkness and deep waters? Genesis 1:2, 6-10. Was it not the same God who, during the time of Noah, caused the fountains of the deep to open up and bring torrential flooding as well as rain upon the earth? Did not Jesus demonstrate His origins and deity when He stood in a boat on the raging Sea of Galilee and commanded the wind and the waves to, “Be still”? Add to these accounts the events of the Exodus and the Red Sea, the crossing of the River Jordan, the terrifying ordeal of Paul and others in a boat on the Mediterranean and you begin to get the picture! 

If our God is Ruler over the entire cosmos, if He spoke the world into being by the voice of His command and if He spun the sun, the moon and the stars into the tapestry of space, then I can believe that the surging seas must obey His commands. Can’t you? What a God He is and the thing that should bless us is that His creative and all-powerful hand is over our lives too. The past week has been, for me, a bit of a surging sea. The waves certainly mounted up and my wife and I aborted a Lake District holiday amid illness and a dark sense of foreboding. But our Lord brought us safely home to the shore. What He does on a grand scale, He also can do for us when the seas surge and the waves mount up. Hallelujah!

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