WHEN WALLS CRUMBLE... 

 

 

 

One thing about earthquakes....you are suddenly made to realize the ground underneath your feet knows how to get your attention.

 

Where I live here in Alaska, some of the tremors are barely felt, but stronger ones can take your car down the street by itself and bring it back without shifting gears or using a drop of gasoline.

 

Trees sway, the ground buckles, and you are reminded of just how unprepared and vunerable you are at that exact moment---just another wide-eyed simpleton looking around for some safer place.

 

After it’s over, and things get back to “normal” We usually clear out any rubble, and then we rebuild...but usually on the same foundations.

 

 

The powerful earthquake in 1907 levelled the city of San Franscisco, which had been built upon an active fault. That bustling port had been overrun by any and all---seeking to make themselves rich in the gold rush and the opening of America’s west. Structual engineering wasn’t a priority and a factor.  It was rebuilt on the same fault—and as quickly as possible.

 

In the case of 9-11, it was the deliberate attack by airplanes flying into those twin towers on a sucicidal mission that caused their collapse.  But they too are rebuilt on the same foundations.

 

 There is a sense of false security in things built and created by man’s ingenuity and genius.  We expect them to last forever.

The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable. An iceberg collision proved otherwise.

The Hindenburg was the answer to fast, luxurious travel via airship across the Atlantic. It exploded in a fireball.

The Nazi empire was to last for a thousand years.  Rome also.  But both Hitler and the Caesars found that “it wasn’t necessarily so.”

 

 

It is unimaginable that the Egyptian pyramids might one day be blown to bits, or that rich men might throw their gold and silver coins away like they were worthless stones. But they are both ”predictable and prophesied possibilities”, even in our lifetimes.

Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 4:18:

“While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal:

but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

One does not need a prophetic mantle to predict ultimate destruction, for whatever is not built upon a firm foundation will fall. 

At this moment of time, mankind is experiencing the small shakings and tremors that are similarly dismissed and forgotten as soon as things return back to “normal”.  We have attitudes which, over time, become as addictive as heroin. We crave the thrill and emphoria of experiencing the latest fad and sensation. Even watching our idols become crumbling relics, dying from their overdoses and excesses, does not seem to matter at all.  We learn nothing, because our unsatisfied craving only demands another “fix” and we are overcome in the strong worldly current propelling us to our doom. 

 

But these are only the small tremors; yet the longer they last, they fortell the Big One.

 

 

God, in His great mercy, will remind those of us who might be living in fear of what may come, of a very simple lesson from nature itself: Not only do we have earthquakes and massive upheavals here in Alaska, we also have a yearly promise that comes from the seas around us:

 

Massive rivers flow down our mountains with waters so strong no human can stand in them.  Yet despite the strength of those waters, there are millions of salmon God endues with supernatural strength to leap through all those rapids, floods and tides, to eventually make it back to the gentle streams of their birthplace.  There they will release and spawn the eggs of another generation which will repeat the cycle, to live forever in His promise of the eternal life He placed within them from the beginning of time. 

 All we need to do, precious saints of God, is to remember that the One who created it all also watches over it all.  For no matter what comes in the days ahead, we have a sure foundation in Him. 

 

 

 

MARY E ADAMS