Tsunami

Long ago a group of poor Chinese settlers came upon a sprawling field of valley floor—strategically lying between the rocky slopes of a nearby mountain and the salty shores of the China Sea—a flatland of earth, perfectly suitable for planting and farming rice. They built their village high up on flat rocky promontory from where they could gaze down upon their new farmland in the valley and out beyond the shoreline to the Azure sea.

One late summer’s afternoon when most of the village had trekked down the slope to the fields below, one of the women who remained in the village that afternoon happened to glance up from her work and squint toward the sea. Her eyes meandered out to the distant sea horizon, when with startled fear she recognized the ominous surge of the sea their Japanese neighbors called a tsunami—a tidal wave.

For a moment she froze, realizing that nearly the entire village was obliviously harvesting their grain along the shoreline, unaware that they faced impending disaster. The incoming tsunami  would obliterate all who were toiling in the farmland beneath the afternoon sun.

Unless she could warn them.

She screamed to the few villagers who had remained up the mountain with her. In panic they began to yell and wave and scream to their family and children and friends below. But it was wasted effort—they were too far away.

With the racing incoming tsunami, there was no time for them to stumble down the rocky slopes to the valley below. They must get the attention of the villagers below instantly or all below would be lost!

It quickly became apparent that they needed something catastrophic to arouse their endangered families below. The woman and her companions knew what they must do. It would be a terrible price to pay. But if the doomed villagers were to be saved, the price must be paid.

Quickly seizing firebrands from their cooking fires the woman and her mountainside companions torched their own thatch-roofed homes.

One by one the houses of the mountainside village erupted in orange flames and billowing black smoke. And one by one the bent-over heads of the villagers below jerked upward to the pluming smoke of their burning village.

With adrenaline pumping, the entire valley floor of villagers raced back up the mountain to save their burning homes.  When in panting fatigue they arrived above they were met by the woman and her neighbors who solemnly pointed back out to sea. The villagers turned in shock to watch the roaring wall of water obliterate the farmland they had been harvesting minutes before.

It had taken something catastrophic to warn of an even greater destruction impending.

There indeed do come desperate times when it takes something catastrophic to get our attention and warn of an even greater destruction impending. Could it be that many of us play and study and labor utterly oblivious to the impending disaster that is about to come upon this earth? Could it be that on the distant horizon there is an approaching and potentially imminent cataclysm that will destroy all the earth, an impending catastrophe that today can only be seen by the One who from his divine heights knows and sees all?

Could it be that above the din and noise of America's national calamity the entire world hears the crying, pleading voice of One who desperately seeks to get our attention, to awaken us from our oblivious stupor, to warn us of an impending end?

In the crucifixion of Jesus, the One who is unwilling that any should perish set His own house on fire in order to get our attention.  And could it be that through every disaster that sin has brought on the earth we can discern God's passionate cry warning us to flee an even greater disaster that is coming? God, using the suffering that sin instigates, to make a 911 call to us?

And could it be that the towering wall of roaring oblivion is much closer than we've thought?

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