Psalm 114: Can You Imagine The After?

When Israel came out of Egypt, Jacob from a people of foreign tongue, Judah became God’s sanctuary, Israel his dominion.

The sea looked and fled, the Jordan turned back; the mountains leaped like rams, the hills like lambs. Why was it, sea, that you fled? Why, Jordan, did you turn back? Why, mountains, did you leap like rams, you hills, like lambs?

Tremble, earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turned the rock into a pool, the hard rock into springs of water.  - Psalm 114

Sometimes when we look at the before and after of a situation, it is hard to imagine how it ever happened. When you go to a beautiful city park, full of trees and families celebrating birthdays and baseball games and then someone tells you it was once the city dump. Or when you see the wasteland of scrub and rocks and sand and then you find out it was once an Eden-like paradise. Most of the time, we don't see the inflection point-that moment where the landscape took on new shape and new prospects. 

In this psalm, the author has the privilege of seeing both the before and after: Israel went from under the control of a foreign power to under God's control. The hillside in the desert changed from a "hard rock" into "springs of water". The point is that when looking at the before, no one could have imagined the after.

That's not to say that the transition was gentle: the sea and river, mountains and hills ran away. But God's plan was not limited by 'difficult'. If we look at the impossible in this world, the situations and people who seem never to change, our imagination can conceive of a different, better reality, if we let it not be squashed by  the thought 'it can't happen'. The only question is: is that what God will do? 

What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived” —the things God has prepared for those who love him— 1 Cor. 2:9