March 27

Exodus 38 Living in Oklahoma, we experience many kinds of weather extremes. We’ve experienced temperatures as cold as twenty degrees below zero and as high as 115. We are known for our violent thunderstorms which produce destructive hail and tornadoes. We have the world’s highest incidence of tornadoes per square mile. When the rains do come, they seem to fall all at once. We were once known for being the “Dust Bowl.” In the thirties a combination of poor farming practices, poor water conservation methods and poor rainfall wreaked havoc upon the land. The last few years in Oklahoma has once again been a drought equal to, if not worse than, the 1930’s. Our ponds and lakes are literally drying up. If we have another year like the last two years, we are going to be in big trouble. We haven’t been in a dust bowl this time because the first dust bowl taught us that we needed to change our farming and water conservation practices, but even stored water eventually disappears if there is not enough rainfall. We have a population of 3,814,820 spread out over 68,594.92 square miles for an average of 54.7 persons per square mile. The state as a whole averaged 33.93 inches per year over the last 120 years. Today’s passage tells us that their census revealed 603,550 men twenty years old or older at Mt. Sinai. If each man had a wife and two children, then there would have been 2,414,200 people, about 63% of the population of Oklahoma. The Sinai Peninsula receives less than 4 inches of rainfall per year (11% of the average rainfall of Oklahoma) and covers 23,000 square miles (33.5% of the size of Oklahoma). That is 63% of the people in 33.5% of the land receiving 11% of the rainfall of Oklahoma. Even that is deceiving, for the Israelites were all living together and not spread out over the Sinai. It would be like moving 2.5 million people into an area smaller than the Stillwater city limits of 28.3 square miles, about 113 people per acre. Having just moved to the area, they had no water collection projects, no ponds, no lakes, no cisterns. They only had natural lakes, wells and seasonal rivers, basically nothing. Providing the water, food and sewage needs for that number of people in a desert would have been a logistical nightmare! Talk about extremes! It would have been humanly impossible. God’s glory is seen in His miraculous provision for them. He alone could have provided. Only food rained from heaven could have produced food needed for them to survive. Only water driven from the reservoirs of the underground could have met their need. How they managed the sewage, is a whole other topic! But God met their need! Can He meet my need/our need? Certainly He can, and He will! It is His glory to do it, but He has one requirement, which is that we trust and obey. Trust means that we are still long enough in His word, to hear His instruction. (Hearing His voice is part of what the furniture of the Tabernacle symbolizes.) Obedience is that when we hear, we do what He instructs. The result is that we will see His glory. There is no other option. Perhaps that is why we see so little of His glory today. We are unwilling to hear and obey. Never-the-less, His glory remains, and He awaits our hearing and obeying to reveal it. Indeed we serve a glorious King. Speak His glory to someone today! --Pastor john