The sea looked and fled,
Psalm 114:3
the Jordan turned back;
I recently visited the Hoover Dam, which obstructs the Colorado River. The engineer part of me appreciated seeing such a massive construction. I appreciate it all the more as I marvel that they built it back in the 1930’s. Nothing like it had been done to date. To think of the effort it took to construct such a massive structure! It’s one among the tallest dams at 726 feet (221 m) made of 3,250,000 cu yd (2,480,000 m3), enough to pave a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York!
This reminded me of the Aswan High Dam that I visited three years ago in Egypt. It is about half the height (364 ft / 111 m), but is made of about 43,000,000 m3 (56,000,000 cu yd) of material, about 17 times the volume!
Think about what it takes to block a raging river like these dams. The primary purpose of a dam is to control the water flow, to prevent flooding and store water for dryer years. It took years to build these modern marvels. Yet when the God of the Bible, the Lord of all creation, decided to block a body of water, it was no difficultly for him. At the Red Sea, the Israelites were stuck between the sea and Pharaoh’s army. “Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the LORD drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left” (Exodus 14:21-22). Such began their wilderness wanderings. Forty years later, they entered the Land of Promise by crossing the Jordan River in a similar fashion: “Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down to the Sea of the Arabah (the Salt Sea) was completely cut off. So the people crossed over opposite Jericho” (Joshua 3:15-16).
We can marvel at our own power and what our hands can create and the rivers we can block, but let us never forget who made the rivers and can stop them with simply a word.