Daily Devotional

All good stories have an element of foreshadowing; a hinting at something that will be important later in the story. In comedy there is an idea called a “call-back” where a joke is made early in the set and then reintroduced later on. The call back almost always gets a bigger laugh than the initial joke. Why? Because the comedian is essentially setting up an inside-joke with the audience, and everyone loves a good inside joke (I hope to be a part of one someday).

So, Psalm 148 says that the wind and weather obey God. Fast forward several hundred years and you have a group of guys in a boat out on the sea. A particularly ferocious storm rises up, to the point where the boat begins to take on water. Naturally, everyone is freaking out. Everyone except for the leader of the group, who is instead sound asleep.
 
You might know how the rest of the story goes. They wake Him up, He tells the wind to knock it off, and instantly the storm goes away and the water calms. Matthew 8:27 picks up the story, “And the men marveled saying, ‘What sort of man is this, that even the winds and sea obey him?’”

The disciples see Jesus tell the wind and weather to cease and the wind and weather obey Him. How is this possible?! The answer is actually found in Psalm 148. This “man” wasn’t just a man but was God in the flesh. Of course the wind and weather obey God and since Jesus was God in the flesh, it makes perfect logical sense that the wind and weather would obey Him.

When I read things like this, I can’t help but smile as I marvel at what a fantastic storyteller God is. The foreshadowing that He sprinkles throughout His Word is incredible and I never tire of seeing it. Though I enjoy seeing past examples of His divine artistry, how often do I (or any of us) miss seeing the Master’s pen at work in what’s happening around us right now? If God can scatter seeds of story through past centuries that would only make sense to us in the future, then does it not stand to reason that He is doing the same thing today? What strands of God’s story are being woven around us right now? We may not know this side of heaven, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. You may feel like you don’t know what God is up to in your life, but that doesn’t mean He’s not up to something. Just wait, like all good storytellers, He’ll reveal it at just the right moment.

New Living Translation (NLT)
Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.