Miracle Consciousness

The sea looked and fled; the Jordan turned back.  Psalm 114:3  NASB

Turned back – Biblical cartoon animation.  That’s what I imagine when I read a verse like this.  Why?  Because the verbs associated with these descriptions of the crossing of the Sea of Reeds and the Jordan are emotional and personal, as if the Sea and the River were sentient beings.

Let’s look at the text.  The two words David uses are sābab + ʾāḥôr  What is the picture?  The verb (sābab) means “to turn back,” but not in the sense of shuv (“to return”).  This verb is about the action of turning around or going around in a circle.  The noun (ʾāḥôr) describes the rear of something, but it’s used in adverbal phrases to mean “backwards.”  So, what did the waters of the Jordan do?  Well, they turned around and went back upstream.  David must have reflected on the recollection of Joshua 3, noticing that the verb in that verse is rāḥaq (“to make”—a great distance, Joshua 3:16).  It implies that the waters themselves chose to turn around.  The heap of waters that opened the gap for the children of Israel to cross was as if the river decided to turn on itself and dam up the waters flowing downstream so that the upstream waters kept piling up and up.  This is an antigravity miracle, but not necessarily because God stopped the waters.  Rather, God seems to have altered the waters’ choice to flow downhill.  It reminds me of modern cartoon characterizations of non-sentient things.  If trees can clap and mountains sing, why can’t waters decide to go uphill?  One more example of the Hebraic idea that the world itself is alive.

At any rate, David seems to have understood this implication when he put the event into poetry.  The sea “ran away;” the water of the Jordan turned around, tail between its legs, and went uphill.  Personal expression commonly associated with free-will beings is now attributed to things like seas and rivers.  Of course, David is a poet so we give him a bit of poetic license.  Poetry stretches language in order to jar us into deeper insights.  But the interesting thing here is that the idea is already present in the account in Joshua.  We don’t think of Joshua 3 as poetry.  It’s narrative, but in that narrative is the intimation of a river with a mind of its own—a river that knows what it’s doing and decides to honor God’s wishes by going backwards.  This would make a great cartoon for kids.  However, I don’t think we should leave it there.  The lesson is for us too.

Everything is connected and God animates His entire creation.  The real difference is that the rest of creation does what the Creator desires.  If He wants the waters to flow backwards, then the waters obediently respond.  But when it comes to us, well, we aren’t nearly as obedient to the wishes of the Creator as the rest of His handiwork.  And that’s the problem.  We don’t have miracle consciousness.  We think in terms of human “cause and effect.”  Of course, cause and effect thinking have resulted in incredible human progress—but perhaps all that progress came at the expense of losing the sense of a living world.  Our world is essentially mechanical.  Apparently God’s world isn’t.

Topical Index:  to turn back, go backwards, sābab, ʾāḥôr, Joshua 3:16, Psalm 114:3