Powerful

The power of water, and of the beauty of nature. (Not what this blog post is about, but it's a nice picture.) Amicalola Falls State Park, April 2021.

Having grown up in the church, I think it's easy sometimes to forget how radical the whole message of the gospel is. The whole idea of the first being last doesn't seem so odd, nor does it seem weird that those who mourn are blessed, or that the meek will inherit the earth. So I was a little surprised this morning when I began thinking about the word "powerful" and all that it means.

My mind immediately went to the thought of raw, destructive power--specifically the current flooding in my home state of Louisiana, and the massive power of water to destroy. Not so many years ago, many of my friends and family members had to flee their homes, some in rescue boats that took them to shelters. Some lost only photographs, furniture, and pets, while others lost their homes completely. The power of nature can up-end our predictable little lives in a matter of minutes.

And then I thought about power in the sense of the heavens declaring the glory of God: The great power of beauty to move us and draw us to worship. That's the good power of God, the power we like to think about. The power that seems safely on our side.

Looking for a verse-of-the-day for "powerful," I found so many verses in the NIV translations of Judges and 1 Samuel:

The Spirit of the Lord came powerfully upon [Samson] so that he tore the lion apart with his bare hands as he might have torn a young goat. (Judges 14:6)

As [Samson] approached Lehi ... The Spirit of the Lord came powerfully upon him. The ropes on his arms became like charred flax, and the bindings dropped from his hands. (Judges 15:14)

... the Spirit of God came powerfully upon [Saul], and he joined in their prophesying. (1 Samuel 10:10)

So Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed [David) in the presence of his brothers, and from that day on the Spirit of the Lord came powerfully upon David. (1 Samuel 16:13)

This is the power of the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit that manifested itself as tongues of fire in Acts and enabled people to communicate in other languages, heal the sick, and spread the gospel to all the nations.

We all love to come up with inadequate analogies to explain the Trinity, and one of mine is this: the Father is the mind that has the thought; the Son is the voice that communicates the thought; the Holy Spirit is the breath that enables the voice to speak it. The Holy Spirit is the power. Whether it comes in a flood or an earthquake or a gentle whisper, it's the power of God in us.

A gentle whisper. That's the paradoxical nature of power in the Kingdom of God, the type of power I didn't immediately think about when I started playing with ideas for this blog post.

A little more searching for "powerful," and I came across 2 Corinthians 10:10:

For his letters, say they, are weighty and powerful; but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible ...

We're reading about Paul here, and about how some false teachers are talking about how unimpressive Paul is as a person--despite his "weighty and powerful" letters.

Back to those paradoxical yet (not so) self-evident truths we learn about in Kindergarten Sunday School: One reality I love about the Kingdom of God is that the weak can be strong. We may be small, soft-spoken, poor, a minority, or have any number of characteristics that are not traditionally considered "powerful." But with the Holy Spirit, we possess that power of God to see Him in the Bible and in nature, to learn about Him, and to communicate His truth to the world, even in the face of opposition.