Oceans and rivers running away? Mountains and hills skipping like kids and lambs? Surely this is just poetic exaggeration, right? In the real world, things like this don’t really happen.

Well yes, yes they do. After all, when God led His people out of Egypt, He parted the waters of the Red Sea to allow them to escape, drowning Pharaoh’s pursuing army in those same waters as they rushed back to their former place (Exodus 14:28-29). And as God led His people into the land that He had promised them, when the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant stepped into the Jordan River, it stopped flowing, allowing God’s people to cross on dry ground (Joshua 3:14-17).

But however beautiful the language might be in this psalm, in real life such experiences were as terrifying as they were exhilarating. For when God came to give His Law to His people, it wasn’t just Mt. Sinai that quaked in the presence of the Lord (Exodus 19:18): no, all the people trembled as well (Exodus 19:16).

And that’s the conclusion the psalmist draws from meditating on these great historical events: that all the earth should indeed tremble in the presence of its Almighty Creator, the One Who spoke all things into existence by the word of His unimaginable power. And God’s human creatures should stand in no less awe of Him than do the mountains and hills, the oceans and rivers.

But the good news is that God graciously chooses to employ His absolute control of the natural world in order to bless His people. After all, verse 8 reminds us that God doesn’t just make the rocks quake and the rivers flee in fear of Him. No, at Horeb, God told Moses to strike a rock so that water would flow from it that the people could drink (Exodus 17:6).

But God said something else on the same occasion in the same verse: that the Lord Himself would stand in front of that rock. In other words, for Moses to strike the rock and obtain life-saving water for the people, he would have to strike God.

And that reminds us of the greatest reason we have to tremble in the presence of the Lord. For in order for God to save us from our sins, He had to absorb the penalty that we all deserve. The cross thus shows us the horrible death our treason has earned, even as it promises forgiveness and freedom to all who trust in Christ to stand in our place.

So, let’s take one step further than the mountains and hills, the oceans and rivers. Let’s not flee from God’s presence in fear, as His Old Testament people did at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 20:18). Instead, let us run to Him as our Savior and Redeemer, even as we fall down before Him as our Creator and our King. For such a God, Whose grace is as great as His power, deserves nothing less.

Psalm 114 (NASB)

When Israel went forth from Egypt, The house of Jacob from a people of strange language,
2 Judah became His sanctuary, Israel, His dominion.
3 The sea looked and fled; The Jordan turned back.
4 The mountains skipped like rams, The hills, like lambs.
5 What ails you, O sea, that you flee? O Jordan, that you turn back?
6 O mountains, that you skip like rams? O hills, like lambs?
7 Tremble, O earth, before the Lord, Before the God of Jacob,
8 Who turned the rock into a pool of water, The flint into a fountain of water.