Water Warehouse

The Genesis Creation story describes the artistry and power of God creating the world. It is effortless, effective and orderly. God speaks and things happen… Light, Sky, Ocean, Land, Grass,

But Psalm 33 depicts God working hard to organize nature.

Think of God as a warehouse manager . . .

"He gathers the waters of the sea into jars;

he puts the deep into storehouses.'

Psalm 33:7

It’s a picturesque metaphor - the vast inventory of the oceans collected and compressed into barrels or skins, stacked up and stored in place so that human life can prevail on the earth.  Vivid language to express the majesty of Yahweh’s governance over the world with purpose.

God is indeed a ware-houser of water. Glaciers and ice-caps and perma-frost are huge reservoirs, locking away two-thirds of the world’s fresh water in cold storage. It’s an arrangement that effortlessly contributes to the moderating of the earth’s atmospheric temperature.

The rest is dispersed through a lace-work of lakes, rivers and marsh-lands, hidden under the earth in aquifers, and couriered about in clouds to fields and forests the world over to sustain life everywhere.

This song is not only about God’s prodigious power in creation but also God's love for humanity. The earth is a storehouse 'full of unfailing love.' (v.5)

For this poet, creation is not just a historic event, but a continuing work-in-progress. God ‘gathers’ the waters - present tense - and stores them away. This portrays God as actively providentially engaged in the world.

Just as God created the oceans long ago, so God sustains their mechanisms, gathering up the tides and releasing them, collecting evaporated mists into clouds day after day, century after century. Unfailing love, stored up and released, gathered again and released again and again and again.

No wonder verse 8 of the psalm urges people everywhere to revere God for his power and goodness!