Everything continues as it always has
As we walked through the village, enjoying all the sights, the thought occurred to me, ‘I wonder if it ever floods here?’ It wasn’t in my head for long, it was simply stirred by the small river with its low banks. And had events not turned out as they did, I would never have thought any more. But that river was more significant than any of us thought.
Now imagine, if I had been a preacher about floods with greater insight—then imagine the message that I would have had to proclaim. I could have told the waterproof salesman that those waterproofs were never going to keep the water out of his shop. I would have warned the owners of the tea house that their place would cease to exist. I’d have warned the grocer that sells some of the best pasties in the area, ‘You’ll see all your goods floating down the river’. And I’d have slapped a big poster up in the car park, ‘Cars and valuables left at your own risk—flood to wash them all away in ten days time!’
Would the police have arrested me for causing a public disturbance? Would the tourists have smiled at me as just one other oddity on a par with the stories of witches in Boscastle.
‘It’s just a stream,’ ‘Boscastle hasn’t been flooded in living memory’. ‘Safe as houses’, they’d say.
Strange how we think that everything will continue as it has from the beginning of time. Disturbing that thoughts of floods, or of the end of everything we hold dear are pushed away from our minds as if irrelevant.
I reckon that the person of Jesus Christ is reckoned like that Boscastle stream. Not significant—beautiful to some. The stream of what He has done has flowed for many years and continues today, but it won’t affect me, it won’t affect us. It will always be as it has been!
How wrong we can be? For the stream can become a flood, and suddenly everyone is caught up in it. And when that happens, all we held dear is washed away. Suddenly we realise that what we ought to have paid attention to we didn’t bother to notice. And now it is too late.
Preachers of floods have never been heard very well. Preachers who speak of a final day are not heard much better. Nor do we listen.
But Jesus is clear, His kingdom will fill the earth. And everything we have and hold dear will be one day be destroyed. On that day, what shall we have left? It won’t be the remains of a flood that we have to contend with, it will be Jesus Christ Himself. And the question then will be, ‘How were you living in the light of the news that it will all end?’
Perhaps we ought to listen that little bit better?
