The Mountain Melting Power of His Presence

                                                   

I am currently in the middle of a verse by verse study of the book of Nahum, and this morning as I was deciding what to write in this blog today, I felt like I should share what I wrote in one of my entries.

"The mountains tremble and quake before Him and the hills melt away, and the earth is upheaved at His presence—yes, the world and all that dwell in it."  Nahum 1:5

 The presence of God is one of the most underestimated forces on earth.  There is a gentleness to it that many of us are used to, but when God brings His presence to bear even the greatest obstacles melt before Him.  It doesn't matter if it is financial problems, addictions, emotional wounds, fear, pride, whatever; if God's presence is involved your world will shift and reform.

Another amazing aspect of this verse is that the only action God took was arriving on the scene.  He didn't command the mountains to tremble or the hills to melt, it happened naturally, like a reflex.  God doesn't leave things the way He finds them, He can't.  Just His presence is so full of power that things rise up or cringe just at the sense of it.  He takes broken people and fixes them, proud people and humbles them, obstacles and destroys them effortlessly.  This is why when we are in a church service where so often we say God moved, the question should always be whether or not something shifted or not.  If everyone leaves the way they came, it was emotion, not God's presence. The true test of revival is not how excited people are about it, but how much of the culture has been impacted, how many lives were utterly transformed by it.

The definition of "presence" is this. "The state or fact of existing, occurring, or being present in a place or thing."  When we refer to the presence of God, we almost always are referring to God arriving in a particular way.  We all know that God is omnipresent, but it is similar to when His presence came after Solomon's prayer and filled the temple in such a powerful way that the priests couldn't stand and minister (1 Kings 8).  There are varying degrees of this, and reactions.  Not everything melted when He arrived.  The mountains trembles, hills melted, and the earth heaved. The point here is that the presence of God isn't even the physical touch of God, it is merely Him being present in the room with us.  It isn't His voice, miraculous action (although miracles do spontaneously happen in His presence, because as we see in this verse things naturally line up with His will), it is literally Him stepping into the room and standing there.  Not that He won't do anything else, but when we refer to His presence, the beginning of it is this.