"God, Please Send Rain!"

(Photo cred: Ron Frazler "Cornfield")

(Originally written for Douglas County Publishing: Pastor's Meditation July 11, 2017)

Season after season, year after year, we find ourselves turning to God, and offering prayers of thanks, petition, even pleading in regard to the weather.  In times like right now when we’ll take as much moisture as we can get here in southern South Dakota and I’ve heard about the even drier conditions to our north, we ask God regularly to send rain.  That’s the refrain in prayers around dinner tables, coffee groups, Sunday services, and the fields and roads as farmers and people living near farms are reminded again of our dependence upon God.

We know it’s not really “Mother Nature” that dictates what happens, though we might sometimes use that language.  It’s not random chance that a pressure system goes through one area and storms follow.  It’s not the weather people with all their computers and technology putting out radars and predictions, who make things happen.  Sometimes they can say there’s a 0% chance of precipitation, and yet we end up getting around half an inch! 

No, it’s God who is in control of the weather.  We find this taught throughout the Bible.  Leading up to the flood, God said to Noah, “I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7:4).  If the Israelites would obey the commands, the covenant, that they entered into with God, he promised, “I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees of the field their fruit” (Leviticus 26:4).  In 1 Kings 17, we read of Elijah, a prophet of God, setting a curse that unless he asked for it, there would not be rain in the land “in the next few years” because of King Ahab’s wicked idolatry.  Jeremiah includes declarations from God that he is the one “who gives autumn and spring rains in season, who assures us of the regular weeks of harvest” (Jeremiah 5:24), and “Do any of the worthless idols of the nations bring rain?  Do the skies themselves send down showers?  No, it is you, O Lord our God.  Therefore our hope is in you, for you are the one who does all this” (Jeremiah 14:22). 

The New Testament continues to testify to the sovereignty of God over weather.  Jesus said, “[The Father in heaven] causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45).  In the city of Lystra, among people who thought they were the pagan gods Zeus and Hermes, apostles Paul and Barnabas taught the crowd, “[The living God] has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy” (Acts 14:17).  James reminds his audience of Elijah’s situation and the power of prayer to God (James 5:17-18).

I could continue to share passages that allude to God’s power and control over all things, even nature, but I think you get the point.  He has this; it’s not even a question!  The rain is an expression of his kindness, by which he provides for us.  So wherever you are, you, a believer, can cry out to God, “Please send rain!” and you are asking him to be kind to us.

The rain is for us, for the carrying on of human life, but we also ought to remember that the praiseworthy acts of God in something like rain, also testify to his care for his creation.  God is kind to it as well.  He created on the third day, “vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees…that bear fruit with seed in it…And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:11, 12).  These were given to man and “to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food” (Genesis 1:29-30).  So we see it’s not just for us, but animals too.

But God did not create simply for the satisfaction of hunger, for the provisions of meals.  In the pleasure of God, for his glory, we read in Genesis 2:9 that he “made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.”  Creation was not just for the utility, the usefulness of man, beast, bird, and all other creatures, but it was for beauty as well.  Flowers, both growing wild and transplanted into landscapes; trees, young and old, tall and strong or small and weak; grasses, corn, beans, sunflowers, and everything else—not only for bearing fruit and seed of various kinds but also pleasing to the eye.  God gave this dual purpose.

The rains not only work to our advantage and the satisfaction of the farmer’s hopeful harvest, but God sends rains also to sustain the beauty of his creation!  The Belgic Confessions (one of the Reformed confessions written in 1561) explains that we know God by his holy and divine Word but also, “By the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20” (Article 2). 

I’ll let you follow up in reading Romans 1, but let us be reminded that God not only cares about us, but he cares about his creation as well.  He gives us all good things that we might be sustained and able to turn to him and give gratitude to him.  He also gives us so many blessings that simply cause us to wonder and stand in awe.  He chooses to sustain things even for the purpose of being beautiful, that we would also search for the even more beautiful Creator and Redeemer.