I’VE LIVED IN California all my life, so earthquakes are nothing new to me (for that matter, neither are wildfires, but that’s another story). Indeed, an earthquake once put the final exclamation point on a class I was teaching. I had just ended the final lecture with a rhetorical flourish, and invited the class to join me in a closing prayer — and then the room began to rumble and shake.

We were on the top floor of the building, which probably made the movement more extreme. I watched many of my students’ eyes widen in terror as they froze in their seats; some dove under the tables. Thankfully, it was all over in a matter of seconds.

But if someone needed an attention-grabbing way to bring home a sermon, that would surely do the trick.

Anyone watching the scene would probably have thought me to be completely unperturbed. I stood there stoically looking around the room, taking in the chaos. But that’s not to say that I had no reaction at all. Yes, to some extent earthquakes are old hat. But my heart jumps whenever I feel the house shake; my mind is immediately on high alert. Earthquakes are, after all, an undeniable and forceful reminder that we can be at the mercy of powers beyond our control.

And lest we forget: that includes the power of God.

PSALM 114 IS the second in the series of psalms known collectively as the Hallel, and at a mere eight verses is even shorter than Psalm 113. Psalm 114 is the main reason this group of songs or poems is associated with the Passover; it’s the only one of the six to make explicit reference to the people’s exodus from Egypt. But their whole history from the Exodus to their settlement in the land of Canaan is summarized in just two verses:

When Israel came out of Egypt,
    Jacob from a people of foreign tongue,
Judah became God’s sanctuary,
    Israel his dominion. (Ps 114:1-2, NIV)

Verse 1, obviously, is the reference to the Exodus. Then, in verse 2, the psalmist seems to be describing a time after the conquest of Canaan, when the land was divided up between the tribes. The phrase “Judah became God’s sanctuary” may be a reference to King David bringing the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem. But all of Israel, not just the territory of Judah, was God’s dominion, especially in the years before the names “Israel” and “Judah” came to represent two separate and rival kingdoms.

In the next pair of verses, the song continues to celebrate the events of the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan, but in a less direct and more poetic fashion:

The sea looked and fled,
    the Jordan turned back;
the mountains leaped like rams,
    the hills like lambs. (vss. 3-4)

Here, the psalmist remembers two miraculous crossings that demonstrated the power of God. The first is when God held back the waters of the Red Sea to allow his people to escape from Pharaoh’s army (Exod 14). Using imagery similar to that of other cultures of the time, the psalmist personifies the sea as seeing the coming of the Divine Warrior and fleeing before him in terror. The second is when God stopped the flow of the River Jordan so the people could cross over into Canaan (Josh 3). The river was at flood stage and should have been impassable — but not for a God who could part the sea.

And what happened after the people entered Canaan? The psalmist says that the mountains and hills leaped like rams and lambs respectively. The Hebrew verb translated as “leaped” is typically used for joyous celebration. Thus, while the sea saw the coming of God and ran away in terror, the land is pictured as a frolicking lamb, as if it rejoiced in the coming of God’s people.

Verses 5 and 6 turn the previous two verses into rhetorical questions:

Why was it, sea, that you fled?
    Why, Jordan, did you turn back?
Why, mountains, did you leap like rams,
    you hills, like lambs? (vss. 5-6)

The imagery and questions are probably meant to be a bit playful. The psalmist doesn’t bother to answer the questions outright, but instead issues a command:

Tremble, earth, at the presence of the Lord,
    at the presence of the God of Jacob,
who turned the rock into a pool,
    the hard rock into springs of water. (vss. 7-8)

God had been present to his people throughout their journey from Egypt to Canaan. He parted the waters of the Red Sea; he stopped the waters of the Jordan. And in between, when the people complained of thirst in the wilderness, he provided water for them to drink. Water from a rock? No problem for the God who created all things.

The psalmist seems to emphasize the point by using a kind of parallelism in the final verse; the same thing is said twice with different words. As the New International Version translates it, God “turned the rock into a pool” and “the hard rock into springs of water.” But the second statement is more intense than the first. What the NIV translates as “hard rock” can also be translated as “flint” — one of the hardest substances known to the psalmist’s readers — and God can turn it into flowing water. In other words, it’s not just that God can miraculously transmute one substance into another. In contemporary terms, it would be like asking, “What kind of power does it take to liquefy diamonds?”

That’s the kind of power at which the earth itself should tremble.

And presumably, so should the nations. Note that nowhere in the psalm does the psalmist use the holy name of God, which in English translations is usually rendered as “the LORD.” Instead, God is referred to as “the God of Jacob,” echoing the mention of the “house of Jacob” in verse 1. This supremely powerful God, in other words, is the God of a particular people: the people for whom he parted the sea and cut off a river to make a way for them, the people for whom he turned the hardest of rock into flowing water to slake their thirst.

Don’t mess with this God, the psalmist seems to say. And if you know what’s good for you, don’t mess with his people either. The psalm reminds us why the Old Testament speaks so often of the “fear of the LORD.” The power of the one who can do all these things — divide the sea, cut off a river, make water flow from a rock, and more — is not to be taken for granted.

AND WHAT ABOUT us? Some of us are so accustomed to hearing a gospel of love and grace that to hear someone speak of the “fear of the LORD” is a bit off-putting. No, no, no, we’re tempted to think, never mind all that. We’ve got the New Testament now. We’ve got Jesus. But the God of the Old Testament is still the God of the New. God’s nature hasn’t changed. His power is still beyond our imagination.

Scared of the sea? The sea fled before him. Afraid of earthquakes? Then what about the one before whom the earth itself trembles, the one who made the earth by the mere power of his word?

We are the recipients of God’s grace and mercy, and for that we should be grateful. But for grace to be received and appreciated truly as grace, we must never forget: we are first at God’s mercy, and only then the recipients of it.