When the Mountain Reminded Us Who Reigns

On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted with the force of five hundred atomic bombs. The blast leveled 230 square miles of forest in minutes. Trees that had stood for centuries snapped like matchsticks. Spirit Lake, once a glassy mirror for hikers and fishermen, was buried under 600 feet of debris. Geologist David Johnston, stationed six miles away at an observation post, radioed his final words: "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"

The eruption was so powerful it was heard in Montana, 600 miles away. An entire mountainside — a billion cubic yards of rock — simply vanished. What had seemed permanent, immovable, eternal, was gone before lunch.

And yet that was just a mountain.

The psalmist writes that mountains melt like wax before the Lord of all the earth. The very things we consider most solid and enduring — granite peaks, ancient ridges, the bedrock itself — become soft and yielding in the presence of the Most High. If a single volcanic eruption can reshape the geography of a continent, how much greater is the One whose throne rests on righteousness and justice, the One before whom the heavens themselves proclaim glory?

This is the God who reigns. Not a distant abstraction, but the Almighty whose presence makes the earth tremble and the islands rejoice. The mountains know it. The question is whether we do.