Why don’t clouds break?
Have you every wondered why clouds that are full of tons of rain, don’t just empty themselves in a massive deluge all at once?
Living in drizzly Manchester (which incidentally, I am a big fan of) I was thinking this thought earlier today.
Job 26:8 gives us a clue. This beautiful text, explains that the clouds don’t break and spill all their water at once, even though millions of tons of water are drawn up from the oceans into them. And, of course, Job was correct. Now, forgive my lack of scientific knowledge here, but, I reckon this is pretty clever! God has a process of gradual cooling that releases the water little by little as it is needed to irrigate the surface of the earth. God revealed it to Job long before geeky bods at weather stations figured it out.
I’m sure all of us know that water has weight, and that its pressure increases dramatically as the depth increases. Certain UFO-like- fish that exist in the very bottom of the ocean (look at exhibit A above for beauty!) are especially engineered by God to withstand this tremendous pressure. If brought quickly up to the surface, they practically explode. No-one would like to be around when that happens, unless fully laminated. Imagine the smell… euuugh.
The pressure that God put into the fish’s muscular structure is still there on the inside when they are brought up where the pressure is not exerted from the outside. This blows my brains. (Although not in a literal sense, or more laminating would be necessary.)
This is a wonderful truth, but check this out… I learnt this incredible fact today: did you realise that we, too, live in the bottom of an atmospheric sea, which also has tremendous weight? At sea level we are living down at the bottom of a very heavy, dense covering. As the ocean is to the fish, so the atmosphere is to us. Every moment we live, a pressure of 14 pounds per square inch is exerted upon our body structure, and that’s pretty heavy. We think a man is strong if he can carry 200 pounds on his back. In fact, the strongest man that ever lived put only 415 pounds over his head. Yet, every single form of life in this world, whether it’s a 90-pound woman (dream on kid) or a burly man, (better) has a constant pressure of over 15 tons at sea level pushing and pressing upon them from every direction. That’s 30,000 pounds! I mean, really! Big numbers! Even bigger God! Even the most delicate-winged insects have been designed by God to withstand their proportion of this pressure. That little teeny fruit fly so annoyingly hovering over my banana, so light and frail that it seems anything could crush it, is built by God to withstand the weight of the atmosphere. Can you think this happened by mere chance? Not on your nelly, or mine (- although I am not at all sure where mine is currently housed…many things have gone astray in the move!)
The air, in other words, is heavy. The atmosphere has weight. If you climb a mountain, the higher you climb, the thinner the atmosphere becomes, and you feel distressed and uncomfortable. Why? Because the pressure is not as great. You see, God has built in a certain amount of pressure that balances that on the outside at sea level. If you went high enough, you would be just as stressed as the fish brought up from the ocean depths. How wonderful that God has designed each living creature to be perfectly comfortable in its own environment.
Clouds don’t break my friend. Fish don’t explode. You and I are alive today for a purpose. What do you make of that?