Water in the wilderness: A desert preaches

Something happened in the Judean wilderness last Saturday that the record books say has never happened before. In the middle of August — the deadest, driest heart of an Israeli summer, when the desert east of Jerusalem is supposed to be nothing but dust and heat — the sky opened over the hills, and water ran down through the wadis toward the Dead Sea.

The numbers were startling enough on their own. According to The Times of Israel, Ma’ale Adumim took 11 millimeters of rain in a single hour and around 26 across the day — the most rain ever recorded in that region in the month of August, and only the fourth time since measurements began that anywhere in the country has seen more than 20 millimeters in this month. Jerusalem itself got a soaking it almost never sees at this season.

But the figure that stopped me was not the rainfall total. It was a streambed. Nahal Og, a normally bone-dry channel north of the Dead Sea, filled and flooded — and the Israel Meteorological Service said it was the first flood ever documented there at this time of year. Water ran east through the Judean wilderness, down into the basin of the sea that takes every river and gives none back, at a season when that ground has never once been recorded doing such a thing.

I am a careful reader of Scripture, and I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of moment that tempts a certain sort of Christian to say more than he knows. So let me be plain about what I am not saying before I say anything at all. I am not announcing a fulfillment, and I am not holding up a weather report as a prophecy come true. I have no date to give you, and I distrust the men who claim they do.

What I want to do is quieter than that, and I think harder to dismiss. I want to point out what this particular land, doing this particular thing, has a habit of preaching — and then let you sit with it.

Because water running east through the desert toward the Dead Sea is not a random image in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is one of the most specific pictures the prophets ever drew. Ezekiel was carried in vision to the Temple and shown water coming out from under the threshold, and he watched where it went.

“These waters issue out toward the east country, and go down into the desert, and go into the sea: which being brought forth into the sea, the waters shall be healed” (Ezekiel 47:8).

East, down into the desert, into the sea. And the sea that takes and never gives — the Dead Sea, the lowest and saltiest water on the face of the earth, where nothing lives — is healed, and fills with fish, and everything the river touches lives. That is the direction the water ran last Saturday. Not a claim; a direction. The same compass bearing the prophet was shown.

And Ezekiel is not alone in it. Isaiah, promising the restoration of the land, reached for the same picture and made it a desert one on purpose.

“…for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert” (Isaiah 35:6).

Parched ground turns to pools, thirsty land to springs. The prophets kept returning to this single, stubborn image — the desert, of all places, running with water — because in a land like this one, water where there should be none is the plainest sign a person can be given that the God who made the ground has not forgotten it.

Now here is where I have to be honest with the honest reader, because you deserve it. The meteorologists have an explanation, and it is a good one. They point to a warming Mediterranean, to the pattern some are calling a super El Niño, to the machinery of a changing climate that is pushing moisture into seasons that used to be dry. They may well be right. I am not a meteorologist, and I am not going to stand here and tell you the physics is wrong.

But notice what the physics does and does not settle. Scripture has never disputed the mechanism of the rain; it disputes that the mechanism is all there is. The same Bible that calls rain a covenant blessing (“I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain” (Deuteronomy 11:14)) knows perfectly well that rain arrives through clouds and wind and pressure. How the water gets here was never the question. Whose hand is on the weather is. And the answer the Scripture gives is not shy: “he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). He sendeth. Through the clouds, through the fronts, through the El Niño if you like — but He sendeth.

So I will not tell you last Saturday was a sign. I will tell you it was, at the very least, a sermon — and the preacher was the ground itself, speaking a language the prophets already taught us to read. Water broke out in the wilderness. Streams ran in the desert. The flood went east, toward the sea that only takes, for the first time anyone has written down. And a land that has spent 3,000 years answering to its Maker did the one thing that land is not supposed to be able to do in August.

You can call it climate. I will not fight you on the clouds. But I would gently ask the sceptic to consider that a thing can have a mechanism and a meaning at once — that the rain can come by the front and still come by the hand — and that when a desert starts behaving like a prophecy, the wise response is neither to explain it away nor to shout that the end has come. It is to pay attention. The land is preaching. It would be a strange thing to be standing in Israel and refuse to listen.