Melchizedek shared bread and wine with Abram and blessed him. Abram gave this king a tenth of everything he had gained from the battles. It is from this verse that the church began the tradition of tithing a tenth of everything to the Lord or to His work on earth.
If there are rainbows in the area where you live, remind yourself next time you see one, that God is remembering that promise! And note that it is not a promise between God and people. But between God and EVERY creature on the earth! The whole world in His hands!
Things seemed to go from bad to worse and some of those sailors must have thought Paul was talking rubbish. Especially when they had to swim to land, and those who could not swim clung to pieces of driftwood! But what he said proved to be true. All were saved.
Nowhere in the Bible do we read that life will be easy. We all pass through storms, and unexpected bad weather, and we need good spiritual advisors to help us pilot our way through those things without too much loss of property. We also need to listen to trustworthy voices.
We can apply this principle to many things, not just spiritual life, but physical too. Not just houses, but any kind of investment. There is much evil going on in the financial world and we must beware where we invest even the smallest amount that we might want to save.
Most of us have met people who gave their hearts to Jesus at an emotional moment in a church service or evangelistic campaign. But then they have not found the right church. Or they were not really cared for as baby believers so they quickly went astray or got bored.
God is still the Lord. He still directs the weather patterns. But the devil who sent that storm and ended up being rebuked by Jesus is still alive and trying to bring storms into our lives too. Storms in relationships, storms in our health, and storms in our working environments.
In long ago days it was essential to understand what the weather was going to do. In order to plant the right things at the right time, and to take the right precautions to stop crops being ruined by extreme weather, understanding the message in the sky was very important.
The whole Exodus story seems to me to alternate between God giving the people a miracle, and then the people complaining, so God gives them another miracle! After the manna miracles, they were happy for a while. But then the trouble makers began to complain about their very limited diet.
Moses and Aaron appear before Pharaoh with a threatening promise from The Lord, warning him of a swarm of locusts which would arrive the following day. We can imagine that those listening to this threat did not believe it. Nothing is left once a swarm of insects has passed through.