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                    ||                       How beautiful on the mountains
                    ||                       are the feet of those ... who
                    ||                       proclaim salvation, who say to
                                             Zion, "Your God reigns!"
          Pastor RALPH & GENE ANN WOOD                  --Isaiah 52:7 (NIV)
          E-mail:  randg.wood@encode.com
          FRESH MANNA, 14/05/1998 ............................. ISAIAH 9:18
          For wickedness burneth as the fire: it shall devour the briers
          and thorns, and shall kindle in the thickets of the forest, and
          they shall mount up like the lifting up of smoke.
                                                      --ISAIAH 9:18 (KJV)
             A large forest fire makes its own weather.  Here, Isaiah gives
          an accurate scientific description of the formation of what is
          called a "convection column".  In Davis' textbook, "Forest Fire
          Control And Use", George M. Byram tells of its power and might:
            "Over major fires and over fires to which one would be most
            likely to apply the term blowup (because of the sudden and
            often unexpected buildup of turbulent energy) there is a well-
            developed convection column which may extend high in the
            atmosphere.  Large fires exhibiting extreme fire behavior have
            convection columns with white water-vapor caps reaching a
            height of 25,000 feet or more.  Since about 70 per cent of the
            total mass of the atmosphere is below this level, these fires
            have literally pierced the atmosphere.  They are truly three-
            dimensional phenomena and have storm characteristics like other
            disturbances in the atmosphere."  [P. 94.]
             Later, Byram describes what a blowup is all about.  He has
          photographs of two types of convection column.  He describes the
          winds generated, and the jumps a big fire can make from a burning
          area to an unburned area of "fresh fuel".  You may be assured you
          don't want to see one!
             And yet we play with the turbulent fire of "wickedness", every
          day.  Strong's Concordance says the Hebrew word used here means,
          "wrong (espec.  moral)".  The KJV translates a closely related
          word as, "iniquity".  The RSV has a footnote, here: "Moral decay
          consumes like a forest fire".  Calvin paraphrases, this fire is
          "the wrath of God", though "their own sins are the fans by which
          it is inflamed and that those sins supply the fuel, and that even
          themselves are consumed by the inward fire of their crimes." This
          fire takes over not just individuals, but nations, if moral sin
          is allowed to kindle unchecked.  Isaiah's image of the out of
          control monster-- the fearsome forest fire, its mighty convection
          column-- clearly portrays what can happen, not just in ancient
          Israel, but in modern nations which condone private immorality,
          or its flagrant public display.  Nations, take note!   --RLW
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