Holy Smoke!

        Waking before daylight one brisk December day, I shivered as I hurried to dress and then opened the door to go to the kitchen for breakfast. Instead of the usual appetizing aroma of bacon frying on the stove and biscuits toasting in the over, a pungent odor of wood smoke and loud voices from outside greeted me.¹

            My great-grandfather, William Clayton Watson, was born on President Abraham Lincoln's Inauguration Day: March 4, 1861. At some point in his lifetime, he penned a clever little poem that passed down through the generations of my family:

Tobacco is an Indian weed;

T’was the devil that sowed the seed.

It stains the pockets and scents the clothes

And makes a chimney of the nose.

            Whether smoke rises from a flesh chimney or a brick one, it almost always signals that something is burning! In Scripture, on the other hand, the sign of smoke frequently indicated the Presence of God – a “Holy Smoke” if you will.

             “It came about when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch…On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram” (Genesis 15:17-18 NASB).

 “There was thunder and lightning flashes and a thick cloud upon the mountain and a very loud trumpet sound…Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire, and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace…Moses spoke and God answered him in the thunder” (Exodus 19:16-19 NASB).

            “One called out to another and said, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is filled with His glory. And the foundations of the threshold trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke” (Isaiah 6:3-4 NASB).

            O Lord, make our hearts Holy-Smoke detectors – alerting us to the earthshaking, all consuming, wonder-working Presence of God!

           

1   Jill Watson Glassco. The Schoolhouse (Peoria, AR: LifeHouse Publishing, 2012), 37.

(The Schoolhouse is available online at Amazon.com)