The Smoke That Thunders

In November 1855, Scottish missionary David Livingstone paddled a canoe down the Zambezi River in southern Africa. He had heard the indigenous Kololo people speak of Mosi-oa-Tunya — "The Smoke That Thunders." Nothing prepared him for what he found. A curtain of mist rose hundreds of feet into the air. The roar was deafening from a mile away. As he crept to the gorge's edge and peered over, he watched the entire width of the Zambezi — over a mile across — plunge three hundred feet into a chasm so deep the water seemed to vanish into the earth itself. Livingstone, a man who had faced lions, malaria, and years of isolation, later wrote that the scene was so magnificent that angels in their flight must have gazed upon it.

He had spent years bringing the gospel to places no European had walked. Yet here, nature itself was preaching. The ground trembled beneath his feet. The rock walls wept with perpetual spray. Everything solid seemed to dissolve before this thundering display of raw power.

The psalmist knew this feeling long before Livingstone: "The mountains melt like wax before the Lord of all the earth." Psalm 97 reminds us that the Most High reigns above every power we can name or imagine. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne — and before that throne, even mountains bow.