The rain had been drilling into the sea for three days. It wasn’t a storm of wild, theatrical fury, but a steady, oppressive deluge that dissolved the horizon into a sheet of wet iron. Eliab’s small boat, the *Dawn Chaser*, rose and fell in the deep, muscular swells with a weary creak of soaked timber. He’d long since stopped trying to bail. The water around his ankles was cold, a permanent companion.

He was a fisherman, a man more familiar with the moods of the water than the faces in his own village. He knew its morning calm, its afternoon treachery, its silver-backed bounty. But this was different. This felt older. This rain and heaving sea spoke not of a passing squall, but of something primordial, as if the foundations of the world were being tested. The phrase from his grandfather’s prayers surfaced in his mind, unbidden: *The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice.*

Wrapping a sodden cloak tighter, he squinted into the grey. There was no shore, no sky, only the endless, lifting walls of water. He felt a fool for venturing out, but the catch had been poor, and his children’s eyes had that hollow look. Now, he was a speck, a piece of driftwood in the vast, churning throat of the deep. A profound loneliness gripped him, colder than the seawater. It was the loneliness of a creature facing a force that existed before mountains, before dry land, before breath.

He remembered the stories, the ancient tales of chaos, of *tehom*—the deep, formless void that was before the Word. This, he thought, must be what it sounds like. Not a roar, but a low, relentless groan, the voice of many waters. He felt his own insignificance press down on him, a weight more tangible than the rain.

Then, as another great swell lifted the *Dawn Chaser* towards its slippery peak, something shifted. It wasn’t a break in the clouds. It was a change in the quality of the sound. Beneath the hiss of rain and the boom of waves, Eliab sensed a deeper tone. It was not a sound heard with the ear, but felt in the bone, in the trembling of the boat’s keel. A stability. A bass note beneath the cacophony.

His gaze, which had been skittering fearfully over the next threatening wave, steadied. He looked, truly looked, at the sea itself. Its power was undeniable, colossal. It could shatter coasts and grind stone to sand. Yet, it was *contained*. It rose in great, foaming crests only to be drawn back, again and again, by a law it could not break. Its boundaries, though they roared and frothed, were fixed. It was mighty, but it was not sovereign.

The realisation came upon him not as a shout, but as a settling. The Lord reigns.

The words formed in his heart, a quiet counterpoint to the din. *He is clothed with majesty.* The majesty was not in the stilling of the storm—the storm raged on—but in the fact that the storm itself was His garment. This terrible, beautiful chaos was merely the robe He wore. The Lord is clothed with strength; He has girded Himself. The sea’s strength was borrowed, on loan from a greater strength that held it in place.

The boat pitched violently, but Eliab’s fear had melted into a raw, awe-filled wonder. He was no longer a speck facing an infinite, hostile force. He was a man standing—no, kneeling now in the bilge water—in the presence of a King whose throne was established of old. The very chaos that terrified him was proof of the throne. A weak king has a quiet kingdom. A mighty King has roaring subjects. And this King, from eternity, had set the world so that it could not be moved.

His thoughts tumbled over the stories of his people. The flood in Noah’s day. The Red Sea standing in heaps. Not victories over non-existent foes, but demonstrations. The floods lifted up, they lifted up their voice… but mightier than the thunder of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, was the Lord on high.

The rain began to slacken. Not abruptly, but as if the downpour had simply exhausted its allotted portion. The iron-grey light softened to the colour of a dove’s wing. Eliab, shivering, looked at his own hands, raw and wrinkled from the water. They were the hands of a man who would return to a small house, to bread that needed earning, to a life of mundane toil. But something had changed. The world had been put into a frame.

The sea was still powerful. His life would still be hard. But the throne stood. It was older than the sea, older than the rain, founded before the first star was kindled. The decrees of that throne, the testimonies of its King, were very sure. Holiness, his grandfather would whisper, befits Your house, O Lord, forevermore.

As a sliver of pale gold finally tore the clouds to the west, gilding the still-heaving waves, Eliab pulled on the oars. His muscles burned, but the motion was steady. He was rowing not just towards a hidden shore, but in a universe that was fixed, held, and ultimately, ruled. The waters had shouted their strength. And in their very shouting, they had declared the glory of a Strength that would never, ever, be moved.