When The 'East Wind' Blows

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.

Williams was supposed to be preaching in California; a grounded flight and a pastor in a hospital put him instead in a Mississippi pulpit on a Sunday afternoon, and he preaches it as a divine detour. His two texts hold one phrase in common: Exodus 10:12-13, where an east wind blows all day and night and brings the locusts — the eighth plague — onto Egypt, and Exodus 14:21, where a strong east wind blows all night and drives back the Red Sea. Between judgment and mercy, he says, there is a very thin line, and the east wind sits on it.

The sermon is a tour of that wind. In Genesis 41 it blasts Pharaoh's thin ears of corn — seven years of famine announced in a dream. In Psalm 48:7 it breaks the ships of Tarshish, the wind Jonah met fleeing from God; and in Jonah 4:8 it beats on the prophet's head outside Nineveh while God teaches him about mercy. Williams' studied claim is that everywhere else in Scripture the east wind means judgment — except Exodus 14, where the same wind, the same hand, the same God, parts the sea for deliverance, on the very shore where the locusts of judgment had been cast dead by the west wind of Exodus 10. The question the sermon keeps asking is therefore personal: which side of the east wind are you on?

The application is a call to get right before the wind has to blow. God, he argues, always offers grace first — Pharaoh did not have to endure all ten plagues; after the eighth he could have listened — and the details of Scripture (be holy, thou shalt not) are not decoration but the terms of staying on the mercy side. His illustration is his own young son, who has reached the age of asking, after a fishing trip or a school day, "Daddy, are you proud of me?" — and who can tell from his father's face whether he is. The altar call turns that question on the congregation — God, are You pleased with me? — and runs into an extended prayer for mercy, for households and neighbors as well as oneself, closing in a deliverance celebration: the same wind that brings judgment, received early enough, brings deliverance instead.

Scripture index: Exodus 10:12-13; Exodus 14:21; Genesis 41:23; Genesis 41:27; Psalm 48:7; Jonah 4:8.