"He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap; He lays up the deep in storehouses" (Ps. 33:7 NASB).

In the early 1980s, I went out to lunch with a pastor friend. If you have ever been to Texas, you know that we are famous for our barbeque restaurants. The one that my friend and I had gone to for lunch was old and rustic with heavy wooden tables and peanut shells on the floor.

As we sat there and talked about the things pastors talk about, he told me about one of the messages he had preached recently at his church.

"Al," he said, "Let me ask you something: when you think of wood, what do you think of?"

The question really caught me off guard. What was he talking about? "I don't really ever think of wood," I answered.

"No, no, no. Listen, let me ask you again in another way: if I ask you to picture wood in your head, what do you think of?"

Still a bit confused by what he was asking, I looked around the room for a moment and my eyes fell on one of the tables nearby. "Oh, I don't know. How about a wooden table?"

"OK, that's good. But think about this now: when God thinks about wood, he would think of something like the redwood forests of the world, or the Amazon jungle. God doesn't think small like we do. He thinks big." Then he went on before I could respond, "When you think about rock, what do you think of?"

Again I looked around. I caught a view of the gravel in the parking lot outside, so I said, "I don't know, how about rocks on a driveway?"

"OK," he accepted, "but when God thinks of rock, He thinks of something like the Rocky Mountains, the Himalayas, the Appalachians, or the Andes, because He is a God of abundance." Again, he went on, "When you think of water, what do you think of?"

Again, I wanted to say, "I don't think about water," but I knew he wouldn't accept that answer, so I looked around the room again. "How about a glass of water?"

"Well, to know what God thinks when He thinks of water, you would have to go to the oceans of the world—the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and all of them rolled into one—because our God is a God of more than enough."

Seeing Things From God's Perspective
Suddenly, with that picture in my mind, I got all excited on the inside. I knew what he was saying was true. God never did anything without creating more than He needed. He always had hundreds—thousands, millions—of times more than He needed in reserves.

Yet if He knew that He could create anything He wanted, why didn't He just create enough to get by for the moment, and then create the rest to meet the need as it arose later?

Think about this for a moment:
  • To hold the one planet on which He placed humanity, He created a universe with billions of solar systems, many of which hold planets of their own. So why did He need so many extra?
  • To feed Adam and Eve, He created a whole planet of food. Why so much? Why didn't He just wait for the generations to follow to come along and let more food-bearing plants grow as they were needed?
  • If Adam and Eve had needed a drink, would they have needed much more than a stream? But God created enough water to cover 70 percent of the earth! Did He really need so much in reserves to take care of His children?
  • According to Psalm 50, He owns all of the creatures of the forest and the cattle on a thousand hills—if He can create more any time He would like, wouldn't the cattle on 10 hills, or even 100, have been enough?
Look for a moment at what Psalm 33 says about God's creation:
The LORD loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love. By the word of the LORD were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth. He gathers the waters of the sea into jars; he puts the deep into storehouses. Let all the earth fear the LORD; let all the people of the world revere him. For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.
(vv. 5-9 NIV)
God created so much water that He needed to put some of it into the storehouses of the deep to hold it in reserve. Would He ever need all that water? Probably not, because He could always make more. Then why all of the extra?

The Nature of God
Suddenly, I began to see that was just His nature—He is a God of extra, a God of reserves, a God of storehouses. He always has more than He needs no matter what happens. Even in the finite sense of what is on earth, He would never run out and we will never run out of what we need. God doesn't have a scarcity mentality!

Let me give you an example of what I mean. There are lots of people worried today that we will soon run out of fossil fuels to heat our homes and power our cars—if you look at the statistics, this is a reasonable concern.

Yet, at the same time, technologies are already being developed to replace those fuels with hydrogen or solar power. In other words, as humanity needs it, God will reveal to us new technologies to meet our needs until He is ready to come back for us.

Could Adam and Eve ever have imagined that one day the earth would hold more than 6 billion people? And yet, somehow, we are surviving. Despite the desperate needs in many areas of the world, if you were to take all the wealth and food in the world and divide it up, everyone would have more than enough. Why?

Because God created vast storehouses of "extra" when He created the earth! He's a God of storehouses, and he wants you to have a big one, too!

Source: The Storehouse Principle by Al Jandl & Van Crouch.
Excerpt permission granted by CrossStaff Publishing.