Daily Devotional – April 14, 2020

says this, deliver me out of the mire and let me not sink.

Let me be delivered from them that hate me and out of the deep waters.

And then Psalm 23, familiar verse, verse 4, yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil for you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

The reason I wanted to share those verses, a couple weeks ago, I guess it's been a couple weeks ago now,

I saw a couple of video clips from some of these faith healer, televangelist types and they could be kind of humorous if they weren't so sad.

One of them was, I mean very angry, he just had this mean scowl on his face like he was like he was doing battle and going to get into a boxing match with somebody.

But his boxing opponent wasn't another person but it was the

COVID -19. And so he had this very fierce look on his face and he's got his fist clenched and he was ordering

COVID -19 to die. He just ordered, he just kept ordering

COVID -19 to die. Now the other guy that I saw, the other video clip

I saw, the guy, he wasn't ordering the virus to die but he was pretty much rebuking its power so that people would stop getting sick and dying as if he could and had the ability through his incantation to, you know, just rebuke the virus and it would go away and nobody else would get sick, nobody else would die.

Well, that was a couple weeks ago. I'm not exactly sure what explanation they have for their commands and their rebukes not accomplishing what they said they should and thereby failed so miserably.

Well, my purpose today is not so much to criticize these guys and to bash them and the nonsense that they're purporting there as it is to kind of address an underlying idea that they and others may have.

And the idea would go along something like this. Many Christians seem to think that the way

God handles diseases and disasters such as COVID -19 and the like, especially in relation to the followers of Jesus, is to completely deliver them from it, to completely deliver

God's people from those diseases or the disasters. But is that so?

Is that what God tells us in his word? I believe God does deliver and I believe he delivers his people, but I think he does so in at least three different ways.

And there may be some overlap in these ways and there may be a little bit of nuance that would see a both and kind of a thing.

But I do think we can find some helpful distinctions here in seeing how

God delivers. In some cases, God does deliver his people from something.

But in other cases, he delivers his people out of something.

And yet there are other cases where God delivers his people through something.

I want to talk about these things in the next couple of days. And today, let's think about the first, that God does sometimes deliver his people from disease and disasters and so on.

And I think the distinction is this. The disease may be all around them, all around us.

And the threat is very real. It's pervasive. It keeps knocking at the door, if you will.

But God graciously delivers from the threat so that the disease or the disaster never touches them.

So for example, let's think about an Old Testament situation. Think about the

Israelite people, the Hebrew people in Egypt. Now, by the way, remember

God didn't prevent them from experiencing some pretty terrible affliction when they were in Egypt.

They were enslaved. They were in bondage. And that bondage and enslavement and the harshness of it all only got worse.

But anyway, you know the story. God sent the 10 plagues upon the

Egyptians, the nation of Egypt. And what was the ultimate outcome of the sending of those plagues?

Well, the Israelites escaped the slavery of their Egyptian captors.

But follow along here. One of the plagues, the swarms of flying insects, maybe flies or some similar kind of pest.

Those swarms of flies filled the skies and they covered the ground.

And they did so throughout the entire land of Egypt, except where the

Israelites were living. The Israelites, the Hebrew people, were delivered from the swarms.

The swarms never touched them. And that same thing happened not only with the swarms of flies, but with a disease that struck all the livestock.

All the livestock of the Egyptians got this disease. They got sick and many died.

But the animals of God's people were delivered from those diseases.

They never got sick. They never did perish. And the same thing with a really, really horrific hailstorm came through and devastated crops all over the nation of Egypt, except for where the

Hebrew people were living. They were delivered from the hailstorm.

Okay, so do you see this? They were delivered from the flying insects, never touched them. The animals were delivered from the disease that wasted the animals of the

Egyptians. They were delivered from the hailstorm. Their crops in their area were not destroyed at all by the hail.

We see the same kind of deliverance in the New Testament. And there are many, many examples of this, but let me just share this one.

So the Apostle Paul, last week, early in the week, we talked about Paul who wrote the letter to the

Philippians. And at the time he wrote that letter to the Philippians, he was under house arrest in Rome.

It wasn't the first time he'd been arrested. By the way, he was arrested. God didn't deliver him from being arrested.

No, he was under house arrest when he wrote Philippians. But there was an earlier time in his career as an apostle when he was arrested, and he was arrested in Jerusalem.

And while Paul was in prison in Jerusalem, there he is, he's in prison. God did not deliver him from being in prison, but he's awaiting trial.

And Paul's nephew overheard a story, overheard a bunch of Jewish people talking, 40 of them, who made a kind of a pact that they wanted to kill

Paul. And they made a plan that when Paul was going to go from prison to the hearing where the hearing was being held, they were going to assassinate him.

Well, Paul's nephew overheard that plot, and he was able to intervene and tell the situation to the authorities.

Excuse me. And Paul was delivered from that assassination plot.

The assassins never had the opportunity to lay hand on him, to lay hand on him.

So here's the point. Here's the point. Even though none of us, none of us are escaping any impact whatsoever from the pandemic.

I mean, we're all experiencing some impact from this thing. The vast majority of us will be delivered from the disease itself.

So by God's grace, the germ that can cause terrible cough and terribly high fever,

God delivers you from ever receiving that germ in your body.

He does that. And you can probably recount many ways that God has delivered you from something, a terrible car accident, a dangerous storm, whatever.

I'm thinking that we probably don't know the half of all the ways that God delivers us from something, but that's not the only way

God delivers. We'll talk about the other two ways in the days to come. Now, by the way, yesterday

I posted a pastor's page entry on this very subject. It's called

Deliverance One Way or Another, and I encourage you to read that. I'm posting on the church homepage by the video for today's devotional a link to that post, and I'll also do that on Facebook and on YouTube as well.

But as we close this afternoon, let me just remind you of a promise that Jesus made to his disciples.

He also called them his brothers and his friends. He said, I am with you always.

I will never leave you nor forsake you. And remember

Psalm 23 verse four, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil. Why? For you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Well, I trust that you're walking in that comfort today, knowing that as you go through this time of restriction and inconvenience and all the rest that's involved with the

COVID -19 thing, that you're aware of the presence of your God. And I trust and pray that he will continue to deliver you from that horrible sickness.

So let's pray and ask God's blessing on the rest of our day as we go forward from here.

So our Father and our God, we thank you that there are many, many times that you do deliver your people from difficult things, from terrible diseases, from disasters, accidents, death, and you are so faithful and kind and gracious when you do so.

I pray that we would trust you today in this day as we go through it and as we journey on through this time of inconvenience and challenge in our lives.

So bless us as we go today. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen. All right.