Daily Devotional – April 15, 2020

You just got done slicing jalapenos for a batch of nachos, and you need to take your contacts out. That's like 20 seconds of scrubbing, y 'all.". Well, that'd do it, and very necessary. I hope you're praying these days for our government officials, the elected officials, praying for them to have wisdom, to do the right things, to make the right decisions.

I understand that the House of Representatives has decided to take a month off, and we all may have some opinions about that. My personal opinion is that maybe it'd be good for them to stay at the job through the crisis, but nevertheless, they definitely need wisdom.

Humility for Elected Officials

But I think also we should pray for elected officials to have some humility, and if they don't have it, to actually be humbled. I think, for example, of this quote that I heard Governor Cuomo from New York make the other day, and pardon me for sounding political and all this kind of stuff, but the reason I'm bringing this up is not political, but it's spiritual.

It's not because of who it is, it's because of what he said. The politicians, including Governor Cuomo, have been very vocal about asking us to pray, pray for the virus to end, and all this kind of stuff, and so Governor Cuomo passed on numbers for New York that showed that the numbers were reducing, numbers of new cases were falling, and deaths were falling, and so forth.

But then he said this, and this is what's disturbing. He said, quote, the number's down because we brought the numbers down. God didn't do it, faith didn't do it, end quote. God didn't do it. Isn't it ironic that on the one hand, they tell everybody to pray, but then when something positive comes, we did it, not God.

I saw someone comment on that, said, sounds a little bit like Nebuchadnezzar. If you don't know that story, look it up in the Bible, not Nebuchadnezzar taking credit for himself when he should have given it to God.

But anyway, that just, to me, pointed out the fact that we need to pray that these officials just have some humility about them, and that God will bring them to their knees if need be. Well, again, let me share with you these couple of verses from the Psalms that I shared yesterday, and continue the thought about God delivering.

God Delivers from Harm

Psalm 69, 14, 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. Yea, Psalm 23, 4, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

So yesterday I began dealing with the question of whether we should expect God to deliver us, always to deliver us from a disaster or a disease like COVID -19. Some Christians seem to think that if we just have enough faith that we will be delivered and never have to deal with it, and so forth.

But is that so? Is that what God has told us in his word? Is that the examples that God has set forth in the scripture? I do believe that God does deliver his people, but not always in the same way. I think there are at least three different ways that we can distinguish, and as I mentioned yesterday, there may be some overlap, and sometimes the ideas are used synonymously, but I think we can distinguish between these three ways.

We can say that in some cases God does deliver his people from a disease. In other cases, God delivers people out of a disease. And then in a third way, God delivers his people through the disease. So yesterday we saw some examples of God delivering his people from harmful things.

Even as the psalmist says, let me be delivered from them that hate me, so that the harmful thing is all around you or the individual, but God delivers them from ever being affected by it harmfully. But today I want to consider that sometimes God delivers his people out of dangerous, miserable, or otherwise harmful circumstances.

Again, the psalmist prayed, deliver me out of the mire, out of the deep water. So in this case, here you are, you're in the middle of it. You're in the middle of the mire. You're in the middle of the deep water.

You're feeling all the pain and the distress, and then suddenly, almost, if not miraculously, God delivers you out of it. Again, let's think about the Hebrew people in Egypt. For years, years, they endured brutal afflictions, enslaved and forced to work long, grueling days under the cruel treatment of harsh, harsh taskmasters.

And for quite some time, they cried out to God long and hard for deliverance. And finally, it came. He graciously, miraculously delivered them out of Egypt. In fact, on the day of their deliverance, Moses told the people this, he said, remember this day in which you came out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, for by a strong hand, the Lord brought you out from this place.

So they were experiencing all of the pain, all of the misery, all of the heartache. And that was going on for quite some time. And then all of a sudden, God delivered them out of that. Years to come in Israel's history, there were occasions when they're in the land of promise, they arrive there, living in the land, and then they were threatened by enemy armies.

And those armies came out against Israel. And Israel, the armies of Israel, had to go and battle against those armies. And it was a very real battle. The armies that they were facing had real weapons and life-threatening things.

Their lives, the livelihood of the Israelite people, and the nation itself, the existence of the nation itself, they were all in peril. But oftentimes, God delivered. Just as he promised on this one occasion to deliver them from the Philistines, when he said this, he said, By the hand of my servant David, I will save my people Israel out of the hand of the Philistines and out of the hand of all their enemies.

So again, they had to go into the battle, they had to fight the battle, but God delivered them out of the hand of the Philistines. He delivered them out of the difficulty. And so he made that promise, and he did.

God Delivers Out of Trouble

And we see this same kind of deliverance in the New Testament, too. Remember that time when Jesus and his disciples, they were in a boat crossing the Sea of Galilee? All of a sudden, this big storm came up, and the wind was just horrific.

The waves are crashing over the side of the boat, and the boat's taking on water. And Jesus is in the back of the boat, sleeping, taking a nap. So it's not bothering him any. He's sound asleep. He's perfectly at rest in all this.

But not the disciples. They are in great distress, and they're fearing for their life. They're convinced that if something doesn't happen, they're going down, and they're all going to perish. And so they come to Jesus, these panic-stricken disciples.

They come to Jesus in this great terror, and accused him of not caring. So what did Jesus do? He got up, spoke a word, and immediately, the wind, the waves stopped. He delivered them out of that life-threatening storm.

On another occasion, Peter was in prison. This was after the resurrection and after the ascension, and Peter had been preaching and so forth, and he was placed in prison. And he was under a death sentence.

The next day, Herod was going to execute Peter. And that night, while in prison, Peter falls asleep. He's sound asleep. And in the middle of the night, an angel comes to him, kicks him on the side, wakes him up, says, come on, come with me.

And the angel leads him out of the prison and opens the gate miraculously. The gates open up, and the outer gate of the prison opens up, and the angel leads Peter out into the middle of the street, middle of town, and then the angel leaves.

And Peter, he thought maybe he was dreaming or something, and he came to his senses and realized, I've been delivered out of jail. And he said this, he says, now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me out of the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting.

So in the New Testament, we have some examples of that. And in modern life, these examples occur from time to time as well. Think for example, and I've heard of these kinds of stories, a patient who's diagnosed with terminal cancer.

You could see on the x-ray, CAT scans or whatever, this tumor that is a massive tumor, and it's inoperable. They can't do anything for him. And they give the person six months to live. And they go back a month later to see just how bad the cancer, the tumor has grown, and it is almost non-existent.

And everybody's stunned. Doctors are shocked. What in the world has happened here? And they go back a month later and there's no trace of the tumor whatsoever. And God has graciously delivered that person out of that cancer, out of that distress.

Or I have a friend, actually a guy who was the best man in my wedding, who was a pilot. He flew Piper Cubs and these single engine planes and so forth. And one night he was flying from Greenville, South Carolina, down to Atlanta, to the Atlanta airport and got, I don't know, 10 minutes or so, 15 minutes away from the airport and ran out of gas.

That's not something you do when you pilot a plane, but he ran out of gas. And the only thing you could do is try to land a plane on a highway. And he did. And you talk about a life-threatening, distressing situation.

He had to land his plane on the highway. Unfortunately, it was late at night, wasn't any traffic, and he ended up crash landing the plane on this highway. And I saw pictures of the... The guy walked away.

He walked away from it. I saw pictures of the aftermath and there's all of this wreckage of the plane. It's hardly identifiable as a plane. And the only thing that's really recognizable is the pilot's seat.

And it's just sitting up on the top of this rubble. And you can see the seatbelt strap there and everything. And it was like the whole plane collapsed all around him and God delivered him out of the disaster of that death.

So when it comes to this pandemic, here's the point. The vast majority of God's people are going to be delivered from the disease itself. We'll never get to sickness. Some, though, probably very, very few, may be terribly sick with COVID -19 one day, feeling like they're going to die, high temperature and all the rest of this.

And God, in his sovereign grace and purposes, delivers them out of that sickness. And miraculously, 24 hours later, they feel better, feel almost like they never had any sickness at all. God can and sometimes does deliver out of things like this.

Not as often as we would like, perhaps, but he can. And in his time and in his way and in his providence, he sometimes does. Yep, there's another way that God delivers. And we'll talk about that one tomorrow.

So I hope you can tune back in tomorrow at noon and we'll talk about that third way that God delivers. Well, today, let me leave you with this reminder that God gave to Israel in Psalm 81, verse 7. He says,.