Living understanding, Pt 45: God protects

Psalm 91:1-8                          1Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.  2I will say of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”  3Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence.  4He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.  5You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, 6nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday.  7A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.  8You will only observe with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked.

Especially in Psalms do we find the situation where Scripture doesn’t seem to match reality.  Particularly in Psalm 91 we find a description of God’s protection which must seem perplexing to any believer who has lost a loved one.  “I found no refuge,” one might say, or “I wasn’t protected from fear!”  This dilemma is more related to attitude than danger though, so the apparent disconnect between faith and circumstance is not as real as we might think.

Faith and circumstance

The key to understanding this Psalm lies in verse 8 where the believer ‘will see the punishment of the wicked’.  This means the tragedies contained in the previous verses are not general in nature.  All of us will agree that calamities happen to righteous as well as wicked, and that there is an appointed time for all of us to meet our maker.  Equally, we recognize God is a righteous God.  This means that divine reward comes to the righteous and divine retribution to the wicked.  We should remember that the wicked are not welcomed into God’s refuge; they are forever on the outside subject to affliction.  Not so with the righteous.  While we are frail and fragile and prone to failure, our heart is to seek the forgiveness and protection of our Father God, and he is willing and able to do exactly that.

Refuge and fortress

Looking at the list of calamities, we find references to disease, to battles, to fears in the wee hours, and that even though we see many succumb to such things they won’t touch us.  But we do encounter disease, our young men do die in war, and we do wake in the middle of the night fearing some approaching conflict.  So, just is God telling us here?  The thing to remember is that while righteous and wicked alike face physical battles, God protects his people from Satan’s attacks.  It is overly optimistic to think the righteous won’t have difficulties and challenges in life.  We live in a fallen world after all, and bad things happen to good people.

How do we respond to those bad things?  The focus of these verses is not that bad things won’t happen, but that God will help us through them.  More importantly, God will help us through the spiritual battle of life.  All of our life is a spiritual battle, one long continuous one, first to come to know Jesus as Savior because of the storms of life, but then to grow in intimate relationship with Him in spite of those storms.

So, we don’t grown or grumble, but seek to understand what it is God wants us to learn in a particular circumstance, or what spiritual muscle needs to be strengthened, or what thorn in the flesh needs to be overcome.

Under his wings

I have never lived on a farm, but I have friends who have, and they have told me stories about how a mother hen will protect her chicks from danger.  If the mother senses danger, she doesn’t run to them to gather them but spreads her wings to their widest reach and begins a frenetic clucking.  The chicks, spread about the yard, all run to her, tuck themselves underneath as the mother lowers her wings to draw them in next to her.  In so doing, the mother doesn’t risk the one in favor of the other, but all the chicks run simultaneously to her.

The analogy is clear:  If we run to God when danger is near, not waiting exposed for him to come to us, we reduce the danger and increase our safety.  Satan thus must attempt to go through God himself to get to us.  This is not going to happen.

37“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. (Matthew 23:37)

What about me?

Do you trust that God is real?  Yes, you say.  Then do you trust that he will keep his word?  Again, yes.  Well then, if the world seems bleak around you then the problem must not be with God, it must be with you.  Remember, he sees what you do not and understands what you do not.  If it seems God is not fulfilling his promises maybe the time is not right yet.  Maybe we haven’t recognized that the fulfillment has happened.  There certainly have been times when I have recognized that good has come from difficult times even though it seemed as if the world was falling about me during those times.

There is evil in the world, and we can be affected by it.  Evil is not orderly, and it does not make sense.  God doesn’t create evil, and he doesn’t use evil to teach lessons or punish the righteous.  Sometimes bad things happen because we do stupid things.  In such situations neither God nor Satan had anything to do with it—it was just our own fault.  But God can use these situations for his purposes, no matter how they happened.

In any case, despite what we think we understand, God’s protection extends at day and at night.  If we struggle, he will help us through.  If we fall, he will lift us up.  If we repent, he will forgive us.