Unseen Protection

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I’d like to tell you about the first time that I ever had a gun pulled on me. I was a new pastor, kind of freshly minted, and we had been called to a kind of rural community. And it was a bit of a struggle, certainly a big adjustment for my wife and I. One morning we sat down and we prayed that God would just sort of show us that he was in our lives and that we had this support.

Now, that night, we were babysitting for another pastor’s kids. They were having their anniversary. And when we got done, it was about one in the morning. We started driving home and it was pitch black in the middle of dark rural Florida. We were driving along. There was a van not too far in front of us, and then all of a sudden there was a bang sound and the car was airborne. When we landed, I pulled over reasonably quickly, opened up the door, got out, and there was just nothing around. It was just pitch black.

And suddenly, out of the darkness, I saw a man just running full tilt at me. Now, this was seemed like good news to me. I thought maybe he had seen what had happened and was coming to help. He had reached into his pocket and I didn’t see it at the time, but my wife did. She saw that he had just pulled a gun. What I saw was this guy come running straight up to me, run right past me, and then disappear off on the other side of the street into the woods.

So as it turns out, what happened was this man was a kidnaper who had carjacked the car, dragged the woman he had kidnaped into that car, and he had been driving the opposite way down the freeway. Now, the woman had jumped out of the car. When she did that, he lost control, slammed into a utility pole, the cord dropped down in front of my car and broke a little electrified hook, poked up, grabbed on to the bottom of my car and discharged a huge amount of electricity which caused the air conditioning to explode. That’s what caused our car to go airborne.

When the car was pulled over there had been smoke billowing out from underneath the hood. And so when the carjacker came running, he saw my car pulled over, thought that we made for a great mark for a car to take. But he saw the smoke coming out from underneath the hood and decided he could probably find better transportation and ran along.

Now, there are so many opportunities that we could have been facing our own demise that day. But it made me think, how many times in life does it occur where you run over the cord and it doesn’t break and you have no idea that God just saved your life three times? That day I could have been killed, that little hook that attached on to the bottom of the car if that had not come detached only about 20 feet away from us, then when I had opened up the door and stepped foot on the ground, I would have been electrocuted and killed.

The accident, which had propelled the car airborne and then caused us to come slamming down. I could have lost control of the vehicle and then killed. The maniac with the gun could have decided that it was worthwhile to kill me and try to take the car, which actually would have gotten him away. I drove the car home that night. It was just the AC that was busted.

So three times that night where I could have been killed, but I wouldn’t have known at all with any of them. If the car had just run over the cord, it hadn’t broken, I’d have gone about my whole night not knowing that God just saved me three times.

We live in a dangerous world. We live in a world that wants to kill us, not just physically. We live in a world that has enmity toward our souls. We live in a world that would like to see us in hell. God’s operation in our lives is extensive, and without Him, we face dangers that we can’t even conceive of. There are so many things hidden from our view because we have a God who loves us so consistently and so persistently that even without our knowledge, he operates.

That night I was saved from some true mortal danger. God goes so much further than that. He has thrown himself between us and destruction eternally. He cares so much about us that the eternal death that we faced, he was willing to face himself instead. Every horror that this world could have thrown at us, Jesus absorbed. Every punishment that we deserved for what we’ve done, Jesus took. The amount of God’s care towards us, the degree to which he was prepared to preserve our lives, took his Son to the cross, where his eternal reward, his eternal life was given to you. Where his empty tomb became a foreshadowing of the eternal life that you have with him.

Knowing that you have the almighty, everlasting, all powerful God working behind the scenes and in front of the scenes inside of your life frees you to live a life of faith, of confidence and of joy.