God who Delivers us
Psa
3:8 From
the LORD
comes deliverance.
So
we have seen previously that the Lord reigns from heaven, and that
He sees and acts, and the things He does affect us here and now. In
fact David was able to say that God was a shield to him, as He came
and stood between David and those who would harm him. Thus God was
not ‘out there' but ‘down here' right now.
Now,
at the end of that same psalm comes this claim, that from
the LORD
comes deliverance.
This phrase is worth pondering upon because it is an extension of
what we considered in the previous meditation. God doesn't stand outside
our affairs when people rise against us, but He stands between them
and us. But He doesn't just stand there, maintaining the situation
as it was, He changes it, and He delivers us.
Do
you remember the story of David and Goliath? When David came to his
brothers at the battlefront, he found the two armies in a place of
stalemate, or of stand-off. For forty days Goliath came out and taunted
the Israelites and nothing happened (1 Sam 17:16).
It needed someone to DO something, to change the situation, to deliver
Israel from
this place. You sometimes see it in a playground at school, two groups
of children challenging each other, but no one actually wanting to
provoke the situation further because they are unsure of the outcome.
That's what happens to us sometimes. Something happens and a bad situation
forms. We want to do something about it but we don't know how. We'd
love to break through to change the thing but we feel powerless. We
need delivering out of this situation, and that's what the Lord does.
Paul
conveyed the same sense in his letter to the Colossians: “he
has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the
kingdom of the Son” (Col 1:13).
We had been in darkness but God came and lifted us up and transferred
– or delivered – us from that into a place of great light; in other
words into Jesus' kingdom.
The
thing about deliverance, is that it is something we couldn't do ourselves.
Israel couldn't
get themselves out of slavery in Egypt
(Ex 1:11
-14). Only God could do it - I
have come down to rescue them (Ex 3:8). Peter couldn't
get himself out of prison (Acts 12:5) but as the church prayed, an
angel from God came and rescued him (Acts 12:11).
This is deliverance, being rescued from a bad place that you cannot
get free from on your own, God stepping in and taking you out.
We
couldn't get free from sin (Rom 7:24)
but Jesus came and, by his work on the Cross and by the power of his
Spirit, he set us free (Rom 8:2). We couldn't do it but he did. As
Paul put it when writing to the Ephesians, “God,
who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were
dead in transgressions” (Eph 2:4,5). Paul says it was
like we were dead (spiritually at least) when we lived self-centred
lives, doing wrong. We were powerless to change that, but God came
and delivered us by making us alive with Christ by the power of his
Spirit, released in us simply
because we accepted what Jesus had done for us.
Believing
didn't suddenly make us capable of change (like self-help courses
suggest), but believing opened the door for God to come by His Spirit
and empower us so that we were no longer spiritually dead, and we
now had His power to live as His children (Jn 1:12). David knew that
God, who was his shield, was also his deliverer. Deliverance is God's
business because He knows that we are incapable of delivering ourselves.
Have you reached this same glorious conclusion? Have you
known this wonderful deliverance?
Response?
Pause up briefly and thank the Lord that, if you are a Christian,
the Lord HAS delivered you from Satan and from Sin. Ask Him to deliver
you from evil this day (Mt 6:13)