God is our shield

The Bible says one of the things God is for us is a shield. Psalm 3.3: ‘But you, O Lord, are a shield about me…’ Psalm 33.20: ‘Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and our shield.’

We are hasty to blame God when little things go wrong in our lives – traffic jam on the way to work, washing machine needs to be fixed, the whole family comes down with the flu at the same time. But do we realize how many big things God shields us from? My hunch is that there are many we never even know about.

Emma and I always close the basement door in our house because it sits atop a steep flight of stairs that would be deadly for our little boy Samuel to fall down.

Several months ago I went downstairs to my study after breakfast and forgot to close the basement door. Samuel was crawling around in another room (this is back when he was crawling) and I didn’t even think about it. Ten minutes later I heard Emma running to the top of the stairs. I came to the bottom of the stairs and looked up to see that Samuel was right on the edge. Emma got him in time. That day could have been the most tragic day of my life…and I might never even have known it. I’m thankful to God for sovereignly averting an accident that would have cost me immeasurable grief, guilt, pain, and anguish. That experience makes me wonder about how many countless other tragedies, mishaps, inconveniences and accidents my actions deserve but God never allows to happen. God is a shield about us. Sometimes we can hear the ‘THUNK!’ of the arrows entering the shield and sometimes we can’t.

Thank you, Lord, for being my shield.

Posted by Stephen Witmer on Jan 10, 03:21 PM