DAY 275- Angels Watching Over Me

Psalm 91 (NRSV) ¹ You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, ² will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.’ ³ For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; ⁴ he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. ⁵ You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, ¹⁴ Those who love me, I will deliver; I will protect those who know my name. ¹⁵ When they call to me, I will answer them; I will be with them in trouble, I will rescue them and honour them. ¹⁶ With long life I will satisfy them, and show them my salvation.

The Psalmist is celebrating an occasion when he has known the protection of God. And we experience those occasions as well. God sometimes works through the circumstances of our lives to protect us. We are at the right place at the right time. Accidents are avoided. People change their minds. With no pre-planning on our part, we are spared. Call it the work of the Lord, angels having charge over us, or synchronicity, sometimes events happen that give protection to our life and well-being. We believe the hand of God is at work in these events, but God is under no obligation and sometimes life caves in around us. Even if our mind knows better, our heart feels betrayed. Our understanding of God’s work is partial. It needs to be complemented by an understanding of God’s work within us.

God does give protection, sometimes by engineering the circumstances of our life, but always by giving us the inner resources we need. And, He is generous in providing us with people and prayer and the Scripture and whatever else we need as armor to combat the terror that comes by night and the arrow that flies by day. The Psalmist says that God provides these gifts to those who live in the shelter of the most high, who abide in the shadow of the almighty.

Abide means to stay with or to remain in. The opposite of abide is to run off, to become separated from. Not abiding is the senseless sin of self-protection. It is a frantic, futile effort that ignores the truth that to be human is to be insecure.  And self-protection has a bad habit of backfiring on us. Abiding is the continual action of trusting in the trustworthiness of God. It is perseverance in surrendering to God’s work and God’s will. It is a constant whispering of “yes” to God.

We fall back on our belief that God is good because God has declared that goodness to us through the instrument of the Cross. The Cross declares to us that in the worst of circumstances, when God appears absolutely uncaring and uninvolved, that those are the times when He cares the most and is most intimately involved. We are not spared life’s problems and pains. That much is obvious. But the Cross also declares that when pain and problems and danger and death have done their worst, we are saved and safe, held by the strong thread of God’s good will. 

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope May 9, 1993

© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell