God Protects In A Mysterious Way...Sometimes

Christ reigns over hard times in our lives so we will lean into Him.   ~~~   We continue to see Saul’s downward spiral in sin. We must see that embedded within the nature of sin is destruction. God told Adam, “If you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will surely die!” Psalm 7:14-16 “Behold, the wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies. He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own skull his violence descends.” We see Saul’s sin directed at God’s anointed one, David. But the recurring theme in this passage is David’s escape. through Jonathan’s covenant through David’s contorting through Michal’s conniving—Psalm 59 In other words, God uses all kinds of ways that we know about, and ones we are not aware of in order to protect his anointed one, to get him to the throne. Ultimately it is all of God. And we see that in this last way of God protecting David: through the Spirit’s confronting Christ was also protected from people’s rage against him so that He could reign through His cross and resurrection.   We see Christ preserved and protected from King Herod in Matthew 1-2 We see Christ preserved and protected from Satan himself in Matthew 4 We see the murderous plot of the Pharisees and Herodians in Mark 3. In Luke 4, when Jesus unrolls the scroll in the temple and declares himself to be the Messiah, the people were “filled with wrath and rose up and drove him out of town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their towns were built, so that that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away.” In John 7, it says, “They were seeking to arrest him, but non one laid a hand on him because his hour had not yet come.” In John 10:39 we read, “And they sought to arrest him but he escaped from their hands.” What we need to realize as God’s church is that God preserved Christ, provided ways of escape for Him so that Christ could fulfill his purpose. And also, he will preserve those who are in Christ so that they will persevere in His purpose for Him. Christ reigns over hard times, evil times in our lives so that we might press into Him and fulfill His purpose for our lives. Paul was let down in a basket as a way of escape Peter walked through open prison doors on the eve of his execution date.