(…continued…) What can we say about all this? Do we know anything for sure from the Bible, and if so, what? “Well yes,” God says, “you can know for sure that I will deliver you.” “God is our deliverer, and happy are they who trust in Him,” says Psalm 40. He will not give us the details, and with our little minds we cannot figure it out, but the message of the Bible is that God will deliver us.
To get at the answer to this, let us begin by looking at where we pray most often for God’s protection and deliverance– and where would that be? Well, in the Lord’s prayer, of course, where we pray every time, “Deliver us from evil.” Martin Luther’s explanation to the parts of the catechism gives a summary of the Bible’s teaching on each part. In his explanation to this petition, ‘Deliver us from evil,’ Martin Luther says this in the Catechism: “We ask in this petition that our heavenly Father would save us from every evil to body and soul, and at our last hour would mercifully take us from the troubles of this world to himself in heaven.”
There is a great deal of meaning in that little petition, ‘deliver us from evil,’ and a great deal of insight in that one sentence from the catechism. First of all, notice, it says “we ask.” ASK. This, and any prayer, is a humble request. We are not in any position to be making any demands of God. All we can do is ask, and we can do that only because he has invited us to do so. And so, we do ask, just like that lady in Nebraska with the tornado coming toward her house, we ask that God save us from every evil to body or soul. Just like the writer of Psalm 40 says, there are troubles all around us, and we can bring them all to the Lord, asking for his help and deliverance. And then, we leave the response up to God, trusting God to respond as He sees fit, whether or not what he does is what we had in mind. That is the part that we can’t see and won’t ever understand.
We do believe that God can act in our world. God certainly has the power to do anything. And, sometimes God will act to intervene and to save or to punish. And, sometimes God will not act, and just let events occur according to the natural laws he created into the world, and according to the free choices made by the humans, to which He gave a mind and a will and a freedom to choose. So, if you choose to drive around a corner at 90 miles an hour, God may well allow the consequences of your choice and the laws of centrifugal force to play out.
Parents of teenagers know how this works. Sometimes they must intervene to protect or punish or reward or encourage their children, and sometimes they will want to just back away and let their son or daughter learn from experience, even if it is painful. Wise teenagers will trust their parents’ decisions about when to intervene, even if they do not like it at the time.
But there is a second part to Luther’s explanation, and that second part of the sentence says this, — we pray that “at our last hour God would mercifully take us from the troubles of this world to himself in heaven.” Luther is saying here that even death, so feared and dreaded by us all, even death becomes a means by which God answers this prayer, because in death, we are delivered once and for all, from all the troubles of this world. One way or the other, God will always deliver us. The woman and her family who survived that Nebraska tornado were delivered by God and allowed to keep living on their undamaged farm. And, the husband and daughter who were killed in the tornado were delivered by God from the troubles of this life, and ushered into that heavenly home prepared for them. We see everything from only this side of death, and we wonder what God is doing and why he delivers some and not others. But from God’s perspective, all who do not refuse him are delivered by him, one way or the other. So, says Luther, when we pray, ‘deliver us from evil,’ we are praying that God keep us safe here in the good life he has given us, and, we are also praying for and trusting in that greater deliverance into our eternal home.
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Romans 14:8,9 — If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life, so that he might be Lord of both the living and the dead.
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O Lord Jesus Christ, will not this misery finally come to an end, and the glory of the children of God soon begin? You have promised us the day in which you will deliver us from all manner of evil; let it come, even in this hour, if it be your will, and make an end of all misery. Amen.
–Martin Luther
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