1 Samuel 23:27–28: “But a messenger came to Saul, saying, ‘Hurry and come, for the Philistines have invaded the land!’ Therefore Saul returned from pursuing David, and went against the Philistines; so they called that place the Rock of Escape.”

June 1st, 2023 by Pastor Ed in devotional

King Saul was attacking David and his men when a messenger came to Saul and told him that the Philistines were invading the land.  Saul had no choice but to pull his army and go back and defend his own cities. David wrote of this escape and God’s providential care in Psalm 54:4: “Behold, God is my helper; The Lord is with those who uphold my life.” David had prayed, “Save me, O God,” and then recognized that the hand of God had come to protect his life.

In the last century this kind of protection was called the “Providence of God,” meaning that God provided protection at just the right moment. The lesson here is that we should look for His “providential coincidences” in our own life and recognize it as the hand of God. We need to become more sensitive to these God-provided “providential” occurrences. They usually don’t come at the moment we want them, but always just in the nick of time. God provided all that was needed in David’s life even though there was trouble all around.

There is an example of God providing escape, even under the most radical circumstances, in the life of a man named Tsutomu Yamaguchi. His obituary read:

Died: Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 93, the only official survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, died and went to be with the Lord January 4. On August 6, 1945, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima for a business trip when the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city; two days later he returned home to Nagasaki where the second atomic bomb dropped on August 9.

This Japanese believer was protected from an atomic-bomb blast twice within 4 days. Nothing is too hard for God. Call on Him right now just as David did so long ago.

“Save us, O God.”