Will God always protect us from harm?
One of the cards we have included in our Blessings Box comes from Psalm 121:7-8:
7 The LORD will protect you from all harm;
he will protect your life.
8 The LORD will protect your coming and going
both now and forever.
It’s a beautiful promise! But… some might wonder whether we are supposed to take this promise seriously…. I mean, can we expect to avoid all harm and pain in this life because we are God’s people? Is that what this verse is promising? We only need to take a look at our social media feeds to see that our world is full of pain and anger. In fact, just this week protests have been breaking out all over the world because of the injustice done to George Floyd.[1] Many say that George Floyd was in fact a Christian.[2] So, did Psalm 121:7-8 not apply to him? Or what about our 8-month-old son, Silas. Just this week we received news from a specialist that he will have to go under anaesthetic to have a lump cut out of his back. Does something like this contradict Psalm 121:7-8?
Well, this certainly is a confident Psalm, but it’s only one Psalm in a whole collection of Psalms! The majority of Psalms are actually ‘laments’,[3] which say things like:
6 I am weary from my groaning;
with my tears I dampen my bed
and drench my couch every night. (Psalm 6:6)
Psalm 88 ends very low, ‘You have distanced loved one and neighbour from me; darkness is my only friend’. My point in saying all of this is that Psalm 121 doesn’t stand alone. It stands within a whole corpus of Psalms. So, while we’re passionate here at Little Lions about children memorising individual verses and promises, we hope that those same children will one day read their Bibles so they can be shaped by all of Scripture. As parents, we want to one day be able to say with Paul, ‘I did not avoid declaring to you the whole plan of God’ (Acts 20:27). Other Scriptures tell us that we will have suffering in this world (John 16:33) and so we should not expect that God will protect us from all pain. We will not know whether our beloved children will be protected from SIDS or from bullying or from any of the other difficulties in this broken world. This is a fact of life in a world under the curse of sin.
So, back to the question then. What actually is Psalm 121:7-8 promising? I think it tells us two things. I think this Psalm wants us to see God as our safe place. He will never be overcome and he is not surprised by anything. He wants us to find our comfort, our strength, our confidence in him. Our children should go to him with their troubles! Secondly, as Christians we know that God will actually protect our lives from ultimate, irrecoverable harm because Jesus has already gone through it for us. Jesus took our shame, submitted himself to death and the grave, and rose again overcoming it. So, he alone is able to say, ‘In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33 NIV). So, as we speak this blessing over our baby, we are reminded that our ‘forever’ really is safe in Jesus, even if our ‘now’ is surrounded with difficulties and trouble.
Grace and Peace,
Little Lions Family (Dad)
Tucker Jr., W. D. “Psalms 1: Book Of.” of Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings. Edited by T. Longman III and P. Enns. Downers Grove: InterVarsity. 2008.
[1] https://www.sbs.com.au/news/thousands-rally-in-uk-germany-to-protest-racism-and-police-brutality-following-george-floyd-s-death
[2] https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/may/george-floyd-ministry-houston-third-ward-church.html?share=7mzh%2FVD8WmdkTckpcCbP8U%2FGY79kTTWh&fbclid=IwAR1Up6CdBdTXERz3-6InK4csScd6bVpFnzkh-CtO2l_AmV3FP31zBncYqB0
[3] ‘The most frequent type of psalm is the individual lament, with nearly one-third of the psalms falling into this category.’ Tucker Jr., “Psalms 1: Book Of,” Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings: 581.