Today’s Deliverance for Tomorrow’s Hope

For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14 ESV)

Weary and worry-laden, we count the seconds of the day and mark the stillness of the world. The flight path is silent. The roadways are barren. No production, no transactions, no engagement. The people in the shops shrink away from one another.

And the death toll rises. 

Hope must become more than a word. Tomorrow is no longer an expectation. We need something more solid on which to base our hope for tomorrow.

Our eyesight records devastation and despair, but on God’s lips is deliverance promised for his people. Those rescued and redeemed once will all be rescued and redeemed again! It may not be obvious today. We may not be able to see it or touch it or measure it, but what began at first with our souls and culminates in eternity is made plain in the little deliverances of every day. Birds singing, flowers budding, a smile, a sweet video, a video-call with dear Bible study friends, the rediscovered verse of poetry, the nudge of an ignored companion. 

It may appear that God has lost control or that he has forgotten us or that the purposes he has for us are not perfectly good and wise in the counsel of his will. But his will is perfect and good, and his word is trustworthy, and his promises are steadfast, and he will bring relief again. He will deliver again!

He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again! (2 Corinthians 1:10 ESV)

And he scatters these precious little deliverances in every day to remind us of his goodness. Isn’t that enough of a reason to hope in his rescue tomorrow?

He doesn’t owe us the birds singing or the flowers budding or the smiles or the warm connections. But he gives them to us because he loves us and he doesn’t want us to panic or be anxious. They are the tokens that his promises of relief and redemption are true.