God's Spiders

"Part your heavens, O Lord, and come down; touch the mountains, so that they smoke. Send forth lightning and scatter the enemies; shoot your arrows and rout them. Reach down your hand from on high; deliver me and rescue me from the mighty waters, from the hands of foreigners whose mouths are full of lies, whose right hands are deceitful." (Psalm 144:5-8, NIV).

I think most, if not all of us, have been where the Psalmist is. In our suffering we cry out to God to rend the heavens and come mightily and miraculously to our aid. Sometimes He does. Sometimes He intervenes in such a way that there is no doubt that it was Him. More often than not, however, there are those times when the heavens are silent and we feel that He has abandoned us.

What I know is that He has not abandoned us (He promises never to do that–Hebrews 13:5) and in my experience even if He doesn’t rend the heavens and come convincingly to our aid, He still comes and He works in such a quiet and unhurried way that if we are not careful we mistake His deliverance for a normal change of circumstances. Personally I am convinced that I will marvel when God reveals to me the countless number of times He was at work in me and I missed what He was doing entirely.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the story I am about to share. During World War II, a soldier was fleeing enemy troops on a small Island in the Pacific. The soldier hid in a cave, and prayed for God’s protection. For the heavens to part and deliverance to come. He knew that his capture would most likely result in torture and then death. As he tried to rest that night, he could hear the enemy soldiers drawing ever closer.

As dawn came, the soldier looked toward the entrance of the cave and discovered that during the night a spider had woven his delicate web across the entrance of the cave. The soldier scoffed, "What I need is an iron door, not a flimsy web!"

About that time he heard the voices and footfall of the enemy. The soldier crouched in a dark corner of that cave and prepared for the worst. As the enemy troops approached his position, they saw the web over the mouth of the cave. There was a brief pause, and then they simply moved on. They had concluded that the web was evidence that no one could be in that cave!

I wonder how many times God’s spiders have been at work around us and like this soldier, because we were expecting a miraculous deliverance we failed to marvel at the intricate and quiet movement that brought us deliverance just as surely as and probably more effectively than even an iron door could have brought us.