if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.
2 Peter 2:9 (NIV)
The Lord Knows How
God brought the flood on an ungodly world and protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others through it. He walked Lot out of Sodom while the city was still standing, and then he burned the two cities to ashes and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly. Lot was a righteous man, and Peter says what the years among the lawless had cost him: tormented in his righteous soul by the deeds he saw and heard.
If this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment. God has done the getting out before, once through water and once ahead of fire, and he did it while the trouble was still going on.
Day after day is the part that gets lived through, and it doesn’t come with a number attached. Lot lived inside those days one at a time, and the rescue came out the far side of them, once they had run as long as they ran. God knew the way out the whole time, before it had shown up in anything Lot could see.
An emergency room at three in the morning has an order of its own. People go back through in a sequence that has nothing to do with how long they’ve been in the chairs, and nobody at the desk explains it. The vending machine hums. The clock over the counter is two minutes fast and has been for years.
Nothing in that room says anybody’s coming. The Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and he’s shown it in the flood and at Sodom. The people who first read that were still inside their own.
A Prayer to Remember
Get me out of this, God, and I’ll ask plainly because I’ve run out of careful ways. I don’t know the length of it and I’ve quit asking for a date. You knew how to get Lot out of a city before the fire fell on it. Do that same kind of thing here. I’d like to still be standing when it happens.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
