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Berserk2
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[Roger:] "Further, we read of countless other cases where a person is apparently being warned of some impending disaster, or being saved from injury or death. Remember Don's story of the man in line at the ticket counter, waiting to buy a ticket on a flight, and being warned by some inner voice not to board that plane? And he decided not to board, and the plane did in fact crash with no survivors."
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This Sunday my sermon title is "God's Selective Protection." My biblical text is Acts 12:1-19, the account of how the apostles James was arrested and immediately executed by Herod Antipas. Peter was arrested shortly thereafter, but his execution had to be postponed for several days until after Jewish Passover. This delay gave a few days of grace for intercessory prayer. Unlike James, Peter is miraculously delivered by an earthquake combined with an angelic apparition. But when he arrives at Mary's house where the prayer meeting is proceeding, no one can believe the initial report that Peter is standing at the door. James is executed too summarily for the church to convene such a prayer meeting in his behalf. So the absence of an intercessory prayer meeting for James is not the church's fault. Still, prayer seems to have made the decisive difference in Peter's deliverance.
I will be exploring similar modern cases in which one believer is divinely protected by a premonition, while others were permitted to die. You cite the case of Methodist pastor E. Stanley Jones's premonition in India to abandon the ticket line in the wake of the impending airplane crash that killed all the Hindu passengers. Similar examples abound. For example, there was a United Methodist church nearby the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, the scene of Tim McVeigh's bombing. But several Methodists who would have been in the kill zone during the bomb's explosion were bizarrely protected by a series of coincidences. For example, the pastor, Nick Harris, was going to tape 4 radio broadcasts at the time of the bombing. But his sound engineer, Gus Alfonso, forgot to show up at 8:30 am. Gus was always reliable and had never forgotten his commitment to be there before! This amnesia, and other similar coincidences, kept several people away from the kill zone in the church sanctuary.
Similarly, Tom Hawthorne wanted his friend, Ken Harvey, to go to the Murrah building with him that fateful Tuesday morning. Tom called Ken on Monday night and reminded him to be ready. At 7:10 am the next morning, Ken called Tom and offered to do the driving. Tom declined Ken's offer and reminded Ken that he would drive by at 8:30 am to pick him up. Despite multiple reminders to pick Ken up, Tom was apparently afflicted with a divine amnesia and never kept his promise to pick Ken up. Tom's body was recovered 5 days after the explosion at 9:02 am. Even more than the prior case, this case suggests divine deliverance was provided for Ken, but not for Tom. In this case, both men were devout Christians. So this refutes any silly claim no Christians are left vulernable in analogous situations. Several children in the Murrah's day care center also perished in the blast.
Also impressive to me is the case of lawyer, Tom Wise. His father, Robert, began each day with an hour of prayer during which he prayed specifically that God would cover each of his children with divine protection. Thirty seconds before the blast, Tom was standing by the window in front of the Murrah Building surveying the business district. He felt prompted to move away, the bomb exploded, and the ceiling fell on his secretary.
Of course, one can wonder why those who received no such prolonged prayer support were permitted to suffer. In my view, God cannot be dismissed as an impersonal sadist; rather, there seem to be some poorly understand spiritual laws at work here that regulate God's ability to intervene in His creation. But I find the evidence for some paranormal intervention compelling in some of these cases.
Roger, you rightly ask why cases like Leonard's visit from his dead son are not more common. One can only speculate, but this mystery hardly refutes the credibility of such accounts. In a future sermon, I will be laying out a comprehensive bibilcal rational for why such apparent inconsistencies seem to abound.
Even so, such fantastic ADCs, though rare, are not as rare as you might imagine. Take a tangible touch from deceased loved ones as a case in point. Today I officiated at a burial service for an elderly grandmother. While alive, she had the habit of sharply poking her daughter Tomi in the chest to make a point. At the grave, Tomi told me that yesterday she felt relentless sharp poking by an unseen hand in her chest, poking so hard that she took her blouse off to check for bruises! Two weeks earlier a parishioner was awakened in the middle of the night by a hand carressing her cheek. It was her recently dead sister's hand. The sister was glowing in the dark and conveyed the joyful news that she was now happily adjusting to her new heavenly locale. I'm almost surprised now if parishioners have no such ADCs to report!
Anyway, as you know, these issues involve complicated moral questions, but I thought I'd provide these experiences as good for thought.
Don
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