.....deliverance

And the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work, and will preserve me unto his heavenly kingdom: to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen 2 Timothy 4:18

In Caesar's court, everyone forsook Paul, but the Lord stood with him and strengthened him, and he was delivered out of the mouth of the lion. Today we read the very next sentence he wrote. Paul has just looked back at how God rescued him, and now he looks ahead.

It is a surprising sentence. Paul knew his life was nearly over. A few lines earlier he had written, "I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand." He did not expect to leave prison alive. Yet he writes, "The Lord shall deliver me from every evil work." How could he say he would be delivered when he expected to die?

Because Paul had learned what God's deliverance really means. God does not always rescue us from suffering or even from death. Stephen was stoned, James was put to death by the sword, and Paul himself would soon die in Rome. But God delivers His children from something far worse: from every evil work that would separate them from Him. Rome could take Paul's freedom and his life, but it could not take his faith or his Saviour. The Lord who had stood with him in the courtroom would carry him safely all the way into the heavenly kingdom.

Paul's confidence did not rest on his own record. It rested on the character of the God who had loved him since the Damascus road. When Paul looked at the cross, he saw a love that would never let him go. Ellen White describes what every believer finds there: "a love that is infinite and a tender pity surpassing a mother's yearning sympathy for her wayward child" Steps to Christ, p. 15. A mother does not abandon her child at the hardest moment, and God will not abandon His children at the end of their journey.

We all face things we cannot escape: illness, loss, ageing, and one day death itself. Growing in grace does not mean we will never face these. It means we face them as Paul did, knowing that nothing that happens to us can take us out of God's hands. The same Lord who preserves us through each day will preserve us all the way home.

In Caesar's court, Paul taught us that the Lord stands with us when others leave. Here, he teaches us that the Lord will finish what He began, and that the right response to such love is the one Paul gave from his prison cell: to Him be glory for ever and ever