Psalm 91:1-12 may not be your usual Communion service scripture. It is a group of wonderful promises, promises that we often think we will claim during the time of trouble we hope is way off in the future. But many Christians around the world, Seventh-day Adventists included, claim these promises on a daily basis.
Some of the people I work with every day have spent time hiding in bomb shelters, and have lost family members to war. I have friends who have been held hostage, have been tortured and interrogated for bringing Bibles and Christian books into countries where they are forbidden. These friends know the taste of that “terror by night” (verse 5).1 They know the stench of death when a thousand have fallen around them (verse 7).
But they, and others like them, also know the blessed peace that comes from the promises. In the blazing heat of the desert they have learned to rejoice “under the shadow of the Almighty” (verse 1). Sometimes they can almost feel the brush of angel feathers as they claim the promise “He shall cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you shall take refuge” (verse 4).
Verses 11-13 are precious to many of our members around the world. My nephew was a student missionary in Peru. One day they found several very poisonous snakes in a ditch they were digging. One of them was already dead, crushed unknowingly by one of their bare feet (verse 13).
Psalm 91:14-16 includes its own promises of deliverance. But from what are we to be delivered? Physical danger, perhaps. But physical danger doesn’t seem to frighten people the way it used to. More and more people are engaging in extreme sports for the thrill of the danger, BASE jumping thousands of feet into a cave with a parachute; throwing their parachute out of a plane, then diving out to catch it; sliding their kayak off a cliff in Tibet into a boiling caldron that has never before been mapped or floated. If the challenge and excitement are great enough, many will take extreme risks with physical danger. Psalm 91 would hardly be simple reassurance of protection during deliberately risky behavior.
Instead, these last verses are most precious to us because they answer our longing for deliverance, freedom from the chains with which Satan has bound us. We long most of all for that last word: “salvation” (verse 16).
In Greek the name Eleftheria means liberation or freedom. It is the name of the main square inside the old walled city of Nicosia, Cyprus (or Lefkosia in Greek). Families come to buy ice cream or feed the pigeons. Old men sit playing games and watching the parade of young women and wannabes that traipse in and out of the specialty shops around the square. My wife, Barbara, and I often walked past all of them and down Ledra Street to the DMZ (demilitarized zone). I can still remember the first time we climbed up to the viewing stand, stood next to the young Cypriot soldiers, and looked over the sandbags and across the “green line” that then separated northern Cyprus from southern Cyprus.
I was still thinking of freedom that evening as we walked into his shop. His eyebrows and more were clearly Greek Orthodox. So were the crucifixes, icons of the virgin Mary, and pictures of the saints. He was a talkative guy. He wanted to know where we were from, and why we were in Cyprus. We told him we worked for the Middle East Association.
Then he wanted to know what that was. I told him it was the Adventist headquarters in the Middle East.
“Are you Christian?” he asked. I answered that we were.
“What do you believe?”
I sent up a prayer and said, “I believe Jesus died for me, paid the price for my sins, rose again, and is coming back to take all who accept Him to heaven.”
A wistful look came over his face. “I don’t know that,” he said. “I wish I knew that Jesus died for me.”
We talked some more, and I left, puzzled: How could a Christian not know that Jesus died for them?
A few months later Caroline, my accountant, came to work with an experience to share at our morning worship. She had been trying for years to reach out to her Cypriot neighbors. Finally, a few months before, she had asked one of the women to help her learn Greek by helping her read the Greek Bible. The woman was skeptical at first.
“What Bible are you going to read?”
“Oh,” Caroline responded, “your Bible.”
“But I don’t have a Bible. You’re not going to read that Adventist Bible, are you?”
“No! We will go buy a Bible at the bookstore—a Bible everyone else can buy.”
Soon they were spending a half hour or so every week as Caroline labored through the Greek words in a modern translation. She would read them in Greek, then ask her neighbor what it said. Caroline knew what it said. She had already read it in English and Arabic. She just wanted the neighbor woman to think about what it said.
It wasn’t long before she noticed her neighbor coming down on other days—with her Bible under her arm. She would say, “I know it isn’t Tuesday, but could we read the Bible today?” That’s exactly what Caroline had hoped would happen.
One day, as they were reading about heaven, Caroline innocently exclaimed, “Oh, won’t it be wonderful when Jesus comes and we get to go to heaven?”
Her neighbor stopped and looked at her with a puzzled expression on her face. “No. I don’t want Jesus to come, because I won’t be going to heaven. I will be going to that other place.”
“No, no,” Caroline exclaimed. “Don’t you remember we read about Jesus dying for our sins so that we don’t have to go there? We can go to heaven with Him!”
The woman shook her head slowly and said, “Jesus didn’t die for me. He died for the saints. The saints will go to heaven, but not the rest of us.”
Aren’t you thankful to know that Jesus died for you? I am so thankful to know that He died for me! I long to share that wonderful news with people all over the world who have never heard it. But sometimes the work seems slow and hard. Our neighbors aren’t always easy to reach. Many places of the world, unentered by the gospel, are dangerous and difficult. We get discouraged and afraid.
But when we do, we would do well to remember Psalm 91.
A few years ago the Adventist Mission office at the General Conference got a diary of memoirs handwritten by a pioneer missionary years ago. She had died, but her son had sent in this old yellowed notebook filled with gripping, breath-stopping, heart-wrenching accounts of what this family went through. Her aged diary told of confrontations with devil doctors, disease, boat crashes, war, and almost total lack of communication with the outside world.
On one occasion her husband came to the United States to a General Conference session, and came down with typhoid fever. The doctors, fearing that he would not live, encouraged him to write a letter to his wife and children back in the mission field. He wrote and posted the letter, but then began to recover.
Out in the mission field, alone with her little children, his wife received the letter from her dying husband. Weeks went by before she received another, the one that said he had not died, but had recovered.
Finally they returned to their home in Australia. For the rest of her life this dedicated missionary wondered if they had really accomplished anything at all. It seemed they had made so little difference. She didn’t complain about the hardships. She complained that they hadn’t been able to do enough to spread the gospel.
The
n, in 1995, 95 years old, Mrs. Ferris took a mission cruise through the islands where they had worked. As they approached one of the towns they had lived in, tears suddenly flooded her eyes: there on the dock and shore were 1,000 Adventists, cheering and singing as they welcomed this woman who had given so much to bring them the liberating news of what Jesus had done for them.
Psalm 91 is a promise that a thousand may fall around us while God’s protecting hand shields His children from the attacks of the evil one. Dedicated, self-sacrificing servants of the cross will also be amazed when we reach heaven and see the thousands standing around us rejoicing because we shared with them the wonderful news of salvation from Satan and liberation from sin.
Communion services are a symbol of that liberation. We know that we have been set free. The promise of salvation is now ours. But the great news of the gospel is also a challenge. Many around us, and around the world, still don’t know that Jesus died for them. We cannot keep this good news to ourselves.
As we partake of Communion emblems we may rejoice in what we know. But we may also do much more. As we partake, let us promise Jesus to help tell others about what He has done for them. They need to know, and because of Jesus’ sacrifice they deserve as surely as we to know these promises—promises not only of physical safety but of God’s determination to have them stand, a thousand, and thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand, on eternity’s shore, to bask forever in the shadow of the Almighty.
