For the next few days I’ll be posting a paper written by Bob Vincent, a pastor in Alexandria Louisiana, just because I liked it so much.

A Testimony

I have known the Lord for over forty-five years and during those years, I have seen him deliver me time and time again.  I have seen him physically heal people, sometimes literally in seconds:  one evening after our mid-week service, a woman who had been diagnosed with degenerated disks and was awaiting surgery as the only solution, was instantly healed as a group of elders laid hands on her.  That was over twenty-eight years ago, and she is still healthy and free from pain today.  I have seen the effects of God’s causing people to conceive after all human efforts had been exhausted:  on one occasion, nine months after our elders anointed the couple with oil.  Most did not give birth nine months later; sometimes it was a year or more.  But over the years we have had almost a dozen such folk in our congregation.  These are not naive rubes: two of the fathers are physicians; a third oversees physicians and nurses at a local hospital.

Time and time again, I have prayed for money, and God has sent it to me. I’ll pass on two memorable situations that I have often shared publicly and privately.

More than twenty years ago, the transmission went out in our only vehicle; it was going to cost $900, and I simply did not have the money. I told no one about it but cried out to God on my knees.  Several days later I found an envelope that had been pushed under my door.  Inside were nine, one hundred dollar bills.  I certainly praised the Lord, but I didn’t understand just how special this gift was at the time.  When I received the anonymous gift, I had assumed that someone had learned about my transmission from the mechanic and had chosen to bless me in this way.  However, some years later a young man came to see me.  He was a Southern Baptist from another parish (county) and hardly knew me.  He asked me, “Several years ago, did you find an envelope with nine, one hundred dollar bills in it?”

“Yes,” I replied. Then he told me that he had been praying, and the Lord had told him to go to Alexandria and give this amount of money to me. Needless to say, I was stunned at such an example of one of God’s providentia extraordinaria.

On September 15, 1996, as I put a check in the morning offering for $110, God quickened me with what had happened to Isaac in Genesis 26:12. By faith — I had never been able to do this before, nor have I ever had the liberty to pray exactly this way since — I prayed for a hundredfold blessing — we were really hurting financially at the time. I continued to press this home to my Father in prayer for weeks on end, and then, on November 16, 1996, out of the blue, I received 200 shares of Wachovia Bank stock from a relative on the East Coast.  Upon opening the envelope, I got on the Internet and discovered that the stock had closed at $55.00 per share.  Do the math:  it comes out to the penny! Through God’s hearing our prayers, instead of living in a church owned parsonage, we now have a beautiful home of our own, on top of a hill overlooking a lake, and we have been able to give away many thousands of dollars.

Psalm 118

Clearly Psalm 118 is a Messianic Psalm.  The Lord Jesus is the Stone rejected by the builders (Psalm 118:22; Matthew 21:42; Mark 12:10-11; Luke 20:17; Acts 4:11; Ephesians 2:20; 1 Peter 2:7).  He is the ultimate and final sacrifice bound to the altar; his blood was shed once for all time, obtaining eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12-15, 23-28; 10:1-18).

The writer of Hebrews applies this Messianic Psalm to us.  Because we are “in Christ,” this Psalm is ours, as well.  Its promises are our promises, “For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us” (2 Corinthians 1:20).  And because King David is “in Christ,” this Psalm is his Psalm, too, a Psalm that had its origins in terrible conflicts from which our Lord God delivered David.

“In Christ,” David is also the stone rejected by the builders, often despised and overlooked, as when the Prophet Samuel came to Bethlehem to anoint King Saul’s successor.  ‘Jesse made seven of his sons to pass before Samuel. And Samuel said unto Jesse, “The LORD hath not chosen these.  And Samuel said unto Jesse, “Are here all thy children?” And he said, “There remaineth yet the youngest, and, behold, he keepeth the sheep”‘ (1 Samuel 16:10, 11).

People were often against him.  His own father-in-law repeatedly plotted his death, but God was always with David to deliver him, and David celebrates these wonderful deliverances in Psalm 118.  As I analyzed each word in the Hebrew text, I was impressed with the significance of the triplet in verses 10-12:

All nations surrounded me, but in Yahweh’s name indeed I cut off their foreskins.  They surrounded me, surrounded me completely, but in Yahweh’s name indeed I cut off their foreskins.  They surrounded me like bees, they crackled like a fire of thorns, but in Yahweh’s name indeed I cut off their foreskins [Psalm 118:10-12; in Mitchell Dahood, Psalms III, 101-150, Anchor Bible, Vol 17, (Doubleday:  New York, 1970), p. 154.  Supporting Dahood’s translation is Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1968), p. 558: “Psalm 118:10; 118:11; 118:12 in the name of y_, yea I will make them to be circumcised {enemies, by force of arms. . .}”.).

1 Samuel 18 records one example of this kind of violent circumcision of David’s enemies:  ‘And Saul said, “Thus shall ye say to David, ‘The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king’s enemies’”‘ (1 Samuel 18:25).  King Saul’s plan was that David would be killed by these “uncircumcised Philistines,” but the Lord was with David and delivered him in battle so that David brought, not one hundred, but two hundred of these Philistine “scalps” (1 Samuel 18:27) and won Michal, King Saul’s daughter.

How often must David have been in violent battles, surrounded by deadly enemies: “They surrounded me like bees, they crackled like a fire of thorns . . .” Again and again, the Lord delivered David: “but in Yahweh’s name indeed I cut off their foreskins” (Psalm 118:12).

David celebrates the victory of God over his enemies in Psalm 118, and as we sing this ancient hymn of praise, we are reminded that the truth of the Sovereignty of God is not about fatalistic, passive acquiescence to some horrible thing that we fearfully imagine is God’s predestined end for us.  It is about fighting the good fight of faith, confident that as we go into battle, the Lord is with us — as Moses teaches us to sing:  “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name” (Exodus 15:3).

(to be continued)