God’s Invisible Hand

In spite of God’s “omnipresence” and “omnipotence” we sometimes overlook His desire and ability to intervene in our lives. Sometimes His intervention is individual and personal. Sometimes it occurs on such a grand scale that both believers and unbelievers are affected.

History provides numerous descriptions of major events involving God’s intervention. Events such as the Exodus and Joshua’s conquest of Jericho are verified in Scripture. Often, however, God provides us with only enough circumstantial evidence to make us wonder.

One example of hard-to-explain circumstances is in the little book, Reflections on Pearl Harbor, by Admiral Chester Nimitz. After viewing the destruction of the American fleet—surrounded by a spirit of despair, dejection, and defeat—the Admiral told a young sailor, “The Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make, or God was taking care of America . . . .”

The three mistakes were:

1. The Japanese attacked on Sunday morning. Nine out of every ten crewmen of the ships in the harbor were ashore on leave. If those same ships had been lured to sea and been sunk—we would have lost 38,000 men instead of 3,800.
2. When the Japanese saw all those battleships lined in a row, they got so carried away they never once bombed our dry docks opposite those ships. If they had destroyed our dry docks, we would have had to tow every one of those ships to America to be repaired, costing us precious time.
3. Every drop of fuel in the Pacific theater of war is on top of the ground storage tanks five miles away . . . . One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our fuel supply.

Is this God’s intervention? Circumstantially, it certainly seems to be so! In my Life Essentials Study Bible I share this principle:

Even when evil leaders engage in terrible acts of violence in order to achieve their own selfish goals, we are to acknowledge God’s overall sovereign control over events in history Principle #49 in Luke.