God Can and Does Act

Ray Ortlund post:  Does God get involved?

“O you who answer prayer . . . .”  Psalm 65:2

Once I was flying at night over the North Atlantic.  It was in 1947, and I was coming back from my first visit to Europe.  Our plane, one of those old DC-4′s with two engines on each wing, was within two or three minutes of the middle of the Atlantic.  Suddenly two engines on one wing stopped.  I had already flown a lot, and so I could feel the engines going wrong.  I remember thinking, if I’m going to go down into the ocean, I’d better get my coat.  When I did, I said to the hostess, “There’s something wrong with the engines.”  She was a bit snappy and said, “You people always think there’s something wrong with the engines.”  So I shrugged my shoulders, but I took my coat.  I had no sooner sat down than the lights came on and a very agitated co-pilot came out.  “We’re in trouble,” he said.  “Hurry and put on your life jackets.”

So down we went, and we fell and fell, until in the middle of the night with no moon we could actually see the water breaking under us in the darkness.  And as we were coming down, I prayed.  Interestingly enough, a radio message had gone out, an SOS that was picked up and broadcast immediately all over the United States in a flash news announcement: “There is a plane falling in the middle of the Atlantic.”  My wife heard about this and at once she gathered our three little girls together and they knelt down and began to pray.  They were praying in St Louis, Missouri, and I was praying on the plane.  And we were going down and down.

Then, while we could see the waves breaking beneath us and everybody was ready for the crash, suddenly the two motors started, and we went on into Gander.  When we got down I found the pilot and asked what happened.  “Well,” he said, “it’s a strange thing, something we can’t explain.  Only rarely do two motors stop on one wing, but you can make an absolute rule that when they do, they don’t start again.  We don’t understand it.”  So I turned to him and I said, “I can explain it.”  He looked at me: “How?”  And I said, “My Father in heaven started it because I was praying.”  That man had the strangest look on his face, and he turned away. . . .

We are not dealing with God as though He were a machine.  He is personal, and as we pray He does not respond mechanically, but as the Personal-Infinite God.  The point is that He is there.  And He can, and does, act into the universe He has made.

Francis Schaeffer, speaking in chapel, Wheaton College, the fall of 1968.