This morning’s word is There Are People Here to Help Now.
The anchor verses are Isaiah 43:2 and 2 Samuel 5:20.
More than a week ago, seven men walked into a cave in central Laos.
They went looking for gold. They knew the risk. There were warnings. They went anyway. People do. The promise of gold has pulled men into dangerous places for as long as there have been men and caves.
Then the rain came.
Flash flooding sealed the entrance behind them. Gravel and dirt. No way back the way they came. The water rose in the tunnels. Seven men, deep underground, in the pitch black, more than two hundred and sixty meters from the entrance. That is the length of nearly three football fields, straight into the earth, with the water coming up around them.
They could not dig out. They could not swim out. They could not save themselves.
So they climbed onto a rocky ledge, the highest ground they could find, and they huddled together in the dark. And they waited. For more than a week. Hungry. Cold. Not knowing if anyone was coming. Not knowing if anyone even knew where they were.
Yesterday, the light came.
Divers from Laos and Thailand crawled through tunnels so narrow you have to turn sideways, duck low, and crawl flat on your stomach to get through. They pushed through toxic gas. They fought the current. Some of them were the same divers who pulled twelve boys and their coach out of a flooded cave in Thailand back in 2018. They went down into the dark and the water on purpose, to reach men they had never met.
And when they reached the ledge, when their headlamps lit up that small chamber where five men had been waiting in the black for over a week, one of the rescuers said this.
“There are people here to help now.”
Five words. In the dark. After a week of silence.
Two men are still missing as I write this. The reporting is still unsettled on exactly how they came to be there. Some accounts say all seven entered together. Others say the two missing men entered earlier, on their own. What is certain is that they are still in the dark, and the search goes on. I am holding them, and the five who were found, and the people crawling through that mountain to bring them out.
But I cannot get those five words out of my head.
There are people here to help now.
That is the whole Gospel in a flooded cave.
Because every one of us has been in that cave. Maybe not literally. But you know the place. The place you walked into knowing the risk. The place where the way back sealed behind you. The place where the water started rising and you realized you could not save yourself. Some of us are in that place right now. Some of us have been on that ledge in the dark for longer than a week, huddled, hungry, wondering if anyone knows where we are.
The Prophet Isaiah wrote words that GOD spoke to a people who knew exactly what that felt like.
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”
Read that again.
GOD does not say you will never pass through the waters. GOD does not promise you will never end up in the cave. The waters come. The rivers rise. The fire burns. That is the world we live in.
What GOD promises is this. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.
I will be with you.
In this morning’s reading from Second Samuel, David fought a battle he could not win on his own. And when GOD broke through, David said, “As waters break out, the LORD has broken out against my enemies before me.” He named the place Baal Perazim. The Hebrew means the LORD who breaks through.
That is who GOD is. The One who breaks through. Through rock. Through flood. Through two hundred and sixty meters of narrow tunnel. Through the sealed entrance of whatever cave you are sitting in this morning.
You may not be able to dig yourself out. You may not be able to swim. You may be on the ledge in the dark, and you may have been there a long time.
But hear this.
There are people here to help now.
And more than people. The GOD who breaks through is already crawling toward you in the dark. HE went into the deepest cave there is, the grave itself, and HE broke out of it. The water did not overwhelm HIM. The flame did not consume HIM. And HE did it so that HE could reach you on your ledge and say the words you have been waiting more than a week to hear.
I am here now. I am with you. We are going to get you out.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.