The Lord Helps

If you are following “The Marley Saga”, we last left our canine heroine quietly begging me with her eyes, as I wrote at my keyboard, to allow her to deal with the groundhog underneath our front steps. This is the same groundhog which she chased under the steps the day before. In recent memory she has done the same thing with a small skunk. After breakfast she accompanied me outside. Despite my hopes that the groundhog had left our premises, I was disappointed to discover through Marley’s extreme behaviour that the evil lurking beneath our deck was still there. Marley’s reaction had not been tempered by a restless night’s sleep. She went wild.

I knew I had to do something for this poor traumatized creature under my steps. I placed Marley in the screen room where she began to whine and cry very loudly while I removed one length of boards from the deck. As I was attempting again to flush out the terrified groundhog, my kind and helpful neighbour who lives at least 400 hundred feet away in heavy forest cover arrived behind me to ask what was wrong with my dog. He and his black lab stood there looking most concerned for the weeping Marley. I explained the problem. He attempted to help me to flush out the poor groundhog. Finally I asked if he might take Marley, on a leash of course, over to his house while I finished what I started.

Despite my best efforts nothing worked. I finally locked the door to the house, left the boards off and walked away to retrieve my dog next door. I brought her home and placed her under house arrest. The groundhog finally left of its own volition, hungry and thirsty no doubt, sometime during the afternoon. After some initial sniffing, Marley immediately looked bored by the deck and its recent history and went to sleep. I immediately cut and stapled steel screening around the apron of the deck.

As I stood back to admire the job, feeling rather self-satisfied, the words, “The Lord helps those who help themselves”, came to mind. A message delivered from the pulpit over a decade ago by my brother-in-law came to mind as well.

If I was to stand on the street corner in a highly populated area and ask where to find the quote, “The Lord helps those who help themselves”, I would strongly suspect that the vast majority would inform me with some surety that the quote is found in the Bible. I believed it for years myself until my wife’s brother burst that bubble. Nowhere in the Bible will you find those words. The Lord indeed does not help those who help themselves.

Who does He help? In the Book of Psalms there are no less than seven verses which tell us who the Lord helps. The best, in my opinion, is Psalm 40:17.

17 But I am poor and needy; Yet the Lord thinks upon me. You are my help and my deliverer; Do not delay, O my God.

Jesus would have referred to those who are helped as “the poor in spirit”. (Matt. 5:3) Only when we realize that we can’t rely upon our own resources and that without God we are indeed helpless, will we be helped by God. We must admit our need and turn ourselves over to His strength. We must believe. We must ask. We must realize that we are nothing without our God.

The famous quote should read: “The Lord helps those who are contrite and needy enough to ask for help.”

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