Objection: Word of Faith Teachers Don’t Really Believe Psalm 91 – They Have Bodyguards

Yes, and they probably lock their cars and houses, too!  Do you?  Does it mean that YOU don’t believe Psalm 91 if you do?  Some of these teachers have places in gated communities.  I don’t consider that unbelief, either.  Unfortunately, some preachers get physically attacked by crazy people.  Living in a gated community or at least a neighborhood where people watch out for each other helps provide a disincentive for crazy stuff.

I believe Psalm 91, but I lock my cars and house, and I live in the kind of place where some people leave their keys in the ignition at the supermarket and even a police officer I talked to in the area sometimes leaves his doors open (not just unlocked) while he isn’t home.  Neighbors look out for each other here, which is better than just having security systems that summon people who might take quite a while to get to the incident site to apprehend the thief (if he hasn’t been shot yet).  But I’m not against security systems, either.  They don’t prove a disbelief in Psalm 91.  They can be another good disincentive for someone with bad intentions.

I pastored a church with two ex-military people, one of whom was always “packing,” and we had one prison guard with a martial arts black belt.  They assured me that nothing would happen to me in our sanctuary!  That does not mean that I didn’t believe Psalm 91.  I do think that you can take steps to discourage trouble.  I attended a church in a larger city that had a police detail present at all services to make sure that no foul play went on, and I had no problem with that.  (Insurance companies sometimes INSIST on such arrangements for larger churches.)

Despite my security people’s presence, we had an incident where someone was about to burn down our building with all of us in it!  He snuck into an entrance while we were all in the sanctuary and he tried to ignite a sign that we had inside on a wall.  If it had caught on fire, the whole building, which was made of wood and built in the early 1800’s, could have gone up in flames very quickly.  We were on the top floor.  The fire department said that we’d all have died.  But there was a problem – the sign just would not catch fire, even though the culprit kept trying and trying to light it until his plastic lighter actually melted!  (He was caught, too, and his melted lighter fingered him when we reported it.  We even had someone come to our “fireproof” church as a result of hearing how it just wouldn’t burn.)  So we DO believe Psalm 91.  On the other hand, we’re not going to make things easy for those with foul plans or put temptation in someone’s way.