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Did God spare Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania? · The Daily Article

• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's Monday, July the Fourteenth, Twenty-Twenty-Five, and this is Dinnison Forum's Daily Article Podcast.
• 0:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Chris Elkins, buriding today's Daily Article, written by her CEO, Dr. Jim Dinnison.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: On July thirteen, twenty twenty-four, a twenty-year-old sniper named Thomas Crookes, fired an AR- fifteen-style rifle from the roof of a building around four hundred feet from the stage where Donald Trump was holding a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He killed a fifty-year-old fireman named Cory Comparator who died shielding his family and critically injured two others.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: The moment crux fired, Mr. Trump turned his head to the right to point to a chart showing illegal border crossings.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: This caused a bullet to skim his right ear rather than hitting his head and killing him.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Secret Service agents tackle Trump to protect him.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: But when he stood to his feet again, he pumped his fist in the air.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: With blood running down his face, he shouted, fight, fight, fight.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Two days later, Mr. Trump made a triumphal entry at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: After the shooting, Mr. Trump told journalists Selena Zito, quote, it was the hand of God.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: He was there.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: A month after returning to the White House, he stated, I feel I feel even stronger.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I believed in God, but I feel much more strongly about it, in quote.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Yesterday's anniversary of the shooting raises again the question, did God save Mr. Trump's life?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin with the biblical fact that he clearly could have.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: The Bible proclaims in Psalm twenty-two verse twenty-eight, King ship belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Even a sparrow does not fall to the ground apart from his providential knowledge, according to Matthew ten verse twenty-nine.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: In Acts five verses seventeen through twenty-one, he sent an angel to free the apostles from prison
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  [SPEAKER_00]: and from X-twelf versus six through eleven, he spared Peter from Herod's execution.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: The list of U.S.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: presidents who survived assassination attempts is long.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Among the most notable is a lone rifle shot fired in August, eighteen sixty four by an unknown sniper that passed through Abraham Lincoln's hat as he wrote in the late evening missing his head by inches.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Another is the bullet fired by John Hinkley that lodged an inch from Ronald Reagan's heart in March
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  [SPEAKER_00]: However, we must obviously add that we have no biblical revelation by which to interpret the shooting in Butler or other assassination near misses.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: We are left to employ what we do know of God's character from Scripture as we seek to understand the events of that day, or of any other.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: One position is that God causes all that happens.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: The Lord declares in Isaiah forty-six verse ten, I will accomplish all my purpose.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: In this view, free will is only apparent, but not real.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: As Solomon noted in Proverbs XXI, the King's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: He turns it wherever he will.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: If this is our only approach to the events of our world, we can credit God for saving Mr. Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, but we must blame him for the death of Mr. Comparator.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: We can credit him when a natural disaster spares us, but we must blame him for the horrific July fourth flood in central Texas.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: The opposite position is that God causes nothing that happens.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Deists believe that God created the universe as a clock maker who then watches it run on his own, refusing to intervene in the natural world.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, the numerous miracles described in Scripture from Genesis to Revelation clearly teaches otherwise.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: A third and middle position is that God honors the free will he gives us, so the consequences of our sin are not his fault, but ours referencing Deuteronomy thirty verse nineteen.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: But the Lord intervened to protect Peter from Herod, just as something he intervened to protect Donald Trump from his would be assassin in Butler.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Fourthly, another middle position is that God allows nature to take its course, but he intervenes when necessary, according to his providential purposes.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Not every storm is his fault, but he can, on occasion, calm the storm as we read in Matthew eight versus twenty-three through twenty-seven.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: For reasons I explain in detail in a Dinnison forum website article, a link to which is in today's podcast episode notes.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I believe that both middle positions are correct.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: God honors our free will and the natural laws he created, but sometimes intervenes with both.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: This leads to the mystery at the heart of the issue.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: If he spared Donald Trump or Ronald Reagan, why not Abraham Lincoln and Ford's theater or John F. Kennedy in Dallas?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: If he rescued some at Camp Mystic and the other sites ravaged by the central Texas floods, I don't know why he did not rescue everyone else.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Nor would I expect to.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: We know from second Timothy three verse sixteen that all Scripture is breathed out by God, as its authors were carried along by the Holy Spirit, noted in second Peter one verse twenty one.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: But the Bible is now a closed canon.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: None of us can claim revelatory knowledge with the certainty of God's Word.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I cannot say with the prophets, thus is the Lord.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Nor can you.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: If I claim that God had declared audibly to me that he spared Donald Trump's life a year ago in Butler, you would have as much right to doubt my testimony as I would if you made such a statement.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I cannot think of any way the Lord would prove that it is so.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: either to me or to you.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: So, two consequences follow.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: First, beware of conforming God's will to ours.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are a partisan supporter of Donald Trump, you might wish I would more definitively agree with those who are convinced God spared his life miraculously a year ago.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are a partisan opponent at the president, you might wish for the opposite, but neither opinion changes reality.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: God's ways are
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  [SPEAKER_00]: higher than our ways affirmed in Isaiah, fifty-five verse nine, and not subject to our subjective wishes.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Accordingly, the purpose of prayer is not to conform God's will to hours, but the reverse.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: As Julian of Norwich noted, quote, the whole reason why we pray is to be united into the vision and contemplation of God to whom we pray, in quote, a second principle follows from the first.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: The purpose of life is to know God and make him known.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: If we pray for him to use every circumstance and challenge we face as a means to this end, he will always answer our prayers.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: He may take us to heaven where we know him as we are known revealed in first Corinthians thirteen verse twelve.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: He may heal us or spare us, or from second Corinthians twelve verses eight through ten, he may answer us by using our suffering to draw us into greater dependence on himself.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And God will help us know him so we can make him known to the world.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: wounded healers are the most effective healers.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: He comforts us so we can comfort others revealed in second Corinthians one verse four.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: As the saying goes, sometimes God calms the storm, but sometimes he lets the storm rage and calms his child.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Both are miracles.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Will you trust him for the one you need most today?