Danger ahead

According to John's Gospel, as I construe it, God doesn't promise Christians that he will protect us from the world, but that he will protect us in the world. We still have to go through the situation. We must endure the ordeal. The promise is not to protect us from suffering, but to protect us from hell. 

I find it useful to visualize that idea. We're on a journey. And there's a sense in which we're traveling on a road that's partly visible and partly invisible. The journey has visible hazards. And because they're visible, we can sometimes avoid them.

But the journey also has invisible hazards. We can't see the danger ahead. 

In one sense you might say there are two parallels roads: one heavenbound while the other is hellbound. But it's more like a maze with many wrong turns and dead-ends. There's a heavenbound route through the maze as well as many hellbound detours at every turn. Only one way to get to heaven but many alternate routes to hell. God can keep you on the heavenbound road by making the hellbound detours invisible. 

In a sense, the maze is hell. By that I mean, if you keep going in circles, if you never escape the maze, then you never get to heaven. To make it to heaven you must make it to the other side of the maze. You must find your way out of the maze. 

To vary the metaphor, compare it to night vision goggles. Because humans have poor nocturnal vision, when we don night vision goggles, it opens up a whole world that was there all along, but we don't normally perceive. That includes hidden dangers–lurking in the shadows.  

Dropping the metaphors, the Christian pilgrimage is full of hazards. Some are imperceptible. That includes malevolent spirits. 

In addition, the decisions we make depend on our circumstances. One way God keeps us on a heavenbound route is to steer us clear of situations where we'd make a decision with spiritually deleterious consequences. God prearranges the circumstances of our lives so that we don't take a fatal wrong turn. God providentially protects us, not from suffering, but from failing to cross the finish line. 

I'm not saying God never intervenes to spare us from suffering. But that's not something you can bank on.