That I may Know HIM - A Devotional

Day 41: ANOTHER ALARM!

February 26, 2012 was one Sunday that started like any other, but one Sunday that was not going to pass away before it had carved its dramatic memory on the tender hearts of worshippers and the granite floors of the headquarters parish of the Church of Christ in Nigeria (COCIN) in the central Nigeria city of Jos.  The first service had begun; worshippers were still streaming in.  Suddenly, at about 7.30am, a gargantuan explosion, heard miles away, shattered the Sunday morning peace, raising an atomic dust cloud.  The church had been suicide-bombed.  A car, which some claim had been escorted thither by what looked like a military vehicle, having been let through the gates, was making its determined way through the parking lot towards the church building when it got entangled with a motorcycle.  It was still wrestling the unrelenting bike towards the building when it had a tyre punctured and the bomb went off, a few feet from the church.

I visited the church on April 14 and was shown round the bomb site with the remains of the suicide car.  A left back tyre on its wrenched axle lay against the near western wall like the limb of a lamb violently torn out.  Five meters away were the mangled remains of what had been the car engine.  My guide showed me the filled crater in the concrete parking lot where the car bomb had gone off.  He showed me on his phone the picture he had taken, of the upper half of the face of the bomber whose one leg had been found about 200 meters away beyond a bank premises. The brother who had taken me there told me he had heard the explosion from his house about 12 kilometres away, and had climbed up his fence to look out, because the bomb had sounded like it had gone off from next door.

In “Beware, the Gibeonites!” dated January 30, 2012, our last post in “The Spirit of Sudan” series, a “call” was made “for watchmen and women from midnight of February 26, praying an hour and a half each, to midnight of the 27th,” because the Lord had exposed that the 27th had been marked by the enemy.  I was in London for the Europe Retreat of The Preacher when my phone rang fifteen minutes after the blast.  My head drooped.  Had we not begun prayers to cover the gates of the dates, I wondered.  So long after, I have had to be thankful also, wondering what more may have been planned for that day, and the 27th.  I left a token offering in support of God’s work in that church.

On my visit to the church, my guide told how miraculously God had saved the church and the worshippers that Sunday morning, in spite of the magnitude of the bomb so maliciously huge probably because it was the church of the disliked Christian governor of the state.   The only casualty within the church premises was the bomber himself, his face partly preserved so it could be photographed.  The only car that began to flame from the incinerated detonation had its fire soon put out, even though the bomb had gone off in a crowded parking lot just steps from the walls of the church.  Buildings meters away were damaged, but the church besides which the bomb had gone off had only a crack in the new staircase under construction.  A miracle! 

The Bible tells how God opened the eyes of Prophet Balaam’s donkey to see the angel of death that the riding master could not see (Numbers 22:22-34).  In this bombed church, God opened the eyes of little children who saw how the church building and the worshippers had been preserved.  In the confusion after the massive detonation, children were seen pointing and asking, “Can’t you see that tall man?”  “Can’t you see that big tall man?”  They saw a huge angel standing between the church and the smoky dust cloud from the bomb, the angel’s hands raised, as if shielding the church behind him.  At another church, children had also seen a huge angel after a bomb had gone off.  The angel seemed to have been pushing the flames and the smote of the detonated suicide bomb away from the church.  God “revealed... unto babes” what He chose to hide “from the wise and prudent” (Matthew 11:25), so that He might perfect unto Himself praise “out of the mouth of babes and sucklings” (Matthew 21:16).