Shutting the Mouths of Lions and Snakes

"My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions.” These words in Daniel 6:22 were spoken by Daniel as he called out to King Darius from a pit of lions. Many wise Sunday school teachers and preachers have taught important lessons from this passage about God’s omnipotence, His omniscience, and His care over the righteous. God showed me another lesson regarding this passage decades after first hearing this true Bible story while on my mother’s lap: snakes can climb walls.

We lived in a village in a mud and stone house that was two stories tall and it had a loft for a third story. The Lord had called my husband, three kids, and me to live with and serve the Nepali people in a remote area of the Himalayan Mountains. In Southeast Asia, when the monsoon rains start, the snake holes get filled with water and the land floods with the large volume of water. Our first monsoon season, we learned that snakes are not necessarily just found slithering on the ground.

A French midwife was our next-door neighbor. On hot and humid nights, we would often come out onto our verandas and chat by the light of the moon. At 9 p.m. I went out onto the second story veranda to ask Anna Marie how her day was at the hospital. I made a mental note that there was what looked like a rope tied around the post near my hand. I wondered if our two boys had been repelling or playing some game with the rope earlier in the day.

Our daughter, Erin, came outside to hug me goodnight and talk for a few minutes before going to bed. The full moon lit our faces and some of the surroundings. Erin turned to go back inside, and the electricity came on about the same instant. Most of the time, we did not have electricity, but tonight the Lord turned it on. The “rope” was a 3-foot-long venomous pit viper that was just inches from me. Erin had been standing an inch or two away from the head of this viper for the last ten minutes!

I screamed loudly and my husband came running with the snake stick. He always said that he could tell the difference between my snake scream and my shrew scream. He was responsible for teaching science the next day and was trying to preserve the head of the snake so that he could show the kids the venom dripping from the fangs. I was more concerned about preserving my life! The snake was dispatched, and the science lesson was successful the next day.

We often pray for physical safety along with health. Daniel prayed three times daily in front of an open window and certainly would have prayed for the Lord’s protection in this domain. Daniel spoke confidently about seeing the angels closing the mouths of hungry lions, but I wonder how many unseen times the Lord protected Daniel from harm. My husband calls this our “Near Miss” video that God will reveal to each of us in heaven.

Back in the village in Nepal that night, it was clear that God was intervening because the electric light illuminated the head of the venomous snake. My God shut the mouth of a pit viper! If the light had not come on, we would not have seen the Lord’s hand at work. It seems appropriate to frequently thank God for His protection that we are unaware of in our lives. Thank Him now!