The Rescue That Rewrote the Textbooks

On July 4, 2018, twelve boys from the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach sat trapped in the flooded chambers of Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand. For eighteen days, the world held its breath. More than ten thousand people mobilized — Thai Navy SEALs, cave diving specialists from Australia and Britain, engineers, hydrologists, and volunteers who pumped 1.6 billion liters of water from the mountain. Expert after expert said the same thing: no rescue operation like this had ever been attempted in the history of cave diving. Former Thai Navy SEAL Saman Kunan gave his life in the effort. And yet, against impossible odds, all thirteen emerged alive.

In the months that followed, rescue professionals studied what happened at Tham Luang with a kind of reverence. Nothing in the record books compared. The operation was singular, unprecedented, unrepeatable.

Moses asks Israel to do something similar in Deuteronomy 4 — search the whole record of human history, scan from one end of the heavens to the other. Has any god reached into the furnace of an empire and pulled out an entire nation with signs, wonders, and an outstretched arm? The answer is silence. There is nothing to compare.

The God who parted the sea and shook Sinai is not one option among many. He is the Lord — in heaven above and on earth below. There is no other. And the only fitting response to a rescue this singular is a life given wholly back to the Rescuer.