Camouflage

“What if my father touches me? I would appear to be tricking him and would bring down a curse on myself rather than a blessing.” —Genesis 27: 12

         Camouflage! That is a big word. It is one of the words that war gave us. When I went to France the ship was camouflaged, that is, it was painted so as to hide it when it was on the sea. The guns were camouflaged, that is, they were covered with the branches of trees to make them look like the forest itself. The roads were camouflaged, that is, they were made to look, not like roads, but like the fields, so the enemy would not know.
       There is a wonderful story of camouflage in the Bible. It is the story of Jacob. You remember his mother wanted him to receive the blessing of his old blind father. So she dressed him up to make him feel like Esau. Esau was a hairy man, and she put skins of kids on Jacob’s neck and hands and when he went to seek his father’s blessing Isaac, his father, said, “The hands are the hands of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob.” That was camouflage.
       It is a bad thing to try to cheat and deceive and betray. You remember what Alice said to the Duchess in “Alice in Wonderland.” She said, “Oh, I know it’s a vegetable; it doesn’t look like one, but it is.” And the Duchess said, "I quite agree with you. The moral of that is, Be what you seem. ” That is a good motto. “Be what you seem.” There is so much sham and pretense in the world. There are so many imitations of real things. Let us be real and be what we seem to be.
       But there is a good kind of camouflage. The world is full of it. We learned camouflage from nature. The lizard in the grass is not seen because it, too, is green. The snake, too, we miss, because it is just the color of the meadow, or the soil. The spotted leopard in the jungle is perfectly camouflaged. The polar bear in the great white wilderness of the North is also white, as white as snow. And the animals and birds change their color with the seasons, and with the soil. Sometimes the rabbit and the fox are white when winter comes; and the birds hide themselves in color like their own. There is an old tale of a chameleon that when chased by a dog suddenly turned around, opened its great pink mouth, and changed color so quickly that the dog was scared nearly to death and ran for its life. They say that once a chameleon, one of these little animals that change their color so easily, was put on a brown rug and became brown, on a green rug it was green, on a blue rug it was blue, and when put on a Persian rug it died. Of course that is a foolish tale, but animals find safety and security in adapting themselves to the color of their surroundings.
       We, too, live in a difficult and dangerous world. It is not easy to escape all our enemies. Sometimes we have to hide ourselves in some 'safe place'. We read in one of the Psalms that in the time of trouble God will hide us, and one man offers a prayer that God will “hide him under the shadow of his wings.” That is the best place to hide in time of danger.

“Rock of ages, cleft for me
Let me hide myself in Thee.”

       During the war I remember going out one dark moonless night up to the front line trenches. The road came to an end in the woods. There in the side of a hill in a little camouflaged chapel we found some of our American soldiers. It was a little shrine which they had built, covered with branches of trees and so camouflaged it could not be seen. There they felt secure as in the presence of God. No enemy can find us, if we hide ourselves with God. Martin Luther used to say, “If any one should come and knock at my heart and say, 'Who lives here?’ I would say, ‘Not Martin Luther, but Jesus Christ lives here for Martin Luther’s life is hid with Christ in God.” Kerr 

"I can only image" by MercyMe