The water in the Big Thompson River was running high. Stannis and Debra, teenage waitresses at the Covered Wagon Restaurant, were worried. Martin and Francis, the restaurant operators, called them saying everyone would be safe from high water in their house beside the restaurant. Debra’s parents phoned the girls telling them it would be safer to wait there until the water went down.
But all these were false hopes, for at that very time a tremendous flash flood of tidal wave proportions was building up on the river above the restaurant. In a last-minute phone call, Stannis told a friend that the flood was already washing propane tanks and cars past them. Then the river got so high it surrounded the restaurant.
Guests in the Palisades Motel across the river were eye witnesses of the tragedy. They saw the tidal wave water pick up the doomed restaurant and hurl it into the blackness of pounding water. Screams of those doomed inside could be heard even above the roar of the flood.
All seven in the restaurant lost their lives in that catastrophe. They thought they were safe, but it was a false hope. How many people today have “false hopes” about salvation and going to heaven! Some trust in their own good works—they think they can gain merit by trying to be good and doing good deeds, and that these when put into the scale will outweigh the bad things they have done. Others think they are safe because God is a loving God and would never send anyone to hell.
Some trust the salvation of their soul to the minister or to the priest. Some children think they are safe because their parents are Christians. But all of these are false hopes. These things will never take a person to heaven nor save him from hell.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the sinner’s only hope. To trust in Him for salvation is the only way to be saved. “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”
ML-07/31/1977