Daily Devotional For October 20, 2025
The ten horns, which you saw, and the beast, these will come to hate the prostitute and she will be made desolate and naked and they will eat her flesh and burn her up with fire. For God has placed it in their hearts to do His purpose, and to be of one purpose themselves, and to give their domain and power to the beast until the words of God are brought to completion. Rev 17:16-17.
God retains sovereignty over the choices that His enemies make. While evil is self-destructive in nature, God’s guiding hand is also there to limit the harm evil powers can do. In the end, not only the beast, but even Satan will do God’s bidding (2 Thess 2:11).
In 1935 Karl Doenitz (born 1891) was made the commander of the reconstituted German submarine command under Adolph Hitler. Derisively referred to as “Admiral Donuts” by the Allies, he considered the problem of defeating Great Britain in a war. The fact that Great Britain is an island nation is both an advantage and a vulnerability. It is an advantage in the sense that it cannot be attacked unless the enemy has overwhelming air and sea superiority. It is a vulnerability in the sense that the shipping lanes must remain open for Britain to survive a war.
Doenitz had an idea and presented it to Hitler. With careful planning and focused resources, he could have factories producing forty submarines a month by the year 1938, well in advance of the war that eventually broke out. If they targeted merchant shipping instead of military vessels, Britain’s military and economy might be strangled in a matter of months. Hitler considered the plan but rejected it. He did not see the brilliance in a tactic that would surprise the enemy. Instead he wanted to match the British in the ego-boosting arena of naval warfare, battleships and aircraft carriers. He was enamored with “the big stuff.”
Hitler authorized a construction level of one or two subs a month in 1936. He placed massive resources into the construction of battleships like the Bismarck and Tirpitz and aircraft carriers that would not have come on line until 1950! When war broke out in 1939, Doenitz’s handful of subs sank 3,000,000 gross tons of British shipping in the first year. Imagine the havoc 500-800 subs around Britain might have wrought! It is very possible that Britain would have been forced to surrender within a year after Dunkirk.
Hitler belatedly authorized Doenitz’s plan. By 1944 the Nazis reached a production level of 40 submarines a month. But by then the Allies had discovered radar and broken the Nazi Enigma code, so the submarines were destroyed as fast as they came off the line. While His hand is often invisible at the time, history reveals that God is always in control. It is sometimes the smallest deviations from plan that lead the enemies of God to disaster.
Lord, help me live in the assurance that You are in control of my life today.