Sunday Devotional: Judges 7:2

Then the Lord said to Gideon, “The people which you have are [too] many for Me to put Midian in their hand, lest Israel glorify themselves over me saying, “My hand has saved me!”

Judges 6 opens with Israel, once again, forsaking the Lord and doing evil in His sight. The Lord delivers Israel into the hands of Midian, and under Midian rule, they are sorely oppressed. At last, Israel cries out to God for relief, and He sends an angel to the youngest son of a family of the tribe of Manasseh named Gideon. The Lord raises Gideon up to lead an army against the Midianites. Having gathered an army of 32,000 to go up against their enemy, the Lord makes the rather strange request we read in Judges 7:2. Instead of making his army bigger, the Lord wants Gideon to reduce the size of his army. It’s too big! In the end, the Lord cuts Gideon’s army down to 300 men. Yet the Lord used these 300 men to bring down the entire Midianite army.

Clearly, Gideon thought, as we would, that a large force needs to be met with a force equal or greater to prevail. What he forgot, and what we tend to forget, is that the Lord is sovereign and almighty. If God intends to bring down the Midianites, does He need 32,000 men to do it? Does He need 10,000? He really didn’t need 300–He can do it with just one man. The size of the army was never the issue here. What God wanted to show Gideon, and Israel, was who’s in charge. He wanted the odds to be stacked against Israel, for the chances of success to be ridiculously low, so Israel could never claim the glory for themselves. They could never say they won by their own strength, or tactics, or weaponry. The only way they could account for their win was the fact that the Lord fought for them.

There are times we face seemingly impossible circumstances, when we know what the Lord would have us to do, but the odds are stacked against our success, or it seems too hard to do. If we truly believe that God is sovereign, and God is all-powerful, then we know such concerns are not an issue to Him. All the Lord is concerned about is that we focus on Him, and seek to give Him the glory for accomplishing His will through us. He is more than capable of taking care of our circumstances.

May the Lord, by His Spirit, enable us to trust Him to complete the work He has ordained to do through us, even when we struggle to believe it possible.

Have a great week!