This post is part of my ongoing series of writing down my thoughts on the Bible passages I read each day. Some days I hope to have great insight that the Lord gives me, and many days, I will likely struggle through the text and not know what to write down based on what I read. My hope and prayer is that as I make this a habit, just as I did daily writing for so long, that I will improve on my ability to read and understand the passages I’m reading. Please keep in mind that many of these posts may be published late at night or with little time studying and simply be my first thoughts after reading. This is in no way a commentary that one should use to discern the Bible, but my own personal thoughts.
You Can’t Win The Battle With Too Much Power
It’s interesting in chapter 6 that we never find out, to my knowledge, who this prophet is. It talks about a prophet, but it doesn’t tell us who it is or anything else that they do. What an amazing story. Someone who had a profound impact on Israel’s history and it seems God didn’t think it was important for us to know his name. We may be a nameless figure in history, but that doesn’t mean that God isn’t going to use us in big ways.
Along the same lines, when Gideon is approached by the angel of God, he lets the angel know that he is in the weakest tribe and he’s the lowest in his father’s house. Again, God is clearly not looking at some sort of status to use people. He is not partial and uses anyone who will be willing and often uses those with less of a status than others.
In fact, this whole story has this theme of using the weak things of the world to shame the strong. It’s striking to me that God was actually like, “no, you have too many people. If you go and win the battle with this many people, people might think that it was them who did the saving instead of me.” It reminds me that sometimes the best place we can be is when we feel the weakest. When we think that there is nothing that we can possibly do, that’s when God comes in big.
On a side note, the 300 dudes who stayed (out of like 32,000 people they started with) must have been some pretty gnarly dudes to have stayed through all of that. Talk about people, who are committed.
The last thing that I noticed as I was reading this was Gideon’s plea to the Lord when God comes to him. Gideon asks God why he doesn’t do good things as he did with his father’s generation, but later on, his own household has other gods that they’re serving. They are performing Baal worship…clearly, there was something lost in translation here as it was made clear in earlier commands that if the people went after other gods, God would curse them. It was as simple as getting rid of those, but it seems that Gideon didn’t even realize the problem until God brought it up to him.
What idols do we have in our life while we ask God to move in our life? Those idols must be removed so that we are able to experience freedom in Christ.