Skip to main content

 


Israel too quickly turned from their singular worship of the Lord God. They looked pragmatically at the pagan gods that seemed to “produce”, when it was the Lord God that had blessed His people. Syncretism: they never totally stopped worshiping the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they just added idols to the mix. God judged them and sent the pagan Midianites to steal crops and cattle as soon as the fields were ripe.
Judges 6:7-10 “When they cried out to the Lord because of Midian, the Lord sent a prophet to the Israelites. He said, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I brought you up out of slavery in Egypt. I rescued you from the Egyptians and from all who oppressed you. I drove out your enemies and gave you their land. I told you, ‘I am the Lord your God. You must not worship the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you now live.’ But you have not listened to me.”
So, soon after, the angel of the Lord came to a man named Gideon. He was the youngest son of the weakest clan of the tribe of Manasseh. He was hiding in a wine press threshing wheat to hide it from the Midianites. The angel said, “Mighty hero! The Lord is with you!” Well, from Gideon’s perspective, that was a laugh! The angel told him that God was sending him to rescue Israel from the Midianites
Gideon in essence said, “No way! That’s not going to happen.” But the Lord God said, “I will be with you, and you will destroy Midian as if it were one singular man.”
What God says about you, what He is calling you to do may seem to you and the world around you as sheer madness. But when God speaks, things that were once non-existent come into being.
Remember, God took a highly educated, stuttering man with anger issues that led to murder from the wilderness and sent him to Pharoah to liberate the people of Israel.
The fact is, since Adam’s fall in Eden, all God has had to work with are deeply flawed human beings. It wasn't because some were naturally gifted, splendid examples of humanity that God chose them. God has constantly been trying to tell us through person after person throughout the entire text of the Bible that when He is WITH US, all things are possible. It's about Him, not us!
It wasn’t about Gideon’s credentials. He was validated by God. As St. Paul writes, “We are not sufficient in ourselves to think of anything as if it were coming from ourselves. Our sufficiency is Christ Jesus.” The signs and wonder that Jesus stated the church would continue to minister in His Name would be the work of the Holy Spirit, not as a result of any inherent, latent ability in any human being.
God was telling Gideon what God was going to do in him and through him. It would be God doing the work, just as He had done at Jericho. All Gideon had to do was listen, believe and obey; just DO IT because God asked him to. More tomorrow about what God did.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

  PRAYER Jesus Christ NEVER taught on what we call "unanswered prayer." James wrote that a divided loyalty between trusting the Lord God for life and at the same time relying on the world's systems to get what you want will result in you not getting anything from God you may have prayed about. God will never reinforce the unbelief that flows from divided loyalty. THAT is not unanswered prayer. That is God saying, "No." to your request. God saying, "No." to your requests is not unanswered prayer. It is His grace. His "No" is just what I would want if I knew what He knows. The Lord also answers with, "Not now; not yet." because we are not yet prepared to receive what we think we need. God works in us both to will and to do His good pleasure. If I am praying for something God wants to do in me and the Holy Spirit is working in me preparing me to receive what God has in store, His "Not yet." is NOT unanswered prayer. As we see...
Post a Comment
Read more
 HEBREWS 10:1-2, 10-18 "The sacrifices under that system ( the Old Covenant) were repeated again and again, year after year, but they were never able to provide perfect cleansing for those who came to worship.   If they could have provided perfect cleansing, the sacrifices would have stopped, for the worshipers would have been purified once for all time, and their feelings of guilt would have disappeared.   For God’s will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time.  Under the Old Covenant, the priest stands and ministers before the altar day after day, offering the same sacrifices again and again, which can never take away sins.   But our High Priest offered Himself to God as a single sacrifice for sins, good for all time. Then He sat down in the place of honor at God’s right hand.   There He waits until His enemies are humbled and made a footstool under His feet.   For by that one offering He forever m...
Post a Comment
Read more
HEARING MUST BE UNITED TO BELIEVING Hebrews 3:16-19 “And who was it who rebelled against God, even though they heard His voice? Wasn’t it the people Moses led out of Egypt? And who made God angry for forty years? Wasn’t it the people who sinned, whose corpses lay in the wilderness? And to whom was God speaking when He took an oath that they would never enter His rest? Wasn’t it the people who disobeyed Him? So, we see that because of their unbelief they were not able to enter His rest.” I have heard people say, “If I heard the voice of God. I would not rebel; I’d believe.” Others have said, “If I saw a miracle, I’d believe.” We really do not have a grip on the capacity for unbelief that is resident in the human heart and mind. The children of Israel saw God decimate the false gods of Egypt in the plagues He sent through Moses. The Lord God who had called Abraham made sure that Abraham’s children saw that the gods and religious culture surrounding them for 400 years were not gods at all...
Post a Comment
Read more