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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.

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