Judges 7:1-8:17, Luke 23:13-43, Psalms 97:1-98:9, Proverbs 14:7-8
Today is the 27th day of April, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it’s wonderful to be here with you today as we gather together. No matter where we are in the world we gather together around this Global Campfire and be together, allow God to speak to us through His word, let everything else go. It’s wonderful to be in this place together with you today. So, I mean in the next step forward is the one that comes after the last step. And, so, we’re working our way through the book of Judges right now and we’re in one of the longer stories of the judges, the story of Gideon. We’re reading from the Common English Bible this week. Judges chapter 7 verse 1 through 8 verse 17.
Commentary:
Okay. So, in the book of Judges we’re reading through though the story of Gideon and it’s a pretty famous story but it’s, you know, it’s one of the longer stories of the judges in Israel. And, so, we’ve already gone through who is Gideon and how God came to him and said you…you know, he’s gonna use him to set the people free from the Midianites and the testing and the assembling of the Army and all of this. So, Gideon has 32,000 people. And, so…like…that’s a lot of people. It may not have been anywhere near as big as the Midianite army that was coming but that’s enough people to do some damage with and to put up a good fight with. And, so, we see the counterintuitive ways of the Lord in like, “there’s too many people. If I had the Midianites over into your hand then…then you’ll say you did it by your own strength. And that’s not what’s going on here. I am setting you free from the Midianites.” And we can see that this is true from our reading alone. Like, after the battle has happened and people are chasing the Midianites and everything then some of the tribes come to Gideon and they’re like, “why didn’t you take us into battle”, right? So, it was all about this glory. And, of course, Gideon’s like, “what have I done? Like, you’re doing more than I ever did.” So, he’s calming them all down. But we can see that when God stripped the Army down and whittled it down further that he was right, they would’ve tried to take the glory for themselves. So, he invites anybody who was afraid basically to leave the mountain and 22,000 of the 32,000 leave which leaves Gideon 10,000. And, so, like that whittles things down considerably but that’s still too many for God. So, in the end the fighting force is 300 people against a vast horde and according to what we read today that vast horde was over 100,000 people. So, 300 against that much of a horde of armed people, like that is not…like you wouldn’t say like, “yeah…that…those are good odds. That's…you should…you should go to battle”, right? It’s more like, “this is a suicide mission.” And we see these counterintuitive ways of God in so many of the stories of the Bible. So, the 300 people, like when it all starts, they are able to, you know, kind of raise torches and blow trumpets and smash vases and make a lot of noise and scream and yell. And because these 300 people have surrounded the camp the people inside the camp have no idea that…all they know is that they’re being attacked. And it…and no one would attack an army like that with three hundred people. Like this is a big attack. And, so they get up and just start fighting…fighting each other. Everything is thrown into disarray. They start fleeing and we’ve seen these kinds of things in many different battles on our journey through the Scriptures so far this year. So, why not the battles that we face? Why wouldn’t God be counterintuitive so that we couldn’t raise our own flag and say look at what I did?
And if we want to talk like counterintuitive ways of getting things done, then let’s just flip over into what we read in the gospel of Luke today because again we read the story of the crucifixion, like the final judgment and the crucifixion of our Savior. And again, it’s so easy, but really…I mean…because it’s so well-known, we’ve heard in a million times, maybe read it 100,000 times…like whatever…we…we’ve been through this story so many times that it’s very easy to just move beyond it, kind of know the end of the story, kinda know what’s gonna happen. And we don’t necessarily have to focus on the fact that, yeah, Jesus was crucified…crucified. That’s just an unthinkable form of execution. It’s just so completely counterintuitive. The most-high God could to anything, could destroy the world in a second, could create things into being out of nothing. The all-powerful most-high God, this is how He chose to humble Himself. Like this…this is such a profound outpouring of love that it is like impossible for our minds to even comprehend it. This is the lengths God is willing to go to to get to us and it’s very counterintuitive because in the end He left us reaching for Him in faith in what looked like defeat. He could’ve done this differently. He could’ve just road in and took over the world. This is the most-high God, who created the world and everything else, both known and unknown, like can whatever He wants to do and this is what He chose. And, so, let’s not expect anything different but a counterintuitive creative God working in among His people, including us individually to do victorious things in counterintuitive ways.
Prayer:
Father, we invite You into that because we like linear. We like predictable. I raise my hand. I raise my other hand. I like things to make sense. I like to know a predictable outcome. We generally do like this and try to arrange for that. And yet, through the stories of the Scriptures we see You continually working in very very interesting unconventional ways. So, why would we expect that would stop even in times like this? So come Holy Spirit, may we hear and see Your movements, may we attain what we’ve been asking for all along, eyes to see and ears to hear, that we might see what You are doing in the world, that we might see what You are doing in our lives. We open ourselves to Your transformation. Come Holy Spirit we pray in the powerful and mighty name of Jesus we ask. Amen.
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