If you grew up going to Sunday School and VBS, I guarantee you’ve made some kind of trumpets, torches, and pitchers craft. Here are some particularly fun ones I found online. 🤓

Anyhoos…

My point is – we all know the WHAT of this story VERY well. We know that God pared down the army. Which is honestly one of the funniest verses in all of scripture:

“Therefore, tell the people, ‘Whoever is timid or afraid may leave this mountain and go home.’” So 22,000 of them went home…” ‭Judges‬ ‭7‬:‭3‬ ‭NLT‬‬

🤣

Oh my gosh, that’s SO FUNNY! 😂

We also know the bit about the water-drinking test to thin the ranks down from 10,000 to just 300. (Interesting that 10,000 was the size of army Deborah & Barak had.)

If you’re really Bible-savvy, you know about Gideon and his servant sneaking into the Midianite camp at night and overhearing the guy tell his tent-mate the dream about the barley bun bowling into the camp of Midian and knocking down all the pins – I mean tents. ⛺️⛺️⛺️⛺️⛺️ 🎳🥯

And everyone’s favorite part is of course the torches 🔥 hidden in jars🏺and the surprise “attack” with the ram’s horn trumpets 🎺 blaring and all the men shouting.

What we often miss is the WHY of God’s strange choice to whittle down Gideon’s army to just 300 men. It’s right at the beginning of the story which kinda gets overlooked.

“The Lord said to Gideon,

🧔🏽 “You have too many warriors with you. If I let all of you fight the Midianites, the Israelites will boast to Me that they saved themselves by their own strength.”
‭‭Judges‬ ‭7‬:‭2‬ ‭NLT‬‬

It’s not in our best interest to believe that we have the power to save ourselves. Cuz we don’t. And westerners tend to believe that more is better. But it isn’t always.

If we find ourselves with limited resources that do not seem adequate for the need, we don’t panic. It’s just God whittling down the army so we don’t get any ideas that we won the day in our own strength.

This is a lot like Moses holding a stick while God parts the water.

🧔🏽 The Lord: Here, Gideon, you and your 300 guys wave these torches and break these jars and make lots of noise while I defeat this vast army.

Did you ever “help” a grownup when you were a small child? Maybe you got to stir some ingredients in a bowl or pick up scraps of wood or feed animals. Have you ever invited small children to “help” you make or do something? It’s usually one very simple task (that they do rather poorly). That’s the level of “help” God “needs” from us. He obviously doesn’t need help at all. The helping is instructional for the helper. The point is not the task. The point is learning and building relationship.

Sometimes I feel like the Lord says to me, “Here, Lacy… You sit here and play the piano and sing while I make people feel better.”

You try it. Put your name in the 1st blank and then something you do well to serve others that isn’t really hard for you (i.e. a gift), in the 2nd blank.

🧔🏽 The Lord: “Here, ______, you go right here and ______ while I save the world.”

I feel like this puts our gifts and service into right perspective. We are not the saviors of the world, but the actual Savior has invited us to participate in saving the world with Him. And our gifts, though small in the grand scheme of things, become part of the story like Moses’ staff or Gideon’s jars. The Lord is pleased when we work with Him like a good parent is pleased to have a child who wants to “help.”

I hope you have some happy memories as a child of being told you were “a good helper.” It’s a fantastic feeling- knowing that you contributed in some small way. Of course we can take about as much credit helping God as a 3 year old can take for making breakfast or fixing a car. But even if our job is just to make noise and wave a torch while God does all the real fighting, our Heavenly Father is including us in His work. And that is what all children want: to be included.

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I got to stand where Gideon stood. Or, at least in the neighborhood.

No, really – It was actually a neighborhood. In Israel. The hillside now has quiet streets and houses. We went to kind of a dead end where there was a vacant lot. It was brushy and overgrown. A few yards down the fairly steep hillside was a seepage of water from the hillside that was probably the location where the soldiers were sorted by lapping or kneeling.

From our vantage point we could see through the trees the part of the Jezreel Valley where the armies of the Midianites, the Amelkites and the people of the east were camped and where they turned their swords against one another in confusion.

It is now dotted with houses and roads, power lines, and Israeli families driving minivans. 🚐

What was once a place of impossible odds and being hopelessly outnumbered became a nice place to live; quiet streets where children play and families maybe keep a few chickens and grow gardens.

Watch and see. If you let the Almighty fight your battles, He will turn your battlefields into places where life and peace and joy can flourish.