S110P1 – His fingerprint: the Midianite defeat

Jdg. 7:7-8a

Then the Lord said to Gideon, “By the three hundred men who lapped I will save you, and deliver the Midianites into your hand. Let all the other people go, every man to his place.” So the people took provisions and their trumpets in their hands. And he sent away all the rest of Israel, every man to his tent, and retained those three hundred men.

Missy was the genius of our class from early on.  Her mother was very active in the school and made sure that her daughters took advantage of every resource and every opportunity.  It was at her mother’s insistence that the young child was skipped a grade to join our class and regularly studied more advanced disciplines with the older kids.  I recall one assignment in particular in which we were to write reports on our favorite animals.  I was pretty young at the time, but there was something about Missy’s report that stood out to me.  It was too good, too polished, and too long.  I thought there was no way that this little girl produced that work on her own because it seemed like her mother’s fingerprints were all over it.

As we serve the Lord, He will work in many ways that protect and support us.  We must remember, however, that there is a greater purpose to that work.  God is to be glorified by all that He does.  Every provision, every healing, every deliverance serves to point the world to him.  He surely wanted to save his people not only from the Midianites but from the other people groups who joined them, but their deliverance was not the end game.  He would deliver them, but He would do so in a way that undoubtedly and solely gave him the victory.  He made sure that no one could say that the Israelites somehow were able to do this on their own.  That is why He whittled their numbers down to a mere 300 when their adversaries were as numerous as locusts covering the valley. 

God can place us in seemingly impossible situations and often clue us in to that beforehand.  For someone like me, this can really shake our faith.  We look at what appears to be ahead of us, and we wonder what God could be thinking because it just does not look good for us.  We must remember the ultimate goal, which is to glorify God.  He may give us talents and abilities, but we do not credit our successes to those talents and abilities.  We credit our successes to his power, and we must welcome an exhibition of that power through the impossible. Father, show up in our lives in a mighty way to glorify yourself before men, and do what no one could credit to us.