Day 91: Judges 6-7

Welcome to 5 -Minute Bible, your daily guide for your daily reading. Today's April the 1st and we'll be looking at Judges 6 -7.

Now yesterday we saw that the cycle of sin and deliverance cannot fix itself, and today we're going to begin to see why.

Because Judges 6 -7 takes us into one of the most familiar accounts in the book, but it presses a deeper point than just familiarity might allow us to notice, because Israel is not merely struggling, they are crushed, stripped of their stability, driven into hiding, and reduced to survival.

Their strength has been broken, their confidence has been shattered, and yet, when God raises up a deliverer,

He does not begin by restoring their strength, He continues to strip it away further and further.

And what unfolds in these chapters is not simply a story of rescue, but a revelation of how

God works. He's not dependent upon human ability, nor does He simply build

His salvation upon human strength, instead, He removes every false foundation so that when deliverance comes, we will know that it's unmistakably

His. And in that way, Judges 6 opens with Israel under devastating oppression from the

Midianites, who sweep through the land like locusts with a consuming force, destroying crops and plundering resources and leaving the people impoverished and afraid.

And in that way, Israel retreats into caves and other strongholds, they're no longer living with confidence in the land that the

Lord had given them, but when they cry out, God first sends a prophet, not immediately to deliver them, but to interpret their suffering.

Their condition is not accidental, it is the direct result of covenant obedience.

Then the angel of the Lord appears to Gideon, calling him to be the instrument of deliverance for the people of God.

But as I'm sure you've heard, Gideon really isn't the picture of strength or readiness. He's in hiding, he's uncertain, he's filled with all kinds of questions.

He asks for signs and then he hesitates. He wrestles to believe that God could actually use a man like him.

And yet God doesn't reject him. He patiently confirms his promise and he calls

Gideon forward. Before any external battle begins, Gideon is commanded to tear down the altar to Baal in his own household.

And I want you to notice that, that's not a minor detail. He has an altar to Baal in his own house.

And in that, it reveals the problem is not merely how strong Midian is or how formidable their forces are or how clever their battle plan is.

It's that idolatry has infected everything within Israel and deliverance must begin by hollowing out the rot before they can begin building upon the promises of God.

Now, after all of that, after Gideon finally accepts the mission that God is giving him, the army gathers. But then

God does something peculiar. He begins to reduce the size of the army. What starts as a large force is steadily diminished until only 300 men remain, which is not only not really a matter of strategy, but it's a matter of theology because God is ensuring that the coming victory cannot be attributed to human strength in the same way that he did it in Jericho.

When the battle finally unfolds, it does so in a way that defies human expectation.

It's 300 worship leaders with trumpets and jars and torches. Gideon's small little force advances and the

Lord, by his power alone, throws the Midianites into confusion so that they collapse upon themselves and kill each other in the midst of their chaos and confusion.

The victory is decisive and the conclusion is unavoidable. This deliverance doesn't belong to Israel.

It belongs to God. So as you read today, I want you to ask the following question. Why does

God deliberately weaken his people before he decides to deliver them? And judges six through seven confronts us with a reality that runs against our human instinct.

We want to pile up our resources. We want to gather more and more strongholds and we want to increase our weaponry and our arsenal and all of that.

But God isn't like us. He's not limited by our human weakness. And he often works by removing our strength first so that his power can be clearly seen.

And in that way, the key tension in these chapters is not simply the contrast between weakness and strength as if God were somehow favoring unlikely victories.

What we see instead is the intentional dismantling of every form of human sufficiency.

Gideon begins as weak and hesitant, but God doesn't resolve that by turning him into a figure of natural strength.

Instead, he strips away everything that could have given him confidence in himself at all. The armies reduced, the numbers shrink, every visible support is removed until nothing remains that could plausibly explain success at all apart from the intervention of God.

And that is so deliberate because the deeper danger is not Midian as an external threat, but Israel's internal tendency to trust in themselves instead of God.

Had they prevailed with their thousands, they would have credited it to their own strength, their own strategy, their own ability.

So God ensures that such a conclusion is impossible. By the time the battle begins, the outcome has already been framed.

If victory comes, it's going to come by God alone. And this pattern presses directly into the human heart because it exposes how naturally you and I also rely upon our strength and our ability.

We trust in our numbers and our resources and our preparation and our control, believing that things can be secured by our effort and by our machinations alone.

And yet God repeatedly works in ways to dismantle those assumptions. What feels like a loss is often preparation.

What appears insufficient is often by God's design. And what looks like weakness generally in the hand of God becomes strength, becomes a opportunity for him to display his power with unmistakable clarity.

And this pattern reaches its fullest expression in Jesus Christ. Gideon's story points forward, but it also reveals its own limitations because the ultimate display of God's power through weakness is not found on the battlefield, but at the cross.

Their strength is not simply reduced, it is hidden. Glory is veiled and victory does not appear as triumph, but as defeat.

Think about this. The greatest victory that ever occurred in all of human history was in the killing and the death of God's one and only son.

And yet it's precisely in that moment that sin is judged, death is conquered, and the power of darkness is beaten.

Just as Gideon's reduced army makes it clear that salvation belongs to the Lord, the cross reveals that redemption is entirely the work of God.

But Christ goes beyond what any judge could accomplish. He doesn't merely interpret a cycle of oppression, he deals with the root of the problem.

He conquers sin itself and establishes a new covenant in which the law of God will be written on our hearts by the

Spirit to transform us from within. What judges exposes as an endless cycle of depravity,

Christ resolves as a decisive victory that leads to sanctification and glorification.

His kingdom doesn't rise and fall with human ability. It actually advances steadily, powerfully, and inevitably in spite of it because it rests on his finished work and his present reign instead of ours.

So as you read Judges 6 -7 today, pay careful attention to how thoroughly God removes every single ground for human boasting.

The victory is clear, but the deeper problem is not yet solved because tomorrow we will see that even after a triumph like this, the seeds of future failure are already taking root again.

And with that, read your Bible carefully, devotionally, and joyfully, and may the Lord use his word to sanctify you completely and we will continue our journey tomorrow.