SDfAoWOP: Gideon

Day Fourteen

Judges 6:27

So Gideon took ten men of his servants and did as the Lord had told him. But because he was too afraid of his family and the men of the town to do it by day, he did it by night.

Salvation belongs to The Lord. Salvation from running after false, wrong, inadequate, brutal gods that sit there as lumps of clay and wood. They have to be torn down, pushed over. Their presence is a heaviness over the land. Why, you ask, are they there, after Israel swore so faithfully to follow The Lord, to serve him only for all their generations? Why do I lug around my own ego, as some precious tiny tin pot dictator, having everyone accommodate my whims and plans?

Salvation belongs to The Lord. Courage, even, belongs to The Lord. Courage to tear the idol down, but anxious worry and fear to do it at night. If ever there is the picture of the Christian, the modern lover of God, it is me creeping around in quiet lest someone discover my true obedience. And when it is discovered, I murmur and mutter and try to convince myself especially that it doesn't signify very much, perhaps nothing at all.

But salvation belongs to The Lord. And he is The Lord both of the day and the night. He sees. He knows. A few hundred trumpets blown jars smashed and the enemy runs away as if persued by an actual army. Even when I obey in terror and darkness, The Lord delivers me out of the hand of all my enemies, most especially even myself.