A Loaf of Barley Could Do My Job
The enemy is huge. They’ve camped in the valley, showing off their strength. Their camels alone are too numerous to count. One could as easily count grains of sand on the seashore.
I suspect it wasn’t any simpler to count the troops. At least not the Midianite and Amalekite warriors.
Gideon’s men? An ambitious preschooler could manage that.
There were only 300.
He had to send the rest of ‘em back to their tents.
But now I’m not sure who made out better: those sent home or those left to fight. Because it looks like 299 of the 300 remaining are about to become the punchline in a “how many Hebrew soldiers does it take” joke.
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No Results Found
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.” (Proverbs 3:5-6)
I thought it would be fun to do something in line with Independence Day for the 4th of July.
So I stopped over to Bible Gateway to see what I could find. I punched in “independence” and waited for my results. I got them instantly. The search page came back saying No Results Found.
Now, realize that this was a search of the whole Bible.
New and Old Testaments.
Sixty-six books.
That’s an awful lot of words to pick from.
But still, No Results Found.
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I figured maybe the translators of the NIV just didn’t prefer that word, so I searched the New American Standard instead.
No Results Found.
What about King James?
No Results Found.
I even tried searching for “independencia” in the Reina-Valera (Spanish) version.
No Results Found.
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What I do think we can fairly conclude is that when God was breathing out His Word, apparently “independence” wasn’t something that He wanted to see come up very often.
By contrast, when I searched for things like “trust in the Lord,” I got pages and pages of results. Imagine that. God doesn’t value our independence.
He values and desires our complete and total dependence on Him.
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It’s funny, because when I consider our job as parents, it is to grow up our kids so that they are not dependent on us. So that they are independent. Our goal in large part is to have them ultimately reach the point where they can make their own sound decisions, can adequately support themselves, can live high quality lives on their own. We celebrate milestones throughout their lives that show they are becoming independent, from taking their first steps to graduating from high school or college.
That independence marks their maturity.
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But when it comes to our maturity in Christ, our spiritual maturity, it’s marked less by our independence than it is by our dependence. Our utter dependence on God. We can recognize spiritual maturity by how an individual recognizes their own dependence.
Really, face it. We are dependent on God for our every breath. But we don’t always like to say so. We like to pose and pretend we are capable and independent. The mature among us can readily admit that they are dependent.
That they trust in the Lord with all their heart, that they don’t lean on their own understanding.
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It’s Independence Day.
We want to celebrate that big. For a nation to be its own sovereign power and not be subject to another gives us good reason to celebrate and set off fireworks. The struggle for independence fought by our Founding Fathers was noble, and it afforded us the freedom we now have to seek after and worship our God. We are indebted to them, and the many since then, who have sacrificed to protect our freedom and independence.
But, as individuals subject to a sovereign God, our own independence leaves much to be desired. It leaves us with the very things we need to survive — the things that God can only provide to those who recognize their absolute dependence on Him — hanging just out of reach.
And that’s nothing to celebrate.
Falling on my face in humble and grateful acknowledgement of my need for Him?
That should set off fireworks.
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(In the spirit of full disclosure, I do have to confess that I also did a word search in The Message for “independence.” I had a hunch that Peterson would come through. And admittedly, I did find one instance of the word in Jeremiah. This sole reference comes in a scathing indictment of the people for their rejection of God and includes some endearing references to a Sir Windbag and an examination of the credentials of the schools of sin and graduate courses in evil that they seemed to be promoting. The chapter got my head spinning and I’ll come back to this. But one day couldn’t do it justice. So stay tuned.)
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