How to be equipped to know what God is doing (Judg 6:1-10)

When I was hospitalised with pneumonia in my early twenties, an elderly lady on the pastoral team of my church came to visit me. She asked me if God had spoken to me, and the implication of her question seemed to be that God was admonishing me for something. While I was pondering a particular decision during that time, I did not feel that the Lord was chastising me through this illness. In fact, the answer I came to was just the opposite. I sensed God’s encouragement to take a course of action that I did not previously feel free to pursue. However, this incident highlights how difficult it can be to know what God is saying to us. So how can we become better equipped to understand His ways?

Israel was experiencing just such a dilemma and their spectacular failure to interpret events correctly points to what was missing from their understanding. On one level they, like us, could only see their circumstances: the Midianites were more powerful and have pushed them back into the hills to hide in caves, their crops were destroyed year after year and their livestock driven away (Judg 6:2-5). Further, in the ancient Near East, no other god required exclusive worship (unlike the Lord), so it was difficult for Israel to appreciate that God saw such practices as unfaithfulness to Him. What is prevalent in the culture is often hard to spot in our own attitudes, like materialism for us in the West. So in their trouble Israel cried out to God, just as they have done during their enslavement in Egypt, which was not caused by sin (Exod 2:23; Judg 6:6). In fact, Gideon’s interpretation is probably representative of Israel’s that the Lord had abandoned them in their distress (Judg 6:13).

How could they have appreciated God’s perspective that they have sinned (Judg 6:1)? First, events described here form a repeated pattern in the Book of Judges (see my introduction to the book here), so that whenever Israel worshipped other gods, the result was foreign oppression (e.g. Judg 3:7, 12; 4:2). Secondly, God’s covenant prohibiting devotion to other gods was clear from the very beginning (Exod 20:3-4) and His anger over the worship of the golden calf (Exod 32:7-8) shortly after the revelation at Sinai should have been etched into Israel’s memory. These two points, however, rely on the fact that one generation passes on their knowledge and experience of God to the next and Israel has failed to do so (Judg 2:10). At the same time, and this is the third point, the Lord sent a prophet reminding them of the true state of affairs, of God’s power and grace to save them, of His requirements not to worship other gods and of their disobedience (Judg 6:7-10). Yet the silence of any response from Israel to the prophet’s message is deafening and it reveals the true issue. It is not simply a lack of knowledge but an unwillingness to listen.

What follows from this for us? The key to understanding what God is doing in our lives is a faithful relationship with the Lord. As we walk with Him, we learn from experience how He deals with us through events and as we grow in our understanding of His Word through biblical teaching in the church and our own reading of Scripture, we get a better idea of what matters to Him. Finally, even if we are inexperienced, the Lord is able to communicate to us what we need to hear – all it takes is our willingness to listen. If we want to hear from Him, how much more does He want us to understand, especially if we need correcting! To be sure, there are times when God seems silent and we feel confused but when we are in darkness, we cling to Him in faith and keep walking. He is faithful to lead us if we seek Him.

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