The Army is Gathering

“For we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you."

This is what the LORD says to you: “Do not be afraid or discouraged because of this vast army. For the battle is not yours, but God's. You will not have to fight this battle. Take up your positions; stand firm and see the deliverance the LORD will give you, O Judah and Jerusalem. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Go out to face them tomorrow, and the LORD will be with you."

2 Chronicles 20: 12, 15, 17

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For a woman who has traditionally felt like it’s far safer to hedge her bets with a diversified portfolio than to trust anything so completely, it’s a difficult confession to make, even if the heart yearns to be rescued like a damsel in distress. To admit there is a vast army preparing to attack you and that there’s nothing you can do about it – now that was scary to me. And that army can take many forms: physical, with circumstances or people who seem to be crowding in, emotional, where you can’t seem to find a place to stand in your roiling feelings, or spiritual, when you are trying to stand on what you know to be true but are feeling so terribly weak to do so. Doesn’t really matter what form that army is taking. It’s there and its sights are set squarely on you. Oh, the shaky breath we draw in as we marshal what strength we’ve got left and the breath we lose when we realize we’ve got nothing left to marshal.

Here is the razor’s edge of the soul, the fork in the road where you have to make a choice. What are you going to do? Try to fight anyway when the stakes are so high, knowing you’ll lose this battle and heaven knows what else? Or admit you don’t know what to do and need to trust God.

But trusting God . . . what a tangle that can be. Even if you’ve confessed your need to God, what does it actually look like? The path to trusting God looks different for different types of people, and I can’t speak for how it is for other personality types. But I can speak for how it usually looks to a woman who always wants to do the right thing but who asks questions and wrestles with God and isn’t satisfied by the pat Sunday School answers. It doesn’t look easy, basically.

We’ve all heard the admonitions and parables about committing a situation into God’s hands, unwittingly snatching it back, and then complaining that God isn’t helping. But no one ever seems to explain how not to snatch it back. Honey, if I knew how to leave it, I would! Who wants to lug that weight around? But then I look down, and blow me down, there it is. Dang it.

Funny how so often it’s when you have nothing at all left, no hands with which to take the burden back, no shoulders to bear up under it, that you learn the hard way what it is to trust God. And funny how even though your soul shrivels a bit at the prospect and throws a little resentment God’s way – “You don’t have to go overboard, you know, God. I want to trust you. Can’t you just work with that?” – it turns out that even in the breath-taking sweep of the destruction of what you held dear, it’s not as bad as you thought it would be. There’s such a sweetness in finding out what it actually looks like to see God be as good as he always claimed to be, as close as you need him to be, and faithful as swore by himself all those centuries ago. Oh, the safety.

And then you see, really see. You understand what it means to trust God when you see another army approaching. You understand what spiritual armor is all about. It’s about putting that helmet of salvation on your head –you know what you know and you’re not allowing any other thought to come in – taking up your position, facing that army, and standing firm while you watch what God can do.

See, the thing that the control-freak Christian has a tough time with is not so much that God can do what you need him to do. We know he’s powerful enough. It says so all through the Bible. It’s that he will do it. There’s never anything in his Word that contradicts his capability, his awesome might. But for what he will do, well, there’s no formula, is there? As John Eldredge points out in Wild at Heart, Jesus healed blindness four times and he never did it the same way twice. How many cries did David cast up to God expressing his confusion and fear because he couldn’t predict God? In the end, David did not rely on God’s methods, only his promises. He focused on what he did know. For a person who is analytical, fair-minded, and smart, all about making wise choices in life and living out her years in an honorable and sensible way, the question springs up like a gopher that won’t leave the golf course: “I want God’s will in my life, and I know God won’t answer my requests if they are outside of his will, so what if it’s his will that I go through this, that I suffer, that I am lost, that I am swept away by this army so I can learn some lesson I need to learn? How can I have confidence to stand on believing for ‘whatsoever ye desire’ if it might not be his will and I just don’t know it?” That’s a really hard question to answer unless you go through his Word. There are times when you need to be broken, when you are holding something dearer and closer than your Savior. There are times when you need to find yourself down the rabbit hole of an impossible situation. But you’ll find more often than not, the reason for the impossible situation is not so that you can be crushed but so that God can show you what he’s made of. It is far more logical, based solely on his Word, to trust that God will deliver you than that he will put you through this suffering with no end. He is the God of “yes” and “amen.” (2 Cor. 1:20)

And think about it – what have you really got to lose? Even if you find he does not intend to rescue you exactly as you expected (and logical planners that we are, we always have a back-up plan in case God needs one!) or when you expected, he will always be faithful to warrant your trust in him. He will always give you more than you gave him, even when what you’re giving him is all your trust which is sometimes more than you thought yourself capable of giving. God knows there is no more precious a gift than that trust from a person who always likes to know the last step in a journey before taking the first one, who always has a color-coded, hyperlinked, indexed itinerary for any trip, who always asks “why” and “when,” who with a secret chagrin identifies more with Martha than with Mary. That, my friend, is your burnt offering, that is your sacrifice, and God knows it. And he will always honor those sacrifices. He said so himself.

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Offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord. (Ps. 4:5)

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May he remember all your sacrifices and accept your burnt offerings. (Ps. 20:3)

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He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God. (Ps. 50:23)

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The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (Ps. 51:17)

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Now, don’t get all worried if you feel like your trust is not enough because you keep having doubts, you keep wondering if God will come, you keep struggling with negative thoughts. “For he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.” (Ps. 103:14) And what has dust to do with the high and lofty ambitions of the Almighty? He knows this! He doesn’t judge you for your faulty faith when you offer it with a right heart. After all, how can it be that “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing is impossible for you” (Matt. 17:20)? How can that be? No faith as meager and faulty as one the size of a mustard seed could possibly yield all of that. Right? Ah, but you’re not figuring in God. Is he not the one who multiplied the loaves and fishes not once, but twice, to feed thousands? Is he not the one who created the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing? Your feeble faith is far more than he needs to expand it a hundred, a thousand times its original size. All it takes for him to do this great thing is a sincere offering and a heartfelt desire to trust him more. Few things are sweeter or more encouraging to me than the story of the man whose son was possessed by demons in Mark 9. How many of us have cried out in our spirit, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” That was my life verse for years. It is possible to believe and still feel unbelief trickle in like a leak the source of which you can’t find. How kind and patient of God to help us with this. How heartening to know he thinks far higher of us than we do, that he sees for us all we can be, that his law is the law of the highest potential.

People like us want to know what is our part. What is up to us to do? Surely God requires something of us, right? After all, we’re no shirkers, we don’t shrink from doing our duty. You don’t get something for nothing, after all. Well, aside from the fact that God sent his Son to die for us when we were completely, utterly unworthy of it, and aside from the times God saves his people for his own name’s sake and not through any worthiness of your own making (Ps. 23:3, 79:9, 106:8, 109:21, 143:11, Is. 48:9, Ezek. 20:44, to name just a few), it is a fact that in most cases, if you refuse to trust God, you stopper his miracles and stymie your own amazement. It takes something very simple, but something at times very difficult from you. It takes you saying “YES.” When you feel that faint nudging that now would probably be the time to trust God, that now is when you won’t be able to save yourself, when you think you hear God whispering, “Trust me. I’ve got this,” say “YES.” God does amazing things with YES. He unlocks doors, he breaks your heart open, he gives you a heart of flesh for your heart of stone (Ez. 36:26). He rises with all the force of a tsunami, ready to slam into you not with destruction but with awesome goodness. He spreads his wings like a great eagle and begins to beat the upper air with your soul securely in his talons. He is the earth beginning to quake, he is the sky ready to unleash its rains.

When you’re faced on all sides with either enemies or merely a lack of support, when you’re alone and you know deep down that no matter how you scramble, you can’t see your way to solving this situation, that’s when God acts. There’s a reason he waits until the eleventh hour: if the situation were not truly dark and insurmountable, then how would you be certain when salvation comes that it was by God’s hand and not your own? There are no “too lates” with God, as Alexander Maclaren said. There’s a reason God so often says, “This battle is not yours, but the Lord’s. Take your positions, stand firm, and see the deliverance the Lord will give you.” There’s a reason this loving Lord leads us into these situations that tempt you to doubt the surety of his love – it is so that he can show you once and for all that you are never so lost that he cannot find you, that you are never so drowned that he cannot swim to you, that you are never so charred that he cannot heal you, that you are never so deadened and tired that he cannot bring you new life. His eye is ever on your end. He does everything he does in order to raise you up as his beloved child, to set you at his side in the heavens.

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Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices;
together they shout for joy.
When the LORD returns to Zion,
they will see it with their own eyes.

- Isaiah 52:8

He has given many words of deliverance, of rescuing his beloved like the hero in a fairy tale. And He is “watching to see that my word is fulfilled.” (Jeremiah 1:12)

Watch and see the deliverance the Lord will give you.