Victory Requires Action

God has done incredible things here on earth over His enemies. God led Gideon to defeat an immense multitude Midianites with a mere 300 soldiers (Judg. 7:7). God stopped the sun in its place, so that Joshua might defeat the Amorites (Josh. 10:12-13). God pured down plagues on Egypt and divide the Red Sea. However, each story demonstrates two points. One, these show that each victory did indeed come by God's hand alone.

There is no human device that can stop either the sun or the earth in their rotation. We do not possess the means today, and we did not posses the means then, either. Nor is there any feat of human engineering that can stop the flow of a massive body of water, such as the Red Sea. While it is true that dams have created to harvest the energy of water, no dam permanently stops up a river, and no reservoir can contain an ocean.

What we also see here is that the men involved in these stories were not inactive. Moses did not stand in the desert and wait for God to magically move him from danger. God provided the method for escape through His wondrous power, but Hid not mystically teleport Israel away from danger. Nor did God build the ark for Noah, but instead had Noah build the large boat over the course of 100 years. Joshua still had to partake in a bloody battle with Amorites, just as Gideon still had to take his men and attack the Midianites. As Ethan Longhenry writes, "God's victory still requires us to act in faith and live in obedience" (Rom. 6:3-7, 1 Pet. 1:22).

Living Life