Insightful Musings on the Scriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67

Hello, dear people.

I need to hurry. The ski bus will be here soon. Not exactly. But whereas a nephew and son are up here from Alabama visiting parents and grandparents and skiing, I’ve agreed to join them today. My pile of work is shifted to the back burner.

May your day go well. May you see beyond stuff and circumstances.

Love, Dad/Ray.

It was Mark Twain who wrote, “Life is one damned thing after another.” He wrote it, but I think we’ve all thought it at some point. Indeed, if all we do is focus on the externals of human history (including our own), that’s about the size of it. It’s an endless roller-coaster ride of up and down, blessing and bummer, peace and conquest, calm and crisis. Israel’s history is clearly no exception. This book of Judges records their cycles of SIN, SERVITUDE, SUFFERING, SORROW, and SALVATION. When one cycle is completed, it goes back and repeats itself. Round and round we go—where it stops, nobody seems to know!

What would we do without Biblical revelation that gives insights into life in this world beyond the externals—beyond the record of who did what to whom? I guess we would have little alternative but to yield to the hopeless futility and cynicism of Mark Twain and back-slidden Solomon in his composition of Ecclesiastes (although he did get it right in the last chapter). To be sure, any view that removes the ingredients of meaning and purpose from life seems to me a recipe for depression—and worse.

This reading begins with Gideon in a state of depression. His entire family and national background didn’t make a lick of sense to him. Here they were occupying the so-called Promised Land, yet now they were just as bound and oppressed by the same conditions their elders claimed God delivered them from in Egypt. He was fearful and frustrated—until he personally met God. That changed everything. It wasn’t necessarily instantaneous, but soon the unseen “Spirit of the LORD came upon Gideon, and he blew a trumpet” (6:34). It ignited his HEART AFTER GOD and set him on a course of meaning, purpose, and usefulness.

Please do not high-center on the data of the externals. Please see the unseen (2 Corinthians 4:16-18). Amidst all this recorded fighting and war, there was warfare going on behind the scenes (Ephesians 6:10-18). This battle over ownership and control of the souls of people continues to this day. Failure to SEE in this dimension indicates that one is already conquered, defeated, and bound.