At the well, God says that the people are too many (Judges 7:1-2)

Gideon is now more confident, in light of the number of people who answered to his call: thirty-two thousand men. Not even he had realised that there were so many Israelites interested in fighting. However, God does not want any of the men there to rely on the strength of their own arm, or else they would defeat their enemies but not solve their problem.

This is because their main problem was that they had turned away from God. They had stopped trusting in Him and had turned to Baal, fearing false gods. Therefore, they had to regain their trust in God and their dependence on Him. God’s way of encouraging this was to start cutting back on resources.

It is also interesting to imagine that perhaps many men (even Gideon?) may have seen the thirty-two thousand men as an answer from God. But then out of the blue, God asks him to sacrifice what seemed to have been a solution.

Along the same lines, this is more or less what He did to Abraham. Isaac seemed to have been God’s answer to Abraham’s prayers, but at a certain point, God asked him to sacrifice Isaac. And just at the right moment, God returns Isaac to Abraham, showing him that Isaac would only be answer to his prayers if Abraham’s trust was in God and not in his offspring.

Similarly, Gideon gathered thirty-two thousand men as an apparent answer to the people’s prayer, but God asks him to sacrifice his army. He does so and goes to war with merely three hundred men, and as the battle was already won, God allows the rest of the people to fight. He gives Gideon back his army after he and the three hundred men had proven that their trust was in God alone.

Sometimes God asks us to give what He has given to us, only to prove our faith and to exercise our trust and dependence on Him. To test our certainty that His hand is not shortened and that He is not limited. Sometimes it can feel like we are losing, but we are not. God is simply refining and strengthening us. We have to trust Him.