Ready for the Battle

I read Proverbs 21:31 recently and fell in love with it in a way that I haven't before.

It says:
"The horse is made ready for the battle, but the victory is the Lord's."

It made me think about my own preparation versus God's sovereignty. This proverb is saying that the army needs to get ready. Is it right for the soldiers to get fat and lazy between wars? Is it right to have crappy armor? Is it right not to train your horses or give them good saddles or help them stay in shape? Of course not. Just like an army that is ready, we need to do the things we need to do to be equipped for our job. Even though we ultimately trust in God, the horse is still made ready for the battle. It isn't smart to never save any money, never go to school to learn, never spend time developing any skills. Would you not take prenatal vitamins to help your baby? Is it a lack of faith in God that compel us to do things that will contribute to our futures in a positive and preparatory way? No. It honors God for us to make ourselves ready! He has given us mind that can come up with plans, can reason through options, can wisely avoid danger, can learn from mistakes, can make decisions - and all of these things honor Him as we use them well. I do not think that His power is lessened if we use wisdom to prepare as best we can.

After this though, we must remember that no amount of our own preparation is the key to any of our success. At the end of the day, the eternal, and even circumstantial, success of our efforts is God's. I think this can be both a relaxing and a difficult thing.

On the negative side, we really don't get much credit for our successes. Success, just like the tools we used to prepare ourselves for it, is a gift from the Lord. We get very little (really no) credit. The glory for success is His, and this can be frustrating as we want some ego-stroking return on the investment we put in.

On the positive side, we don't have to take every seeming failure on ourselves. If we can honestly say that we did the best we could with what we had and we followed God the best way we knew how and things still didn't work out well, we don't have to carry all of that. Sometimes, we do all the things we think we should and things still fail or don't work out or crumble. It is in these moments that we have to remember that the plan wasn't ultimately ours to begin with - it was God's, and if He chose for the time being to withhold success, we do not have to walk away hating ourselves. (the hard part of this, to me, is maintaining joy and faith in His plans even when I worked really hard for something that ended up failing.)

The fact that the victory is the Lord's is both a frustration (when we want credit) and a comfort (when things fail), but it is also a scary place. Because what that means is that no amount of our own preparation and planning can ENSURE victory. We can do the best we can to be ready, but God will either give us victory or He won't, and we can force His hand either way. While it is scary to be in control of things (because if they fail, then it's on you), there is some comfort in control because you get to decide how things turn out.

There are many facets of this and many frustrations within it, especially as we have to learn to be joyful and trusting and faithful in the face of sometimes not getting our way.

But I hope that's its more of a comfort, and I hope that we can all get to a place where we trust God enough and give Him enough credit that, when things do go badly, we actually really BELIEVE that He will work it out, that this setback is a painful little piece of an ultimately wonderful plan.

Remember Daniel 3:16-18:
"Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to him, 'King Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But EVEN IF HE DOES NOT, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.'"