The Odd Thing About The Odds
The Odd Thing About the Odds
There is something about impossible situations that reveals the true nature of faith. When the numbers are stacked against you, when the circumstances look bleak, and when every reasonable voice in the room says to walk away, what do you do? The answer to that question says everything about how you view God.
Consider a warrior named Benaiah, a man whose story is tucked into a few brief verses of Scripture yet contains enough raw courage to fuel a lifetime of faith. In a short span of recorded history, this man faced two of Moab's mightiest warriors simultaneously, chased a lion into a pit on a snowy day, and then confronted a giant Egyptian soldier armed with a spear the size of a weaver's beam. Benaiah had a staff. By every measurable standard, every one of those encounters should have ended in his death. They did not. Benaiah walked away from all three, not because he was the biggest or the strongest, but because he refused to let the odds define the outcome.
That is the odd thing about odds. When God is in the equation, the numbers stop making sense in the most wonderful way possible.
Most of us live with a quiet awareness of the odds against us. Maybe it is a health diagnosis that arrived without warning. Maybe it is a financial situation that seems to have no exit. Maybe it is a relationship that feels irreparably broken, a dream that looks too far gone to recover, or a season of life that has stretched on so long you have stopped expecting it to change. The odds feel real because they are real. The weight of them is not imaginary.
But here is what Benaiah understood that most people miss: he did not focus on his disadvantages. He did not rehearse the reasons why he should fail. He did not stand at the edge of that pit, calculating the lion's weight advantage and superior night vision, and then decide the math did not work in his favor. He went in. And God showed up.
This is the consistent pattern woven throughout Scripture. God rarely intervenes before a situation becomes humanly impossible. In Judges 7, Gideon stood before an army of 135,000 Midianite soldiers. He had assembled 32,000 of his own warriors, and even that number felt desperately thin. Then God told him he had too many. He sent home everyone who was afraid, losing two-thirds of his force immediately. Then God said he still had too many. After a second reduction, Gideon was left with 300 men, armed not with swords or siege weapons, but with torches hidden inside clay jars and trumpets. The odds had moved from overwhelming to mathematically absurd. And then they won. Completely.
Why does God operate this way? The answer is straightforward: so that no one can look at the outcome and say they did it themselves. When 300 men defeat 135,000, there is only one explanation available. God receives the glory precisely because the odds made human credit impossible.
The way you view God determines everything about how you navigate this life. The theologian A.W. Tozer wrote that the most important thing about any person is what comes to mind when they think about God. A small view of God produces a life paralyzed by fear, because every obstacle looks larger than the One who could move it. A high view of God produces something entirely different. It produces lion chasers.
Lion chasers are not people who are unaware of danger. They are people who have placed the danger in proper proportion next to the God they serve. They understand that impossible odds do not limit God. If anything, impossible odds set the stage for God to reveal His glory in ways that a manageable situation never could.
There is a lesser-known miracle in 2 Kings 6 that captures something beautiful about the character of God. A young prophet-in-training was chopping wood near the Jordan River when his borrowed axe head flew off the handle and sank into the water. He cried out to the prophet Elisha, distressed not only at the loss but at the fact that the tool was borrowed. Elisha cut a stick and threw it into the water. The iron axe head floated to the surface.
This was not a life-or-death miracle. No one was dying. No army was closing in. It was a borrowed axe head at the bottom of a river. And yet God moved on behalf of this young man's small, ordinary, embarrassing problem.
This is the truth that changes everything: God is not great merely because nothing is too big for Him. God is great because nothing is too small for Him either.
We tend to rank our prayer requests the way a judge scores a gymnastics routine, assigning degrees of difficulty and deciding which needs are worthy of bringing before God. Cancer gets a prayer. A car payment feels too trivial. A broken relationship qualifies. A lost tool feels like a waste of God's time. But this ranking system reflects a misunderstanding of who God is.
To an infinite God, all finite things are equal. There are no degrees of difficulty. There are no long odds. There is no category of request too small to matter and no situation too far gone to redeem. The axe head and the cancer, the wedding reception and the terminal diagnosis, the borrowed tool and the broken family, all of it lands in the same place before a God who exists outside the boundaries of time, space, and limitation.
Whatever you are facing right now, the invitation is simple. Do not focus on the disadvantage. Do not make excuses for why this particular situation is beyond reach. Do not avoid the places where the odds are stacked against you, because those are often the exact places where God does His most unmistakable work.
The miracle worker has never retired. The odds have never once intimidated Him. And the children He loves are never too small, too broken, or too far behind for Him to show up and change everything.
There is something about impossible situations that reveals the true nature of faith. When the numbers are stacked against you, when the circumstances look bleak, and when every reasonable voice in the room says to walk away, what do you do? The answer to that question says everything about how you view God.
Consider a warrior named Benaiah, a man whose story is tucked into a few brief verses of Scripture yet contains enough raw courage to fuel a lifetime of faith. In a short span of recorded history, this man faced two of Moab's mightiest warriors simultaneously, chased a lion into a pit on a snowy day, and then confronted a giant Egyptian soldier armed with a spear the size of a weaver's beam. Benaiah had a staff. By every measurable standard, every one of those encounters should have ended in his death. They did not. Benaiah walked away from all three, not because he was the biggest or the strongest, but because he refused to let the odds define the outcome.
That is the odd thing about odds. When God is in the equation, the numbers stop making sense in the most wonderful way possible.
Most of us live with a quiet awareness of the odds against us. Maybe it is a health diagnosis that arrived without warning. Maybe it is a financial situation that seems to have no exit. Maybe it is a relationship that feels irreparably broken, a dream that looks too far gone to recover, or a season of life that has stretched on so long you have stopped expecting it to change. The odds feel real because they are real. The weight of them is not imaginary.
But here is what Benaiah understood that most people miss: he did not focus on his disadvantages. He did not rehearse the reasons why he should fail. He did not stand at the edge of that pit, calculating the lion's weight advantage and superior night vision, and then decide the math did not work in his favor. He went in. And God showed up.
This is the consistent pattern woven throughout Scripture. God rarely intervenes before a situation becomes humanly impossible. In Judges 7, Gideon stood before an army of 135,000 Midianite soldiers. He had assembled 32,000 of his own warriors, and even that number felt desperately thin. Then God told him he had too many. He sent home everyone who was afraid, losing two-thirds of his force immediately. Then God said he still had too many. After a second reduction, Gideon was left with 300 men, armed not with swords or siege weapons, but with torches hidden inside clay jars and trumpets. The odds had moved from overwhelming to mathematically absurd. And then they won. Completely.
Why does God operate this way? The answer is straightforward: so that no one can look at the outcome and say they did it themselves. When 300 men defeat 135,000, there is only one explanation available. God receives the glory precisely because the odds made human credit impossible.
The way you view God determines everything about how you navigate this life. The theologian A.W. Tozer wrote that the most important thing about any person is what comes to mind when they think about God. A small view of God produces a life paralyzed by fear, because every obstacle looks larger than the One who could move it. A high view of God produces something entirely different. It produces lion chasers.
Lion chasers are not people who are unaware of danger. They are people who have placed the danger in proper proportion next to the God they serve. They understand that impossible odds do not limit God. If anything, impossible odds set the stage for God to reveal His glory in ways that a manageable situation never could.
There is a lesser-known miracle in 2 Kings 6 that captures something beautiful about the character of God. A young prophet-in-training was chopping wood near the Jordan River when his borrowed axe head flew off the handle and sank into the water. He cried out to the prophet Elisha, distressed not only at the loss but at the fact that the tool was borrowed. Elisha cut a stick and threw it into the water. The iron axe head floated to the surface.
This was not a life-or-death miracle. No one was dying. No army was closing in. It was a borrowed axe head at the bottom of a river. And yet God moved on behalf of this young man's small, ordinary, embarrassing problem.
This is the truth that changes everything: God is not great merely because nothing is too big for Him. God is great because nothing is too small for Him either.
We tend to rank our prayer requests the way a judge scores a gymnastics routine, assigning degrees of difficulty and deciding which needs are worthy of bringing before God. Cancer gets a prayer. A car payment feels too trivial. A broken relationship qualifies. A lost tool feels like a waste of God's time. But this ranking system reflects a misunderstanding of who God is.
To an infinite God, all finite things are equal. There are no degrees of difficulty. There are no long odds. There is no category of request too small to matter and no situation too far gone to redeem. The axe head and the cancer, the wedding reception and the terminal diagnosis, the borrowed tool and the broken family, all of it lands in the same place before a God who exists outside the boundaries of time, space, and limitation.
Whatever you are facing right now, the invitation is simple. Do not focus on the disadvantage. Do not make excuses for why this particular situation is beyond reach. Do not avoid the places where the odds are stacked against you, because those are often the exact places where God does His most unmistakable work.
The miracle worker has never retired. The odds have never once intimidated Him. And the children He loves are never too small, too broken, or too far behind for Him to show up and change everything.
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