Our Awesome God

One awesome quality of God is His sovereignty and immaculate plans only He could possibly conceive and accomplish.  While we try to do our best with our scraps of intelligence and limited ability, He brings into existence what could not be foreseen or predicted.  The birth of Samson is one of those moments in history when God was working to do what His people could not even dream was possible in an unlikely, improbable way.

During their marriage, Manoah and his wife had been unable to have children.  This suggests they desired children, did everything in their power to have a child, but as time wore on they were unsuccessful.  One day the wife of Manoah was met by an angel of the LORD who told her she would have a son who would begin to deliver the children of Israel out of the hand of the Philistines, a people who had oppressed them 40 years.  It is remarkable that Manoah and his wife were well aware of their present inability to even fall pregnant, much less deliver Israel from the Philistines!  Their own personal struggles likely overshadowed the plight of their nation God intended to deliver by their son who was not yet conceived.

Where there was only inability, emptiness and barrenness, God purposed to raise up a deliverer to save His people.  The second time the angel of the LORD appeared Manoah feared they would be struck dead because they had seen God, yet his wife wisely responded in Judges 13:23:  "But his wife said to him, "If the LORD had desired to kill us, He would not have accepted a burnt offering and a grain offering from our hands, nor would He have shown us all these things, nor would He have told us such things as these at this time."  Consider all God has spoken to us in the Bible concerning the future and how to presently order our lives in the way that pleases Him.  God has chosen to allow His redeemed people to remain on earth so His plans, purposes and salvation would be accomplished through us--despite our inability to do anything.

Regardless of our season of life on earth, God reveals enough for us to take the next step of faith in obedience to Him.  We are the overwhelmed and ignorant; we are the helpless and barren, yet God plans to work His wonders, deliverance and salvation through us.  God's answer to our prayers is not only for our sakes but to accomplish His purposes concerning our nation in the years to come.  Praise be to God who only does awesome things, who instructs and prepares us for what we never could have dreamed or foreseen that He will make reality by His grace and goodness.