The Bible is filled with tiny treasures. I like to call them gems - little phrases or verses that, for the most part, go unnoticed or get overlooked. One of my favorites is found in the book of Judges. Verse 4 of Chapter 8 reads thusly: “And Gideon came to Jordon, and passed it over, he and his three hundred men that were with him, faint, yet still pursuing them.”
“One hundred and twenty thousand who drew sword” had fallen at the hands of Gideon and his three hundred men. This hand-picked band had fought throughout the night, but there were still two kings of Midian to be tracked down. The job was not quite finished. On two occasions they stopped and asked for bread to sustain their strength. Both times they were denied. On they marched.
There is much we don’t know about these three hundred. We do know they made up less than one percent of Gideon’s original army. We know they numbered themselves among the fearless and the unafraid. (Twenty-two thousand called it quits early.) Ten thousand were put to an additional test. When instructed to go down to the water and drink, ninety-seven hundred of those remaining dropped to their knees and drank with their faces in the water. Only three hundred drank by putting their hand to their mouth, lapping water from the palm of their hand like a dog. It paints a compelling picture. You can almost see these men, weapon readied in one hand as they drank from the other - alert and on-guard. The Apostle Peter referred to these kinds of soldiers in the New Testament as “sober and vigilant,” fully aware of any impending dangers.
But it took the rigors of battle to reveal the true character of these warriors. After fighting all night, they came to the Jordan “faint, yet still pursuing.”
A saint of old once observed that times of peril do not make martyrs - they discover them. A cliché of our times goes like this: “When the going gets tough, the tough keep going.”
“We cannot tell what may happen to us in this strange medley of life,” observed Joseph Fort Newton. Job was more to the point when he said, “Man that is born of woman is of a few days, and full of trouble.”
Trouble . . . it comes to us all - in ways, sometimes, we could never have imagined.
Sometimes our troubles are the result of our sins. (In today’s world we are often inclined to refer to our sins as mistakes.) Sometimes our troubles come because we are being tested. And sometimes our troubles are simply a part of the struggle of life.
As an old hymn once proclaimed, “It’s not an easy road.”
I think that all of us, at one time or another, experience what I have come to call “a darkness of the soul.” A time when it all goes wrong, when it makes no sense, when there seems to be no easy explanation - times that “try our souls.” It is in these times we are called upon to “endure hardness as a good soldier.”
And the words of Paul, the Apostle, echo across the centuries. “And let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we will reap, if we don’t give up.”
“And Gideon came to Jordon, and passed it over, he and his three hundred men that were with him, faint, yet still pursuing them.”
I often think of these three hundred men, wearied from the struggles of their conflict. And I always take courage in their resolve to finish their task.
Are you a tired soldier? Take heart in the words of this old hymn: “Cheer up my brother (sister). Live in the sunshine. We’ll understand it . . . all . . . by and by.”
Copyright 2026 by Jack McCall
