How do you make the hard decisions? Easy decisions are easy to make because if you get them wrong, they generally don’t matter much. But the real big ones? Who to marry, what career to choose, where to live, whether to have another child or not… these decisions vastly change your future.
With large decisions looming, we turn to prayer. We turn to godly people for advice and wisdom. Maybe we turn to a pastor or parent. Big decisions require lots of input and deep thought. They also require a huge amount of faith.
For the Jews we are reading about, the faith required was even deeper. They had to trust that the priest they approached was chosen by God and would make a just decision. But they also had to trust the means of making that decision, namely the Urim and the Thummim. These were two stones or sticks, a black and a white, that were kept in a pocket of the priests garments over the heart. These were used for the big decisions including whether to go to war or not or who would lead the people. The stones were tossed or chosen and which came up determined the will of God. With the proverbial flip of a coin, God’s people would declare that God was sending them to war.
Would you trust a coin, or a pair of stones, to determine God’s will for you? It seems almost ludicrous today, but it begs the question, how do you make the hard decisions? What is your Urim? your Thummim? Do you ever open the bible at random and point at a verse to hear what God might have to say? Do you ever take a phrase of a song to be God’s word for you today? Have you ever prayed and flipped a coin? If God is truly omnipotent, is there any opportunity He cannot use to share His will?
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