“Numbers don’t lie”—we use them to quantify and evaluate pretty much everything in order to get a tangible understanding of what’s going on around us: where we live, how we live, how healthy we are, how safe the world is, how well we’re doing, or how well this Church is doing. “Numbers don’t lie”—it’s often the numbers that give us the objective proof we’re looking for compared to what people claim only anecdotally. “Numbers don’t lie”—or do they?
Talking about overused sayings, here’s another one: “Strength in numbers.” Gideon, a former judge of the Israelites, who lived about 3,100 years ago, was tempted to evaluate his chances against the oppressive Midianites, who annually pillaged the Israelites’ crops, by looking at the size of his army. The head count revealed 32,000. Too many for God, evidently, who taught a very important lesson to Gideon and to us. It wasn’t the quantity that brought the victory. It was the quality and unity of their faith. In the end, 300 soldiers were enough to win the battle (see Judges, chaps. 6—8).
When we look at moments of significant progress for humanity over the centuries, they frequently came not through large numbers of people but rather through the power of truth manifested through relatively small numbers and brave, committed, selfless hearts. Take Jesus and his 11 disciples, Paul of Tarsus, Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers, Mahatma Gandhi, Galileo, to name a few. They all felt impelled by a deep conviction that wasn’t rooted in numbers; it was rooted in the truth—in a certain way we might say, in Truth, God.
