Failure and Success

By David Hobbs

Failure and success are intertwined in life. While you can have failure all by itself, it is safe to say you can’t have success without failure. The greatest homerun hitters in baseball also listed high on the all-time strikeout list: Babe Ruth was 95th on the list, Barry Bonds 39th, Mark McGuire 32nd, Mickey Mantle 21st, Sammy Sousa 3rd, and so on.

In the Bible also, some of the greatest figures also had spectacular failures. Moses, though he delivered Israel from Egyptian bondage, received the law from God, built the tabernacle in the wilderness, brought forth quail and manna from heaven, and water from the rock to sustain them, and led them through the wilderness for 40 years up to the Promised Land… yet the whole generation he brought out of Egypt died in the wilderness without entering the Promised Land, nor was Moses able to go in himself. And perhaps his biggest failure was an inability to change the hearts of the people he was leading. As God told him shortly before his death, in Deut. 31:16 … “You are going to rest with your fathers, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.” Moses himself said the same thing to the people in verse 29: “For I know that after my death you are sure to become utterly corrupt and to turn from the way I have commanded you.”

So while one part of Moses’ mission was a smashing success, another part was a sad failure.

And so it goes through the Bible. The Apostle Paul was such a success he “turned the world upside down.” Yet at the end of his ministry he said that “everyone in the province of Asia has deserted me (2 Tim. 1:15).” And when he was brought to trial in Rome, “At my first defense, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me (2 Tim. 4:16).”

Jacob, after fathering the 12 patriarchs who would become the 12 tribes of Israel, told Pharaoh at the end of his life that “My years have been few and difficult, and they do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers (Gen. 47:9).”

But the most spectacular mission failure was Jesus! Though we concentrate on His successes (and rightly so), it’s easy to forget that His original mission was to save the "lost sheep of the house of Israel." In spite of His powerful, unparalleled ministry (The temple guards testified, “No one ever spoke the way this man does” [John 7:46]; the blind man testified, “Nobody has ever heard of the opening of the eyes of a man born blind” [John 9:32]; when He healed the paralytic, the crowd testified, “We have never seen anything like this!” [Mark 2:12]; and “people brought to him all [my emphasis] who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them [Mt. 4:24]”—in spite of all this and much more, at the end of His public ministry the Bible says in John 12:37—“Even after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him.”

There was a purpose behind the healings and signs Jesus did. The purpose was to turn the nation back to God. This is shown in Mt. 11:20, where “Jesus began to denounce the cities in which most of his miracles had been performed, because they did not repent [my emphasis].” And though He was successful in doing the miracles, the desired result never occurred—the nation didn’t turn back to God, but rejected the One God had sent.

This is clearly shown in a prophetic conversation between Jesus and the Father recorded in Isaiah 49, hundreds of years before Jesus came to the earth. After giving the background of His equipping and call in verses 1-3, Jesus says in verse 4, “But I said, ‘I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.’” Though Jesus did everything the Father told Him to say and do, yet it didn’t have its intended effect. Jesus successfully completed His assignment, yet the mission failed!


And what was the Father’s response? “Oh no, I misjudged the people?” “Sorry. I gave you faulty instructions?” “The devil got the better of me this time?”

You gotta love this. The Father said, “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the lost tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth (Isa. 49:6).” The Father said that Jesus was so great and His mission went so well, it was worthy of way more than just bringing the Jewish nation back to Him. Instead God would expand its achievement from saving the Jews to bringing salvation to the whole world! God allowed His first mission to fail, even caused it to fail by hardening Israel’s hearts (John 12:39-40), so that it could be expanded many times over and we Gentiles might be brought in. You have to love the way God works. With Him, failure is never what it seems. God is the master of the “Phoenix Effect,” raising out of the ashes of failure a grand scheme of glory and victory.