Gideon’s New Beginning

Judges 6: 11-16

11  The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites.

12  When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “the Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”

13  “But sir,” Gideon replied, “if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?  Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’  But now the Lord has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian.”

14  The Lord turned to him and said, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?”

15  But Lord,” Gideon asked, “how can I save Israel?  My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.”

16  The Lord answered, “I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites together.”

Gideon’s New Beginning

Happy New Year!  What a wonderful greeting!  It suggests that in this New Year there is at least the possibility that things will be as good, or even better, than they were last year.  Some of us will try to make certain of that by making vows to be more considerate, spend less money, lose weight, find a better job, or any of an almost endless number of other things that people want to change in their lives.  But perhaps for some of us, a few modest changes are not enough.  Perhaps for some of us, there is a desperate hope that the new year will bring a new beginning.

Though it wasn’t New Years time, the Israelites in today’s reading were in the last group.  They were desperate for a change.  The Midianites had taken over their land.  They moved in next door, along with all their flocks and herds, and started taking everything away from their new neighbors, the Israelites.  They took over the highways.  The people of Israel didn’t dare to travel on their own roads, because if they did, they were robbed and killed.  Instead, they sneaked around over little known footpaths.  And when the Israelites harvested their crops, there were the Midianites to take everything away from them.  The people of Israel were reduced to hiding out in caves and holes in the ground just to survive.  It had been that way for seven long years and some of them had finally come to their senses and cried out to God for help.

God responded, as He often did, by sending a prophet, who basically said, as prophets are wont to say, “Hey, what did you expect?  It’s your own fault.  You’ve been messing around with other gods again.”

Things had gotten about as bad as they could get when we meet Gideon, who, though he is scared like everybody else, is not completely intimidated by the Midianites.  He’s figured out a way to keep some of his own grain from being taken from him.  He looks around and sees a wine press out in the field, abandoned because it isn’t time to be pressing grapes, and he says to himself, “Aha!  They’ll never look there since there’s nothing there to steal!” and that’s where he takes his grain to thresh it.  And that is where he encounters the possibility for a new beginning in the person of an angel of the Lord.  But there are several things that Gideon has to learn before that new beginning can take place.

First he learns to stop blaming God for the trouble he’s in.  There, in the wine press, the angel comes to him with the greeting, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”  A strange greeting for a man sneaking around because he’s afraid, but it is exactly the right greeting.  It speaks to what Gideon is already thinking and he angrily replies,

“. . . if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?  Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’  But now the Lord has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian.”

He implies that if God exists at all, this mess is His fault.  He has not only abandoned his people, but He has betrayed them to the enemy!  Have you ever noticed that people are prone to blaming God when they have a guilty conscience?  Gideon is no exception, but the angel doesn’t respond to the accusation.  He knows that Gideon knows why things are the way they are.  The prophet has made that very clear.  And the angel has already hinted at the solution by calling Gideon a mighty warrior.  Now he stops hinting, and says plainly that Gideon must save Israel.

Gideon is not eager to be a hero.  He doesn’t want the job.  He begins to make excuses.  He has no stature in the country at all.  His family is insignificant and he is the least significant of all, which is an interesting reply because we learn later that there might not be any others, at least any other others of importance, in his family, since his brothers had been killed by the Midianites.  And we learn that those insignificant men, his brothers, were seen by the enemy to have the bearing of princes, as did Gideon himself.

So the Lord turns to Gideon and says, “I will be with you.”

This story of Gideon is such a great story for us today, because he is so much like us.  He is so modern!  Now he begins to wonder if this whole thing isn’t some creation of his own psyche.  He wants a sign that it is really the Lord talking to him.  Of course, he doesn’t really expect to get the sign he’s asking for.  After all, only crazy people really think God talks to them.  When he does get it, he’s scared to death.  The upshot of it all is that he meets the God of his fathers for himself and builds an altar called the Lord is peace.

So Gideon has learned to stop blaming God, to stop making excuses for himself, and that knowing God brings peace.

Now he is ready to learn that before he can do what God has in mind for him, he has to get rid of the sin in his own life.  He is ordered to burn his father’s idol.  You will notice that he doesn’t bother to explain that he can’t dictate what others must believe and that, after all, the idol belongs to his father.  He knows it has to go.  It is a national sin that his family is also involved in.  But he is still the same Gideon who was hiding in the wine press.  Not only was he afraid of the Midianites, he is now, with very good reason, afraid of his own people as well, and he burns the idol at night.  But he does burn it.  He has learned to obey.

God’s timing is once again perfect, for just as Gideon is ready to be a leader of the people, a huge army of Midianites, Amalekites and others begin to amass against Israel.  Gideon calls his own people to arms and 30,000 of them respond.  But 30,000 was nothing compared to the invaders.  Gideon is still afraid.  He asks for more signs and gets them.  Then god says,

“You’ve got too many men.  You’ll all think you are pretty hotshot soldiers if you win with these odds.  You’ll never acknowledge that I’m the one who won the battle and not you.”

So Gideon’s army is reduced to 300 men.  Three hundred men; no more than many churches would hold on a good Sunday against an army so vast it settled in the valley thick as locusts and whose camels could no more be counted than the sand on the seashore

And in the middle of the night, while Gideon is lying in his sleeping bag sick with fear and remembering his brothers, God comes to him and tells him it’s time to attack.  “Are you afraid?” he asks.  “If you are, take your servant and go down to the enemy camp and listen to what they are saying.”  I think God must have been smiling the dark.  Is he afraid!  His hands shake so badly he can hardly tie on his sandals, so he goes down to the camp to hear an encouraging word, and he hears that one of that vast host has dreamed that God had delivered the whole camp into Gideon’s hand.

Now Gideon learns what it is to have faith.  He goes back and wakes up his men and gives them instructions.  Each of his 300 men is armed with a trumpet in one hand and a torch hidden inside a clay jug in the other.  Strange weapons, but really, with only 300 against so many, what difference could it possibly make whether or not they had weapons.  Gideon places them in three companies around the camp.  At a signal they all blow their trumpets, break the clay jars and shout, as loud as they can, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon.”  Can you imagine being one of Gideon’s soldiers and stepping out into the night armed only with a trumpet and a jar covering a torch, with the odds against you apparently being thousands and thousands to one?  New beginnings don’t happen by magic.  Those soldiers provided human arms to hold the trumpets and torches and somehow they found the faith to respond.

Now imagine yourself in that camp of sleeping soldiers down in the valley.  Suddenly, in the middle of the night, you are awakened by hundreds of trumpets, a huge shattering noise and voices of what must be millions echoing off the walls of the valley all around you.  They’re all around you.  You’re dazed and half dressed and in the confusion you don’t recognize the people around you, your brothers in arms; people with fear in their faces crowding you on every side.  You’ve got to get out of there, but these yelling, pushing idiots won’t let you. Finally, you find your sword and begin to slash your way out.

Meanwhile, Gideon and his men stand in amazement, with their torches held high and their trumpets hanging from their limp hands.  They don’t need to make any more noise.  The noise from inside the camp is deafening.  They just stand and watch this great army destroy itself.  They stand and watch their deliverance happen.

Perhaps there are some of us who are facing scary decisions this year.  If so, this story of Gideon might have some good instruction for us.  Perhaps we’ve been blaming God for the way things are, when those things are really the results of our own mistakes.  Perhaps we need to stop making excuses for ourselves for not going on with what we think we should do.  Perhaps we need to step out in faith and obedience toward the new life God is leading us into, then stand back in awe as God graciously provides what is needed.

My prayer for each of us who need a change is that we acknowledge that we are in the winepress, that we hear God’s instruction and have the faith, obedience and boldness to step out, as Gideon did.  Then we will have rest, blessing and peace, no matter what this new year holds.