Judges 8:22,23 * July 19, 2009 * Pentecost 7 * Pastor Pagels

In the name of Christ Jesus, dear friends:

The date was June 14, 2009. The place was a hotel in downtown Chicago. After a day of sightseeing the Pagels family went back to our room to settle in for the night. Even though my girls were tired, they still had enough energy to do a little exploring. And when one of them opened the top drawer of the bedside table she made a startling discovery (at least it was startling to her). There she found a small book stamped with an image of a clay jar and these four words: “Placed By the Gideons.”

For more than one hundred years the Gideons have been putting Bibles in hotel rooms, but did you ever wonder how the organization got its name? In 1899 three men met at the YMCA in Janesville, WI with the goal of bringing together Christian commercial travelers for mutual recognition, personal evangelism and united service for the Lord.

Much thought was given to what the name of the association should be, and after they offered a special prayer asking God to lead them to select the proper name, Mr. William Knights got up from his knees and said: “We shall be called Gideons.”

Why Gideon? Why not the Abrahams or the Davids or the Elijahs? The Gideons International website offers the following explanation: “Gideon was a man who was willing to do exactly what God wanted him to do, regardless of his own judgment as to the plans or results. Humility, faith, and obedience were his great elements of character.”

Today it will be our privilege to put that explanation to the test, to examine the life of this Old Testament judge and discover why God addressed him as…

GIDEON, MIGHTY WARRIOR

Gideon didn’t look all that mighty the first time the Lord approached him. He was threshing grain in a winepress, not because he was confused, but because he was afraid. For seven consecutive years a nomadic people known as the Midianites had invaded his land. “They came up with their livestock and their tents like swarms of locusts. It was impossible to count the men and their camels; they invaded the land to ravage it” (Judges 6:5). The situation had gotten so bad that the Israelites were forced to live in mountain clefts and caves for safety.

And that explains why Gideon was threshing grain in a winepress. Instead of tossing the wheat up into the open air so that the wind could blow away the chaff away, he was working below ground level in a winepress so that the Midianites couldn’t see what he was doing. It was to this man who was hiding from his enemies that God appeared and said: “The LORD is with you, mighty warrior” (Judges 6:12).

Gideon didn’t laugh, but he didn’t accept the compliment either. Instead he answered the stranger (at the time he didn’t know that he was speaking with the LORD) with a series of questions: “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 out of Egypt?’ But now the LORD has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian” (Judges 6:13).

It was true that God had delivered his people into the hands of the Midianites, but he had NOT abandoned them. Gideon didn’t realize it at the time, but God had chosen him to lead an army that would win one of the greatest battles in Israel’s history.

But before he could lead a nation, Gideon had to get his own house in order. At God’s direction he destroyed the family altar to Baal. In its place he erected an altar to the Lord and sacrificed a bull as a burnt offering. After giving the offering Gideon asked for and received two signs.

One night he put a wool fleece on the threshing room floor. The next morning the fleece was wet with dew, but the ground around it was dry. The following morning God gave Gideon the same sign, except in reverse. The ground of the threshing floor was covered with dew, but the fleece was completely dry.

Those signs were enough for Gideon. He gathered an army of 32,000 men to fight the Midianites. His troops were outnumbered more than four to one, but they were ready because they knew that they were going into battle with the Lord.

The Lord, however, didn’t like those odds, but not for the reason you might be thinking. Imagine the look on Gideon’s face when God told him that he had too many men. Imagine what Gideon was thinking to himself as the Lord reduced his force from 32,000 to 300. How could 300 men defeat an army of 135,000 (that’s ratio of 450:1)? With the Lord and the element of surprise.

Gideon divided his men into three companies and they approached the Midianite camp under cover of night. Armed with only trumpets and clay jar covered torches they surrounded the enemy. At Gideon’s command the soldiers blew their trumpets, broke their jars, waved their torches and shouted: “A sword for the LORD and for Gideon” (Judges 7:20).

When the Midianites heard the blast of the trumpets and saw the burst of bright light, they panicked. The soldiers turned on each other, swinging their weapons wildly at anything that moved in the darkness. And as a result of this “friendly fire,” 120,000 Midianites died.

Sensing that victory was his, Gideon pursued the fleeing Midianites beyond the Jordan River. He called out the men of Ephraim to cut off all possible escape routes. He captured and killed the Midianite kings Zebah and Zalmunna. And he returned to his hometown of Ophrah as a triumphant general, a war hero who had almost single handedly saved his people.

It’s no surprise that on the heels of this great victory the Israelites wanted to make Gideon their king. They said to him: “Rule over us—you, your son and your grandson—because you have saved us out of the hand of Midian” (Judges 8:22).

It was a tempting offer to be sure, but Gideon declined. Instead of accepting the crown he told the people: “I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. The LORD will rule over you” (Judges 8:23).

What a beautiful confession of faith! That statement would provide a beautiful conclusion to the account of Gideon, but unfortunately it’s not the end of the story. With his next breath Gideon made a rather unusual request. He asked all the people to give him one gold earring from their share of the plunder, and with their donations he made an ephod (a holy garment that was normally worn by the priests). Gideon set up the ephod as a shrine to himself in his hometown, and people came from all over Israel to worship it.

That doesn’t sound like the same man who humbly refused to become Israel’s king. Gideon’s words and actions seem to contradict each other. In fact, a closer look at Gideon’s life might lead us to conclude that he was a living, breathing, walking, talking contradiction.

When the Lord first appeared to him, he was weak and timid. When the Lord called Gideon to deliver his people, he protested: “How can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family” (Judges 6:15).

But later on, when he got a taste of power, when he experienced some success, Gideon forgot the lesson the Lord was trying to teach him by reducing his army from tens of thousands to a few hundred. The Lord wanted to keep Israel and its leader from boasting that her own strength had saved her (Judges 7:2), but Gideon fell into the trap of sinful pride.

When God told Gideon to tear down his family’s idols and offer a sacrifice to the one true God, he did it immediately. He didn’t even wait for the sun to come up. But when he went to work in the darkness was he motivated by a sincere desire to obey the Lord or by a fearful desire to keep his act of obedience a secret?

When the Lord called Gideon to lead the people into battle against the Midianites, he did what God commanded him. But before he did anything he asked God for signs to prove that God was who he said he was and that he would do what he promised to do.

All of these contradictions, wanting to obey and yet not wanting anyone to find out, trusting in God and at the same time seeking signs from God, and especially when he directed the people serve God and then made an ephod that quickly became an idol, all of these things have led some to doubt the sincerity of Gideon’s faith. Some Bible scholars have even gone so far as to question whether or not Gideon is in heaven.

The book of Judges doesn’t give us a clear answer. We are told that Gideon died of a good old age and that he was buried in the tomb of his father (8:32), and nothing more. The one Bible passage that sheds some light on the whereabouts of Gideon’s eternal resting place is in Hebrews 11 where his name is included in a list of Old Testament believers who “through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised” (33).

Gideon conquered kings and kingdoms, but that didn’t save him. Gideon administered swift and severe justice to his enemies, but that didn’t save him either. According to the author of Hebrews Gideon gained what God had promised to his forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but he didn’t do anything to earn it. It was a gift. It was a gift that God gave Gideon through faith.

And in those two little words there is great comfort for us because we are a lot like Gideon. We call ourselves believers, but we can also be living, breathing, walking, talking contradictions. When our enemies attack us, we become afraid. When times get tough, we are quick to ask: “Where is God?” But when life is good, sometimes we act like we don’t need God at all.

We want to live our lives to the glory of God, but we don’t want other people to label us. We don’t want our friends to make fun us. And so we buy into the lie that our faith is something that should be kept private.

We believe God’s Word. We trust God’s promises, but who here hasn’t said or at least thought that it would be nice, it would be helpful if every so often the Lord would come down and give us a sign?

And then there are those dark days when what we say directly contradicts what we do. We sing God’s praises on Sunday morning, and a few hours later we don’t think twice about using his name in vain. In church we express our desire to serve God, but for the rest of the week we live to serve ourselves. We don’t melt down gold to make our own personal ephods, but we do set up our own personal idols in our hearts.

What if other people looked at our lives through a microscope? What if they examined our lives the way we examined Gideon’s? Would they have any reason to doubt the sincerity of our faith? Would there be any reason for them to question where we will end up when we die?

No. Not because of anything in us. Not because of all the good things we have done because we haven’t done anything. We haven’t conquered kingdoms like Gideon. We will never administer justice like Gideon. But we will gain what God has promised us…through faith…just like Gideon.

We will gain what God has promised because we have a God who never contradicts himself. We have a Savior who will never go back on his promises. We have the promise that Jesus has taken away our sins and that he will take us to heaven. We have Jesus’ promise that he will protect us as long as we live and that when we die we will live with him forever.

There need be no doubt. Our eternal destiny is secure because God has given us faith, through his Spirit, through his Word, through the life giving message contained in the little book in your pews, in your homes, and in hotel rooms across the country, compliments of the Gideons. Amen.