Gideon
The Strength of a Man
So with the Lord He takes and He refuses;
Finds Him men whom others deny.
Neither strong ones nor mighty he chooses;
But such as John, or Gideon or I.
— F.B. Meyer
Some years ago I found myself in an elevator with a couple of other men. It was late at night and we all looked pretty wasted.
The elevator came to a stop and a larger-than-life Owyhee County buckaroo ambled in, wearing a battered Stetson, an old, stained sheepskin coat, and worn-out loggerboots. He looked around the elevator, met our eyes and growled. "Good evening, men." All of us straightened up. Trying to live up to the name.
"Living up to the name" is what men are mainly about. That's why we try to act macho. Yet for all our manly effort we know we never quite measure up. We're not the men we ought to be. Underneath the bragging and bravado we harbor a host of fears, inadequacies, and insecurities, a condition a friend of mine refers to as the "male chicken factor." Most of our manliness is pure bluff.
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Paul was man enough to admit it: "We are weak" was his succinct point of view (1 Corinthians 14:10). That's not pious palaver. It's a humbling fact. Would that all of us were that truthful.
Weakness is the greatest experience of all. By an odd sort of irony, it is the means by which we become strong. Paul, who was inclined toward paradoxes, put it this way: "When I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:10). It is awareness of our weakness that leads to strength.
Becoming strong
There is an imperative that occurs thirty times or more in the Bible: "Be strong and courageous." The verb translated "be strong" in almost every case means "play the man."
The Jewish scholars who first translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek almost always rendered that word with a corresponding Greek verb, andridzomai, which in classical sources meant "act like a man." It was an important word in a culture that literally idolized manliness.
The apostle Paul borrowed the verb and made significant use of it in 1 Corinthians 16:13, where he wrote, "Act like a man; be strong." The verb translated "act like a man" is based on the above-mentioned root, andridzomai. The verb translated "be strong" is actually passive and should be rendered, "be made strong." Paul understood well: the only way to be a man is to be made that way.
God fears our strength, and so should we. Strong men bluster about and get in God's way. There's little he can do with them. It's only the weak who can be made truly great. The strong can't be trusted with greatness.
That principle appears repeatedly in the Bible, but the story of Gideon may be the best example of all. Gideon was an ordinary man whom God made extraordinarily strong. More than that, he's a pattern for every man, and his life illustrates perfectly how God makes all of us strong.
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The story begins in the book of Judges with Israel's domination at the hands of the Midianites:
Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD, and for seven years he gave them into the hands of the Midianites (6:1).
Two factors come to light: Israel's disobedience and the utter unfitness of anyone to deliver them from the results of their disobedience. No one could stem the tide.
The dominating power came from the east — the Midianites, the Amalekites, and various nomads from the Syrian desert. For seven years Israel endured the humiliation of periodic raids as waves of Bedouins swept across the countryside on camels, raping, pillaging, destroying what they could not carry away.
Midian so impoverished the Israelites they they cried out to the LORD for help (6:6).
God heard their prayers — though offered as a last resort — and he sent help.
First God sent a prophet to tell his people where they had gone wrong. It's always God's way to be precise about our sin. The devil beats around the bush and fills our minds with vague, amorphous free-form guilt; not God: he puts his finger squarely on our sin:
I said to you, "I am the LORD your God; do not worship the gods of the Amonites . . . " But you have not listened to me (6:10).
The failure was theirs — not his. Nevertheless, God set out to bring salvation to his people. It is his way. We can never out-sin his love.
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God in the hands of an angry man
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. When the angel of the LORD appeared to Gideon, he said, "The LORD is with you, mighty warrior."
"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."
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?"
"But Lord," Gideon asked, "how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family."
The LORD answered, "I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites together: (6:11-16).
The angel of the Lord — the Lord representing himself in the form of an angel — appeared to Gideon who, at the time was hiding in a winepress, hunched down in a hollow in the rocks, beating out wheat with a stick, improvising to save his grain crop from the marauding Midianites.
God said to Gideon, "The LORD is with you, mighty warrior," using an expression that denotes a member of the military aristocracy.
Gideon missed the irony of the angel's greeting and launched into a bitter diatribe:
If the LORD is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us
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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 (6:13).
"The Lord is with us?" "Where was he when the Midianites burned my farm?" "Where was he when raiders killed my two brothers?" (see Judges 8:18-21). "Where are all these so-called 'wonders' that God has been telling us about?"
What Gideon did not know was that God was already on the move and that Gideon himself was the "wonder" that God would work in the land.
The Lord shrugged off Gideon's assault and said to him,
"Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand" (6:14).
Literally, "Go in this your strength." What strength? Gideon had none! He was the "least" in his household (6:15). The word means "trifling" or "small." Gideon was nobody. Exactly! That was his strength.
"If I must boast," Paul wrote, "I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, who is to be praised for ever, knows that I am not lying. In Damascus the governor under King Aretas had the city of the Damascenes guarded in order to arrest me. But I was lowered in a basket from a window in the wall and slipped through his hands" (2 Corinthians 11:30-33).
Paul came to Damascus thinking he was God's gift to his generation — perfectly suited to evangelize the Jews. He had reason to be confident: "circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless" (Philippians 3:4-6). He was an Israelite indeed. He
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was the little engine that could! And so he tackled the thing that couldn't be done, and he couldn't do it. Instead of a revival, he precipitated a riot.
The Christians in Damascus put him in a fish basket, lowered him over the wall and sent him away, pleading with him not to return lest he undo all that God had done.
What a bitter embarrassment! It was the worst day of Paul's life — and the best. That's the day he learned that he was, as he later put it, "nobody" (2 Corinthians 12:11).
But not to worry! Paul became "somebody." He rounds out the picture this way: "We have this treasure [Christ himself] in jars of clay [our bodies] to show that this all surpassing power is from God and not from us" (2 Corinthians 4:7). Deity in humanity; God in a peanut-butter jar. Paul carried about in his weak and inadequate body the presence and essence of God.
We must accept our limits — no, must love them. They are God's gift to us. It is the way we are. Nothing in us is a source of hope. Nothing in us is worth defending. Nothing in us is worth admiring. Every natural virtue, every endearing quality, every tendency toward goodness comes from God. Without him we can do nothing. When we accept that fact we can rest in him who alone is wisdom, righteousness, and power.
Our human reaction to any difficult assignment is to say, "I can't!" That's perfectly natural. But then God says, "My grace is sufficient for you; go in this your strength." At that moment, "I can't" becomes blasphemy.
God has promised to meet every need we have, but he cannot do it until we admit our need and cast ourselves on him. When we have done this, we don't have to worry about whether he will find us fit enough to do his work. In the words of the old hymn, "All the fitness he requireth is to feel our need of Him."
We should never say to God, "I can't do that" because we're too young or too inexperienced. Youth and inexperience
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are never a problem to God. Most of the biblical people God pressed into service were undeveloped: Jeremiah was a mere slip of a boy; the disciples were green and untested; even Jesus, from the standpoint of an old grizzly like me, was much too young to save the world. No, youthfulness never frustrates God. Only immaturity does, and immaturity can be outgrown by the grace of God.
Nor should we ever say no to God because we are afraid. We're all afraid. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he was dead wrong. It's the absence of fear that we should fear.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm tell a fairy tale about a young man who was normal in every respect except that he could not shudder. All sorts of shocks were prepared for him — ghosts, hanged men, devil-cats, and bodies in coffins — but to no avail. He was hampered by his absence of fear.
Fear is the natural human reaction to any difficult or dangerous undertaking, and God does not condemn it. But he does not want us to be dominated by fear. Jesus' consistent word to his disciples was, "Don't be afraid," using a verb tense that suggests continuance: "Don't keep on fearing." We need not be intimidated by our fear or be overcome by it, for God can turn our fear into strength.
God calls us to get a grip on him and, by his power, walk through the walls of our fear. Courage is mastery of fear, not its absence. We should resist our fear — meet it with faith. Jesus has said, "I am with you always, to the very end of the age" (Matthew 28:20).
And so it comes to this: We should never worry about ourselves — our voice, our looks, our personalities, our education, our intelligence. God sets aside conventional notions of maturity, adequacy, and efficiency and looks for those who know their limitations. "This is the one I esteem," God assures us, "he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word (Isaiah 66:2).
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From weakness we are made strong. The realization that we are weak and powerless is the beginning of God's work.
We must "confess ourselves poor creatures," George MacDonald said, "for that is the beginning of being great. To try to persuade ourselves that we are something when we are nothing is terrible loss; to confess that we are nothing is to lay the foundation of being something."
This is the life: living without apparent power, prosperity, or adequacy, wholly dependent on God, available to him to be put to his intended use. We don't have to render the big answer. We don't have to perform the immortal deed. We don't have to be terrific or sensational. All we need is God.
And so it was for Gideon.
The LORD answered, "I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites together" (6:16).
Note the change in subject. When the angel of the Lord first appeared to Gideon, he said, "The LORD is with you." Now he says, "I will be with you" — and Gideon realizes to whom he is speaking. This is no messenger; this is God himself, putting in a personal appearance, assuring Gideon that he was Gideon's strength and success (6:17-24).
Courage begins at home
That same night the LORD said to him, "Take the second bull from your father's herd, the one seven years old. Tear down your father's alter to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. Then build a proper kind of alter to the LORD your God on the top of this height. Using the wood of the Asherah pole that you cut down, offer the second bull as a burnt offering" (6:25-26).
Gideon's father was the custodian of a Baal sanctuary and probably its priest. For seven years he and his family had
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worshiped the sacred bulls. (The bull was the Canaanite symbol for the god Baal. Our English word bull is probably derived from the Semitic word Baal.) Now it was time for Gideon to pull that worship down.
Gideon was fearful — he worked under cover of darkness — but he got the job done. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is rather the capacity to draw on the resources of God to do what we know we must do — respond in obedience to his call and in total dependence on his power. "Courage is fear that has said its prayers," poet Karle Wilson Baker says.
Gideon acted despite his fear: he pulled down the alter to Baal, cut down the Asherah pole that stood beside it, built a proper alter on top of the fortress where everyone could see it, and offered his father's sacred bull as a sacrifice to the living and true God.
The townsfolk were enraged, certain that Baal would now abandon them. They counted on Baal and his consort Asherah for rainfall and fertility. But Joash, Gideon's father, moved to faith by his son's obedience, flew to his defense: "If Baal is a god let him look after himself," he insisted. And then he dubbed his son "Jerubbaal" — "Baal fighter" became his nickname!
Courage begins at home. Perhaps the most difficult and dangerous task that you have to face lies within the four walls of your house; a spouse who does not love you, who is determined after years of marriage to "find herself" in someone or something other than you; a teenager in the midst of rebellion who has jettisoned all his or her family values and is in wild pursuit of satisfaction through sex and drugs. This is the place to begin.
Gideon did not shrink from the task. By God's grace he tackled the thing that "couldn't be done" and he did it. And so can you. There are no guarantees that your efforts will pay off as Gideon's did — at least not in this life. God gives men and women the right to choose, and they may choose against him and against their own best interests. Our task is not to make
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everything right, but to be the right sort of men and leave the consequences to God. That's where his enablement comes in: he will provide what it takes to be the man he wants you to be right where you are.
The fabulous fleece
It was about that time that the Midianites, the Amalekites, and the people from the east conducted one of their annual raids and encamped in the valley of Jezreel (6:33). Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon, who mustered his clan, along with the three tribes of Israel located in that vicinity — Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali (6:34-35).
Having gathered the tribes, Gideon had another failure of nerve — something that often happens on the eve of doing the thing we fear. Gideon asked for a sign that God was still with him. He said to God,
"If you will save Israel by my hand as you have promised — look, I will place a wool fleece and all the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you said." And that is what happened. Gideon rose early the next day; he squeezed the fleece and wrung out the dew — a bowlful of water.
Then Gideon said to God, "Do not be angry with me. Let me make just one more request. Allow me one more test with the fleece. This time make the fleece dry and the ground covered with dew." That night God did so. Only the fleece was dry; all the ground was covered with dew (6:36-40).
Gideon asked for something contrary to nature, but God met Gideon where he was, giving him the assurance he
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needed, for he knew that the demand on Gideon's faith was greater than he could bear.
Gideon is infamous for this incident. It's often cited as an example of putting God to the test, something we're told not to do. Or it's pointed out as an example of "little faith," a faith that needs signs and wonders to support it.
I suppose both suggestions are valid. Gideon was putting God to the test and Gideon didn't have a whole lot of faith at this point. But it was all the faith Gideon had, and God wanted to make it grow.
Faith is a growing thing. We grow "from faith to faith," as Paul said. We should pray as the disciples prayed, "Increase our faith!" Jesus said, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you" (Luke 17:5-6).
Jesus' point is simply this: A little faith goes a long, long way. Exercising it is the way to make it grow.
The battle is joined
Israel encamped at the spring of Harod. The camp of Midian was north of them across the plain of Esdraelon near the hill of Moreh. The battle was about to be joined. Now was the time for God to ready his troops.
Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest was once asked about his remarkable success at the battle of Murfreesboro. He explained, "I got there fustest with the mostest." Gideon's destiny was to get there with the "leastest," which is usually the way the Lord leads us into war.
Nebuchadnezzar, the archtypical worldling, said, I have accomplished great things "by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty," relying on that humanistic trinity — me, myself, and I — making himself the measure of all things (Daniel 4:30). But we rely on another power: "'Not by [your] might nor by [your] power, but by my Spirit,' says the LORD Almighty" (Zechariah 4:6).
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The odds were stacked against against Gideon's army 4 to 1. Midian had 135,000 foot soldiers (8:10); Gideon had 32,000 (7:3). The odds were all wrong, God told Gideon. "The people who are with you are too many for me" (7:2). So he decimated Gideon's army.
Announce now to the people, "Anyone who trembles with fear may turn back and leave Mount Gilead." So twenty-two thousand men left, while ten thousand remained (7:3).
Now the odds were 13 to 1. God then further diminished Gideon's number:
The LORD said to Gideon, "There are still too many men. Take them down to the water, and I will sift them out for you there. If I say, 'This one shall go with you,' he shall go; but if I say, 'This one shall not go with you,' he shall not go."
So Gideon took the men down to the water. There the LORD told him, "Separate those who lap the water with their tongues like a dog from those who kneel down to drink." Three hundred men lapped with their hands to their mouths. All the rest got down on their knees to drink (7:4-6).
Now Gideon's army numbered 300. The odds were 450 to 1.
God not only dismembered Gideon's army, he disarmed them,taking away their swords and giving them trumpets and candles instead (7:16-18), turning them into a lean fighting machine. He did so because he wanted to make it clear that the battle belonged to the Lord!
Paul says, "Though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world" (2 Corinthians 10:3-4). God's
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wars are never fought by numbers, though we incessantly crunch them. "Size is success," we say; the bigger the better. But not necessarily. God's way has usually been through small and insignificant beings.
Numbers, planning, formulae, techniques, and methods amount to nothing apart from God. It is by faith that the heroes of Hebrews conquered kingdoms, administered justice, gained what was promised, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of flames, escaped the edge of the sword. It is by faith that "weakness was turned to strength; and [men and women] became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies" (Hebrews 11:33-34).
Blessed assurance
And so God, wanting to teach Gideon to operate on his strength, stripped him of every human resource. But knowing the state of his fledgling faith he gave him another assurance: "If you are afraid to attack, go down to the [enemy] camp with your servant Purah and listen to what they're saying" (7:10).
"If you are afraid!" Of course Gideon was afraid. And so he and his page made their way under cover of darkness to the outskirts of the camp where they heard two soldiers discussing a dream: one of them had seen a round barley loaf roll into camp and flatten their commander's tent.
Like most dreams, this one was murky and incongruous, but the soldiers interpreted it to mean defeat: "This can be nothing other than the sword of Gideon, son of Joash the Israelite. God has given the Midianites and the whole camp into his hands" (7:14).
Josephus, the Jewish historian, said that barley loaves were poor fare — tasteless, teeth-bending biscuits that were barely edible. The barley loaf was none other than Gideon.
The dream brought Gideon back to reality — back to "the simplicity and helplessness of his own resources according to F.B. Meyer:
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In the gathering of these crowds of warriors, in the notoriety he had achieved, in the loyalty of the three hundred, there was much to inflate his pride. Therefore God had to bring him face to face with himself. He was only a cake of barley bread at the best. Before God can uplift, use, and anoint us, he must show us what we are, humbling and emptying us, bringing us into the dust of death. Before God can use thee to work a great deliverance, He must convince thee of being only a cake of barley bread. "Five barley loaves, and two small fishes."
A barley loaf is a small and worthless thing, but if God is the one who launches it, it can topple a tent, or a kingdom. Once it is set in motion by the Lord it has divine power to demolish strongholds! (2 Corinthians 10:4).
When Gideon heard the dream and its interpretation, he bowed behind his bush and worshiped. Then he returned to the camp of Israel and called out, "Get up! The LORD has given the Midianite camp into your hands" (7:15). Gideon now knew that victory was assured.
Gideon divided his rag-tag army into three units of one hundred each and stationed them on three sides of the Midianite camp. When he gave the signal, each soldier broke his pitcher, blew his trumpet and shouted at the top of his lungs: "A sword for the LORD and for Gideon." (Please note that there was no sword in anyone's hand.) And God routed the Midianites.
Panicked by the noise and lights and unable to see in the darkness, the Midianites believed they were being attacked by a superior force. They turned their swords on one another and decimated their own army. Then they fled to the east.
Not content with mere attack, Gideon chased the raiders into the desert and all the way back home, thus once for all putting an end to their domination (7:23-8:21).
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The writer of Hebrews adds, "And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies" (Hebrews 11:32-34).
The agony of defeat
He was greatly helped until he became strong
(2 Chronicles 26:15).
After the battle, "the Israelites said to Gideon, 'Rule over us — you, your son and your grandson — because you saved us from the hand of Midian," but Gideon declined, adding piously, "The Lord himself will reign over you."
Though he would not accept the responsibility of leadership, he readily acceded to its perquisites. He lived a decidedly royal lifestyle, with many sons and daughters and wives and a mistress or two, one of which fathered a son whose name was a dead giveaway: "Abimelech," which means, "My father is a king!"
In the end he squandered away his life. Where did Gideon go wrong? He got to be too strong.
I only ask one thing of Thee;
Give Thou Thyself and all is given
I am not strong nor brave nor wise;
Be Thou with me — it shall suffice.—Annie Johnson Flint
