(Prayer before stepping up: “Dear Lord, you got me through these battles – I pray you get me through this Press Conference! Thank you Lord in your mighty Name, Amen.)
Good morning. Thank you so much for this great gift of this snazzy vellum ephod and hero’s hat. Oh, please, don’t rush the stage – I’ll be giving autographs afterwards. That is, if you still want them when you hear what I have to say. (To the side) Do these megaphones work? (Blows in them).
Okay, well – listen! - the reason I agreed to do this today is because I have just one message I want to give you neighbors and this is it: Any one of you can do what I did – and maybe even more - if you let yourself be empowered exclusively by the one Great God.
That’s it! That’s my message!
All right. Now, let me start with a confession: I’ve never really been good at handling social pressure. I’ve been bad at it all my life. I think it’s a family failing.
Take my dad. You all know my dad, Joash? Right? Yeah? Well, you know how he’s always been such a model citizen and a loyal member of the nation and all that, yes? Did you ever ask yourself why? I’ll tell you why. Because he’s a guy who doesn’t like to have any hassle with the neighbors. You can’t blame him! I mean, we’ve got our hands full as it is.
Look, it’s no secret that a lot of folks who used to live here have relocated. A sizable group of them have taken off to the mountains – and I don’t mean for vacation either! It’s been so hard for any of us to make a living. Every business is in trouble – especially the farms!
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Every time we get a flock together or a crop ready to harvest, here come the Midianites and the Amalakites and who knows who – charging in off the desert!
They run off the sheep and camp out in the fields and, when they get done, with their camels stomping all around on everything, it looks like the 17 year locust infestation just hit us! It’s awful and there’s not a blasted thing we can do about it!
We’re not warriors. Maybe we were back in the great Deborah’s time. But, that was like 50 years ago. We’re all farmers now and we’re knee-deep in debt with these marauders and their camels stomping all over the place, tearing up the fields, and running off with the cattle. Not even the donkeys are safe.
And, of course, there’s more to this than just a raid or two. For centuries, you know there’s been bad blood between us and the Midianites. I think it’s because we’re related… Midian was one of the six sons of Abraham’s wife Keturah. But Abraham preferred our ancestor Isaac, the son of Sarah (our great, great, great, you know, a whole lot of “greats” grandmother.) So there was jealousy there! And don’t forget it was Midianite traders that bought our own ancestor Joseph and sold him into slavery in Egypt (Gen 37:28). And it was Midian along with the Moabites (Num 22:7) who hired Balaam to curse Israel when our ancestors were arriving here, and when that curse didn’t work, they waylaid us by seducing some of our leaders into pagan worship (Num 25:1-6). So, it’s been trouble since the beginning!
And there’s nobody to come to our rescue. Egypt is useless now. Nobody’s keeping the peace. So, we’ve got no place to turn. It’s all up for grabs.
So, of course, given all this strife, my dad wouldn’t want any more trouble with the neighbors, would he? Can you blame him? I can’t. He’s got hassle enough trying to keep the family fed. I can certainly understand what he’s going through and what he was thinking when he put that big altar of Baal up in the backyard and that fertility pole to Baal’s celestial wife, Asherah, because that’s who everybody around us worshipped, and he was saying, in effect, “I’m a get-along guy. I don’t want any trouble. So, I’m going along with everybody else. See?” “Look, I’m with you folks. Whatever works! Sure I’m a descendant of Abiezer, who was the son of Gilead, who was right straight out of the line of Manasseh, son of the great Joseph himself. But, these days, I’m just trying to take care of my family, so whatever they got going in heaven, I’m for it. All I know, is I’ve got to get some help from somewhere – because we’re not going to make it the way things are going! So, I’ve got my ends open – spiritually speaking. Whoever works up there – and keeps the peace, I’m for them.”
In the meantime, all of us are crying out to the Lord God of Israel, hedging our bets.
I mean, we’d heard the old stories about how God delivered Moses and gave us this promised land under Joshua and how nobody could stand up to us when God was blessing us and all that. Sure, every one of us knew those accounts and sure hoped they were true, because we sure needed some divine help. Every one of us knew we weren’t going to make it without something changing!
The way I figured it was – we got here to Canaan somehow, right? Nobody else had a better explanation than the stories the Levites told. I mean, that was our history. God brought us here. So, why wouldn’t God look out for us now? It stood to reason! But, in the meantime, we were all taking a beating from the Midianites and we’re all crying out to God and to whomever else we felt like crying out to.
Though, not me, I was sticking with the Lord God of Israel, but I mean a lot of the rest of our neighborhood was trying out a bunch of divine options. So, you get the picture?
Okay. So, one day this guy shows up. I’d never seen him before, but suddenly – there he is. He’s wearing this thick robe, like he spends a lot of time outdoors and he’s kind of unkempt, but he’s really different from every one of the rest of us.
He comes striding in off the desert and sweeps his eyes around all of us with this air of authority and starts right in – town to town, village to village, business to business, farm to farm.
No preliminaries or anything - nothing like, you know: “Hello, folks. I hope you’re having a nice day. You don’t know me, but I’m the answer to your prayers. You all do know the Lord God of Israel? Yes? Well, you’re never going to guess who I had a chat with the other day. The very Same! And, you know what? He’s heard your prayers. No fooling. He’s concerned and he’s going to schedule in a conference on your situation. You should be hearing from his heavenly headquarters at some point soon with a few helpful suggestions for getting along better with the bullies from Midian.” Something like that – the usual I mean, we’d heard the old stories about how God delivered Moses and gave us this promised land under Joshua officialese you get from a palace?
Well, as you can imagine, it was nothing like that! This prophet didn’t even say God was going to deliver us! He just yelled at us for being unfaithful. It was a general bawling-out.
And then I had another visit by another messenger and this one was just for me!
See, I’m working down at the winepress processing wheat, right? I know! I know! You don’t refine wheat at a winepress, right? But I got this great idea!
It wasn’t grape season. So, I figured, not one of these marauders is going to figure out that I’m at the winepress working on the wheat. Nobody’s going to look for food to steal there – at this time of year.
So, I sneak down there under cover and I’m making the equipment for the grapes work for getting the wheat processed, so I can salvage the crop. Pretty smart, huh?
So, here I am – I got a skeleton crew working so we don’t attract attention. Just me and a couple of hired hands to help me bring in the sheaths of wheat and I’ve hidden the millstones behind the wine vats where we usually tread on the grapes.
So, I post a look out, of course, and we’re working away as quietly as we can, peeling off the husks, cleaning and soaking the grain to toughen up the bran, so we can use the mill stones to break the kernels into pieces, flatten out the bran, and then sift it all through bolting cloth, so the brown bran and the yellow parts from the germ of the wheat and the layer of granules under the bran can sift through and produce that creamy brown flecked flour that’s so good? Eh? Of course, you’ve got to use it all fast so the wheat germ doesn’t turn dark and rancid. But that’s not a problem, since we were practically eating on the run anyway!
Well, we’re just working away as quietly as possible – no singing or anything – because we were reasoning no one was going to figure out we were there. Well, that’s what I thought.
Okay, so you know where my dad’s winepress is? It’s under that big oak we got on the property? Over near the vineyards? Yeah? Well, we show up one morning with this wagon and we got the wheat under some old tarpaulins – you know just old ragged stuff that won’t attract any attention.
We rumble up and just as we arrive at the big oak, we see this big guy sitting under it. Oh, oh. I thought – this looks like trouble. How’d anyone find out we were coming here?
We roll up by him. Then he stands up and I almost fall off the wagon. This isn’t just some big guy. I mean this person is like no one I’ve ever seen?
You think the prophet was impressive? You should have seen this guy! He radiates power. He pulls himself up even larger, fixes me with his eyes and announces right directly to me, “The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior!”
Say what? I’m like looking around at the hired hands. They’re all shrinking away, edging out of the scene. I’m just gawking at him, astonished: “You’re talking to me.” I mean, “mighty warrior?” What’s wrong with this picture?
That’s what I’m thinking – but what I’m saying is, “But, sir.” I’m staying polite here – I mean this guy obviously is a mighty warrior I’m talking to – but I’ve got to ask: “If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? And where are all the wonderful deeds that our ancestors told us about?”
Okay, so I admit it. I was whining. But he lets me get it all out. Then he looks at me full in the face, ignoring everything I said, and orders, “Go in this power of yours and deliver Israel. I commission you!”
Me? Me? What power? See, I didn’t have the gift of sight to see what he was seeing. I’d always seen myself as a loser – a chump. What did I ever do to make the Lord think I could deliver Israel? And I told him so!
I mean we may be descended from Abiezer and Manasseh and Joseph the deliverer of Israel and all that, but, remember – even way back in Joseph’s time, when our great ancestor brought his two sons to his father Israel – who had even wrestled with an angel (Gen 32:28)! Well, when Joseph brought him his two sons – our family’s ancestor was the one who got passed over for his younger brother and got the lesser blessing!
*Father Israel announced Ephraim was going to be greater and become a multitude of nations and our ancestor Manasseh was just going to produce a lesser people – so what can I say? That’s history! (Gen 48: 17-20). What could I do but tell him he had the wrong guy? My clan – the one with the second-rate blessing - has always been the weakest one in Israel and I was the runt of the family.
What I was wondering was, why didn’t this warrior go to the people of Ephraim – the other half of our tribe? The better half! The one that got the better blessing? They’ve got all the talent – they had all the breaks from day one! What can God expect from me?
You know what this spokesperson of God said to me? “I’ll be with you. We’re going to do this together!”
Okay…yeah, right. That’s what I was thinking. How do I know this isn’t some kind of ruse people have always been pulling off on my family, leaving us holding the bag. I mean I can see me standing there with my hired hands and a few courageously foolish relatives and here come the Midianites roaring off the desert. yelling: “Get that chump!”
And me, looking all around wildly, “Hey, where’s the prophet? Where’d he go? Run!”
So, just to make sure we were on the same piece of papyri, and we were really going to do this together, I asked him to stick around while I scurry and get us some lunch. I figured, if he wasn’t going to stick around that long, then I wasn’t going to hang around either! I had wheat to process!
So, I asked him to wait, while I rustled up a meal of goat meat and unleavened bread for us and when I got back with it – not only was he still there, but I got a huge surprise.
He told me to put the meat and bread on a rock, pour the broth on it. Then he touched it with the staff he was carrying, and fire came bursting out of the rock, burning up the meat and bread and then – this guy disappeared! He was no prophet or earthly warrior. I realized he was an angel from the Lord!
I even wondered if this angel I was talking to was the one who had wrestled all night with our Father Israel, because he was certainly giving me the order to fight!
Then everything happened fast. First I dropped down on the ground and shouted out to the Lord to spare me because I didn’t want to die. But God filled me with assurance that that wasn’t what God was intending. I really did have a commission. I really was going to deliver my people.
That night I got my next commission. God told me to chop down my dad’s altar to Baal and the fertility pole to Asherah the goddess that he had next to it.
Eeeeee! This was sticky. I mean I was really scared. This was dad’s property, not to mention that we were surrounded by neighbors who were worshipping Baal and Asherah to keep the peace and they were NOT going to take very kindly to this!
But, what could I do? I’d been ordered by an angel! So, I got ten guys I could trust, because this thing was big and heavy, and we waited until pitch dark and then we did it. We toppled down that altar of Baal and broke it all up. Then we chopped up that pole and built a proper altar of stone to the Lord God. Then we dumped the wood from the pole on the altar, rustled my dad’s second-best bull out of the corral, and we sacrificed it on that altar.
Well, it all broke loose the next morning. Everybody was shocked and scandalized. Who would do such a thing? And at such a precarious time?
All through the day, they searched for the perpetrator, questioning everyone carefully. It was a manhunt like I’d never seen.
Of course, I worked through my options: I could run, but flight is the clearest admission of guilt. I could deny everything or try to put it off on somebody else, but that would be a lie before heaven – and heaven is what got me into this situation in the first place!
*Or I could just keep working on the wheat like everything was normal and just see what happened. And that’s what I did.
All day long they kept up the interrogations. Look, I’m not stupid, I wasn’t stepping forward, but you can’t keep ten guys quiet. And, as soon as the word got out, everybody was calling for my head.
By that time, I was back home. Night was closing in again and they had lit torches up already. When they amassed in front of our house it looked like a bonfire and they were all burning mad.
They were shouting for my dad to turn me over to them: “Bring out your son! He must die!”
And then my dad came out, surrounded by all the warriors of our family he could muster – old campaigners and the young and eager. Dad stalked right up to the leaders and faced down the whole pack of them.
Calling for silence, he shouted at the crowd: “Are you people pleading Baal’s cause? Humph! Are you trying to rescue him? I’ll tell you what, we’ll kill anyone of you that tries to fight for Baal! By morning, you’ll be dead! If he really is a god, then let him fight for himself and for his own altar!”
And I think that was the moment that everybody suddenly realized that Baal had done squat for us so far! After all, the name “Baal” is just the general label for all the gods of this land of Canaan. Sort of a catchall deity – and that includes the god of Midian – because, like I told you – our nation got waylaid by Midianite women when we camped at that Acacia Grove outside of Moab during our long trek to Canaan and these Midianite hussies got our guys sinning by worshipping the Moab Baal of Peor (Gen 25:3). And what happened to those guys? God ordered Moses to kill every man who had worshipped Baal (Gen 25:5)! And Baal came to nobody’s rescue!
So, what are we doing now worshiping the god of our long-term enemies - the Midianites? How is their god going to deliver us from its own people? How dumb can you get?
Well, the whole mob suddenly began to melt away. They’d had a reality check. They were Israelites and dad made them realize it was time to choose between the God of Israel and the god of our enemies. They chose right.
My dad, the get along guy, he did this! He did it for me…
I got a nickname out of this incident: “Jerub-Baal” – “Let Baal fight with him!” So, I could see it was time to fight.
And just like that, I was filled with God’s power – just as the angel had said. I sent out the call to fight and all our family – all the descendants of Abiezer – and then all our tribe of Manasseh and even warriors from three other local Israelite tribes - Asher, Zebulon, Naphtali – came massing up to fight with us.
At the same time, word spread out to the Midianites and they and their buddies the Amalakites and the rest of their mob massed up against us. So, it was war!
And then I did something I’m not proud of, so I’m going to say this briefly. I asked God for one more sign. I know, I know! After all this, I still needed reassurance? Well, the power wasn’t in me naturally. I knew that. I just wanted to make certain it was going to be there when I needed it.
What I did sounds really dumb, I realize that, but I just worked with what I had on hand at the time. I had all these guys milling around me anxious to go and I just grabbed the first thing I could think of: I threw a blanket down on the ground and asked God to make it wet and the ground dry. And then, when that happened, I did it again the other way. And, okay, God was patient with me and did it both ways for me. So, I was ready to go!
And then it turned out God wasn’t ready to let us go! God then gave me God’s own sign - which I hadn’t asked for! God took away my whole army of 30,000 guys and left me with just one percent of them: three hundred of the bravest and dumbest looking in the whole lot – no offense guys.
You know, asking for signs is not that hot an idea – it can cut both ways! Better just to trust the Lord from the start.
Why did God do that? Just so we knew who really was going to win the battle. Hint? It wasn’t us!
And what about the battle itself? You know, I don’t have all that much to say about it. That’s because I didn’t do all that much!
We were mustering our army – actually eliminating our army over at the Spring of Harod. So, when God finally had us all pared down, the 302 of us crept over the mountains and peered down toward the foot of the Hill of Moreh and there across the valley stretched out the vast army of Midianites and their allies, disappearing into the distance as far as the eye could see. It was terrifying.
But that night God asked me if I was too scared to attack. God knew the answer already. I was! So, God told me to go down with Purah, my right hand guy, and simply listen to what the Midianites were saying. So, as the dark night thickened, we edged our way down the hill to the outskirts of the camp, disguised and vigilant.
The first voices we heard were troubled ones. A soldier had awakened from a dream about a loaf of bread crashing into the camp and demolishing a tent. “Uh oh,” his friend cried, “that must be the sword of Gideon!” The friend jumped up from where he was sitting at the fire, glancing wildly about and shrieking, “God has given the Midianites and the whole camp into Gideon’s hands!”
Well, I didn’t miss the significance of that dream. A loaf of bread? I’d been grinding flour for bread when God called me!
So, Purah and I charged right back up the hill, posted three companies of a hundred men each in three perches around the camp with trumpets and jars and - at the signal – all 300 of us made a ruckus – blowing the horns, busting the jars, waving torches and shouting, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!”
The whole enemy camp went berserk, everybody tumbling over everybody else, many of them slashing each other, thinking they were us, others tearing off across the desert, camels colliding, fires scattered about, tents ripped down and burning. If we had posted ourselves down in the valley, instead of on this mountain, we’d have all been trampled!
So, I sent messengers out to our allies to pick up on those who escape and ambush them at the Jordan River. It was a complete rout!
So, they may call me the hero of the day, but, when it was all over, and they asked me to be their king, I refused. “The Lord will rule over you,” I told them all. I didn’t have any illusions about what happened. But I did learn a life-changing lesson and I pass it on to you.
You may not have all the talent. You may not be from the best family. You may not have gotten all the breaks in life. But, when you let yourself be empowered by the Lord God, you’re a warrior and you too can move from chump to champ.
Because that’s my true story.
Thank you.
Amen!
Bill in Gideon’s name
