Gideon - The Judge Who Needed Signs - Part 1 (Judges 6:1-24)
INTRODUCTION:
This morning we turn our attention back to the book of Judges. We have been away from it for seven weeks but this morning we return to it. So far, we have seen a cycle that begins with Israel turning from God to worship the gods of the Canaanites in whose land they live because God gave it to them. This apostasy then provokes God’s anger, and He sells them into the hands of the nations around them to oppress them. God then in His mercy graciously raises up a judge to deliver them out of the hands of their oppressors and they enjoy a period of rest during the lifetime of the judge God raised up. The judge dies and the cycle begins all over again. In our study of Judges, we have so far looked at four judges. The first was Othniel, the model judge; next was Ehud, an unlikely judge; after him was Shamgar, the unknown judge, and finally, Barak, the reluctant judge. Then we spent three Sundays on Deborah’s song in chapter 5, looking at it from different viewpoints. This morning we move into chapter 6 where God will raise up Gideon, who turns out to be a judge who needs a lot of assurances from God before moving forward to carry out what God tells him to do.
As we move into this new chapter, we will observe God making Gideon into the leader God wants him to be. No one is born a great man or woman of God, and neither are great leaders made in a moment. Each of us starts out with what we inherited from our parents and unfortunately part of that inheritance includes a sin nature which can be traced all the way back to our great grandparents Adam and Eve and their rebellion against God at the beginning of human history. Just because we inherited their sin nature, this does not absolve us from our responsibility for our own sin. Each of us owns our own sin, but our vulnerability to it is something we share with all other human beings. Just as it is characteristic of the whole environment into which we are born, it was also characteristic of the environment that Gideon was born into, and as Paul writes in Romans, “…death reigned …, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam…” (Romans 5:14, NASB95)[1]. This is the world we live in; this is the world Gideon lived in and the Israel that Gideon was a part of. As we will learn there is nothing in Gideon’s family’s conduct or circumstances to make us believe that they were any better than anyone else. But God with great patience and perseverance and many assurances takes men like Gideon and makes them into the godly leaders and heroes that are needed to deliver His people. As this chapter opens, we will see the particular condition of sin and death that was Gideon’s world. Let’s pray and then get into our passage of Scripture for this morning.
--PRAY--
SCRIPTURE:
Turn in your Bibles to Judges 6:1-24, our passage for this morning. If you are able, please stand in honor of the reading of God’s Word and follow along as I read.
Judges 6:1-24,
“Then the sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord gave them into the hands of Midian seven years. The power of Midian prevailed against Israel. Because of Midian the sons of Israel made for themselves the dens which were in the mountains and the caves and the strongholds. For it was when Israel had sown, that the Midianites would come up with the Amalekites and the sons of the east and go against them. So they would camp against them and destroy the produce of the earth as far as Gaza, and leave no sustenance in Israel as well as no sheep, ox, or donkey. For they would come up with their livestock and their tents, they would come in like locusts for number, both they and their camels were innumerable; and they came into the land to devastate it. So Israel was brought very low because of Midian, and the sons of Israel cried to the Lord. Now it came about when the sons of Israel cried to the Lord on account of Midian, that the Lord sent a prophet to the sons of Israel, and he said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, “It was I who brought you up from Egypt and brought you out from the house of slavery. I delivered you from the hands of the Egyptians and from the hands of all your oppressors, and dispossessed them before you and gave you their land, and I said to you, ‘I am the Lord your God; you shall not fear the gods of the Amorites in whose land you live. But you have not obeyed Me.’”’ Then the angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak that was in Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite as his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press in order to save it from the Midianites. The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, ‘The Lord is with you, O valiant warrior.’ Then Gideon said to him, ‘O my lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all His miracles which our fathers told us about, saying, “Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?” But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.’ The Lord looked at him and said, ‘Go in this your strength and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian. Have I not sent you?’ He said to Him, ‘O Lord, how shall I deliver Israel? Behold, my family is the least in Manasseh, and I am the youngest in my father’s house.’ But the Lord said to him, ‘Surely I will be with you, and you shall defeat Midian as one man.’ So Gideon said to Him, ‘If now I have found favor in Your sight, then show me a sign that it is You who speak with me. Please do not depart from here, until I come back to You, and bring out my offering and lay it before You.’ And He said, ‘I will remain until you return.’ Then Gideon went in and prepared a young goat and unleavened bread from an ephah of flour; he put the meat in a basket and the broth in a pot, and brought them out to him under the oak and presented them. The angel of God said to him, ‘Take the meat and the unleavened bread and lay them on this rock, and pour out the broth.’ And he did so. Then the angel of the Lord put out the end of the staff that was in his hand and touched the meat and the unleavened bread; and fire sprang up from the rock and consumed the meat and the unleavened bread. Then the angel of the Lord vanished from his sight. When Gideon saw that he was the angel of the Lord, he said, ‘Alas, O Lord God! For now I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face.’ The Lord said to him, ‘Peace to you, do not fear; you shall not die.’ Then Gideon built an altar there to the Lord and named it The Lord is Peace. To this day it is still in Ophrah of the Abiezrites.” (Judges 6:1–24, NASB95)[2]
ISRAEL IN GIDEON’S DAY (Judges 6:1-6)
As we begin this new chapter and begin to look at the next judge that God would raise up to deliver His people, this next section of history begins in much the same way the history of Ehud and Barak began. The author writes in Judges 6:1, “Then the sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” (Judges 6:1a, NASB95)[3] Notice, however, that there are a couple of differences that provide us with some valuable information for understanding the context of the time in which Gideon grew up. First, we must remember that this chapter opens on the heels of chapter 5, the great victory song of Deborah. The last statement of chapter 5 in the very end of verse 31 says, “And the land was undisturbed for forty years.” (Judges 5:31, NASB95)[4] More literally it says, “And the land had rest or was at rest for forty years.” As we will learn in this chapter, Gideon was a young man when God commissioned him as a judge, which means he was born into the good time when the land was at rest, when Israel was not being oppressed by a foreign nation. Israel had been delivered from twenty years of oppression under Jabin and Sisera and as Deborah and Barak’s praise shows in chapter 5, the Israelites knew they owed their freedom and the 40 years of rest it provided to the LORD. They were God’s friends as the end of the song says and were strong like the rising sun in its might. Second, there is a missing word in Judges 6:1 that is present in both the Ehud and Barak histories, the word is “again.” Here in verse one, we do not read, “The sons of Israel again did what was evil…” as it says in Judges 3:12 and Judges 4:1 as this is the same as always, this is what the sons of Israel always do. Here in verse one, it simply says, “Then the sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” (Judges 6:1a, NASB95)[5] It is a subtle change, but this subtle change could mean that it could have been different this time. The victory and praise that took place after the death of Sisera and Jabin could have ushered in a new era in Israel. It could have broken the cycle of sin and oppression caused by Israel’s repeated failure to worship the Lord and worship Him only and the forty years of rest could have been extended to 80 or 100 years or even an entirely new future that was completely different from Israel’s past. If this would have been the case, Judges would have ended with chapter 5, but unfortunately this was not the case. The pull of the Canaanite religion was too strong and Israel’s resistance to it was already too weak because of the lapse in earlier generations. Israel again returned to their old ways, they started the cycle over again and a dark shadow fell over the land once again. Verse one goes on, “Then the sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord gave them into the hands of Midian seven years.” (Judges 6:1, NASB95)[6] These seven years were to be vastly different from the good years Gideon had known until this time.
This time God sold the sons of Israel into the hands of the Midianites. The Midianites were allied with the Amalekites and the people of the East. All of these people groups were semi-nomadic desert dwellers who lived in the land outside the border of Israel to the east and south. We have already encountered the Amalekites when they allied with Eglon the king of Moab when he oppressed Israel before Ehud assassinated him. The Amalekites were ancient enemies of Israel. There had also been troubled with the Midianites during the time of Moses. They had deceived Israel into idol worship and then Israel defeated them in battle. They were the sworn enemies of Israel. This oppression was different than the previous ones, the enemy did not want to conquer and occupy the land of Israel, they only wanted to plunder it yearly. The Midianites like the other desert dwellers they allied with were hungry for the riches that fertile farming land could produce. So yearly after the planting of the crops and the growing season had passed and as it neared harvest time the Midianites and their allies would descend on the land like locust and strip the land bare. They would also carry off the sheep, oxen, and donkeys which would leave the sons of Israel without food and no way to produce it. The author of Judges tells us that when these people swept into the land of Israel the Israelites would head for the hills where they lived in the caves and strongholds, they had built there to survive another year to have it happen all over again. When they could not bear it any longer, they cried out to the Lord to save them. During these seven years of hardship Gideon left his carefree youth behind and matured into the resourceful and angry young man we will meet beginning in verse 11.
ISRAEL’S INDICTMENT (Judges 6:7-10)
The sons of Israel cried out to the LORD hoping for some relief from this yearly plundering of their crops and livestock. God does not immediately send them a deliverer, but He does send them a prophet. This prophet does not bring good news, instead he brings the LORD’s indictment against Israel. He comes to remind Israel that what they are suffering is of their own doing, God had warned them multiple times of the consequences of forsaking Him and doing evil in His sight by worshiping the false gods of the people whom He had dispossessed before them. This unnamed prophet speaks the words of God to the people. He begins by reminding them that He the LORD is the God of Israel, He and He alone should be worshiped. Then He reminds them why He is their God, and it is because He is the One who brought them out of the land of Egypt, He is the One who freed them from the house of slavery. The prophet goes onto remind them that the LORD not only delivered them from the hands of the Egyptians but also from the hands of all their oppressors, and He dispossessed them before them and gave their land to them.
Then God’s prophet reminded them again what the LORD had said to them, “I am the LORD your God, you shall not fear the gods of the Amorites in whose land you live. But you have not obeyed Me.” (Judges 6:10b, NASB95)[7] The fear that God speaks of here is the fear of worship, it can mean to be afraid, but it can also mean to have reverence for, to venerate, or worship, or be in awe of. The LORD God of Israel was the only God the sons of Israel were to fear, and they had not obeyed, literally they had not listened to the LORD’s voice and all this calamity, all this distress has come upon them because of their unfaithfulness to the LORD. The sons of Israel would remember that the LORD had warned them repeatedly of the consequences of forsaking Him and doing evil in His sight by worshiping the false gods of the people He had dispossessed before them. They would remember that He had warned them through Moses and through Joshua and the Angel of the LORD in chapter two had warned them also. This prophet of God is telling the sons of Israel that because of their unfaithfulness because they have broken the covenant of the LORD that they have forfeited all rights to deliverance. The sons of Israel brought this calamity on themselves and in view of their unfaithfulness there was little hope for deliverance, what exactly God would do next was unclear. But with our hindsight we can remember what the author had said back in chapter 2:18, he wrote, “When the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge and delivered them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge; for the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who oppressed and afflicted them.” (Judges 2:18, NASB95)[8] Even in their unfaithfulness, God never stopped loving His people and showing them His mercy and grace as He sought to woo them back to Himself.
CONCLUSION:
I am going to stop here this morning and we can pick our text back up next week in verse 11 and meet Gideon. Was all this background in verses 1-10 necessary? God thought it was because He is the One who inspired the author to write it. It was important for us to see how quickly people can turn from following the true God to following after something else, thinking that something else will give them more satisfaction, more joy, and more peace than they would find following God. They had enjoyed 40 years of rest under the care of Deborah and Barak, and that rest could have continued if they had stayed true to their God and the covenant that He had made with them. The sons of Israel could have changed the whole history of the nation of Israel if they had remembered God’s faithfulness to them, if they would have listened to His voice, if they had feared Him and worshiped the LORD their God only.
Before we come down too hard on the sons of Israel, we must first examine our own hearts. Is there ever an occasion in your life when you have failed to remember God’s faithfulness to you? I know I have, and I must make it a daily habit to remember God’s faithfulness to me and to express my gratitude for His faithfulness. Are there occasions in your life when you do not want to listen to God’s voice? Like when He tells us to obey our governing authorities and we are tired of wearing masks, we are tired of all the restrictions imposed on us. Or maybe we do not want to listen because the easier thing to do would be to go our own way. Listening to and obeying God’s voice might mean we have to do something that is not easy or that makes us uncomfortable. I am not just talking to you; I am talking to my own self as well. Are there times in our life that we try to ignore the Lord and our fear of Him fades and we become comfortable doing our own thing, deciding our own destiny. That sounds a lot like what Adam and Eve did, they rebelled against their Creator and Provider in hopes of becoming like Him. They stopped fearing Him. Let’s not be too harsh on the sons of Israel until we examine the motives of our own hearts.
[1]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[2]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[3]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[4]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[5]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[6]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[7]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[8]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.