Date: 13.8.17
Text: Judges 6-8 (Judges 6:1, 7-16)
Place: Rhema
Title: Gideon – Fleecing God
File: Judges5
Preacher: Stephen Taylor
When I was in my late teenage years, the youth group that I was in loved their camps. So four times a year we would pack up, go to a Christian campsite somewhere, get in a good speaker and have a mixture of teaching and fun. So in those years I went on a lot of camps. But I can only remember one set of studies that we ever were given. And that was when Dave Thurston, who is now the minister of Abbotsford Presbyterian Church but was at that time a student for the ministry spoke to us on Guidance.
For the first talk he read for us the story of Gideon and emphasised the part where Gideon put out a fleece. Gideon needed guidance from God. How could someone so weak as he, from such a small clan as his, ever fight the might of the Midianites? Only by getting God’s guidance. So Gideon asked God for help. He needed direction from God if he was ever to fight God’s battles. And so when we are unsure we need to do something similar. We need to ask God for help. We need to set up conditions to see if God will fulfil them. We need to put out our fleece. Then and only then will we know we are on God’s track.
Now after the talk he had a question time and a few people asked how you might do this? Do you toss coins perhaps? Ask advice from friends and Dave carefully answered our questions. But when the questions dried up, he delivered his bomb shell. Don’t always believe what your speaker is saying. Look at the Scriptures to see if he is being true to the text. And in the next two talks he then sought to point us that true guidance comes not when we look to our outward circumstances but when we wrestle with the word of God.
That was a massive lesson for me. I must be like the Bereans who heard the apostle Paul and always went back to the Scriptures to see if what I was being taught is in tune with it. And so now I come to the story of Gideon and I want you as always to have your bible open to check that what I am saying is in accordance with the word of God.
Now when we turn to chapter 6, we see this spin cycle, this groundhog day of sin is still going on in Israel. When are they ever going to learn? Well let’s see V.1, the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and so He gave them into the hands of Midianites. Now that’s a
1. Problem.A big problem because their power was so oppressive that the Israelites were kicked out of their own homes. And their crops were destroyed, completely destroyed. They just would come with their camels or livestock and ate everything. So there was nothing left for the people of God.
So the Israelites had a problem. The Midianites. And so after trying all other options, they finally remembered what they should have done in the first place. They cried out to the Lord. And God hears their cry and responses by sending them a Saviour. Wait a second! That is not exactly what happens this time. He doesn’t send them a Saviour but a sermon!
Before Gideon comes on the scene, God sends a prophet, a nameless man or woman of God. You see the Israelites have again got it wrong, they think the problem is that of the Midianites but really it is the problem of the Israelites. They think it is the people out there, but it is actually the people in here. They have forgotten the Lord their God. They have failed to remember the great acts of salvation that God has already done. It is like God is saying to them, you think you are weak because your enemies are strong. But actually you are weak because you are worshipping other gods and so you have turned your back on your real source of your strength!
Now I think this is a mistake we all too commonly make today. We think the problem of the Church is that we live in a world that is now anti Christian. That is opposing us. That thinks we are dangerous. But the problem is not really out there. It is in here. We have not really put God first as a Church. We have chased financial security or that nice functional building, or the fact that if we just preach the gospel the Church will grow and forgotten while we are doing our own thing here, that we have lost our schools, our Sundays and our community!
Actually what if the Church isn’t the problem, what if it is actually me? I’m not committed enough. I’m not generous enough with my time or my money. I’m not willing for the Church to change or adjust to a changing world because I like the certainty of what we have always done. Friends as someone once pointed out to me, whenever you point the finger at someone else, there are three point back at yourself!
So when there is a problem within the family, it is the kids fault. A problem in the marriage it is my wife’s fault. A problem within the Church it is the leaders fault. But it actually might be my fault. So when I call upon the Lord for help. When I ask God to save me from the problems that are all around me, maybe I need to ask Him first to do something in me. Forgive me. Change me. Help get the log out of my own eye, then maybe, just maybe I might be ready to get the speck out of the eyes of those around me.
2. The Word.So in response to the problem, God sends his people the Word. “I am the Lord your God. I have saved you graciously. I have given you all your victories in the past. But you have not listened to me.”
What the people of God needed more than anything else was the Word of God. What you and I constantly need is to hear and apply is God’s word to our lives. Hope in the midst of difficulty comes from hearing the word of God and trusting it. Romans 10 says faith comes from hearing the message and the message is heard through the word of Christ. God knows what we need. And God gives us what we need in the word of God. We might think we need legislation that protects traditional marriage, we might want our hassles to go away. We might desire a more comfortable life. But the word of God comes to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.
God sends Israel a prophet and then soon after he sends Gideon the angel of the Lord. And the word of God for Gideon is short and sweet. In fact it is a message that one commentator has noted appears 365 times in the Bible. Enough for one each day of the year. And that message is “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior!” The Lord is with you.
Now Gideon doesn’t look like a mighty warrior. He is threshing his harvest hidden away in a wine press, too scared to do it out in the open where it will be more effective! Gideon is the youngest in his family, his family is the weakest in the tribe of Manasseh and Manasseh is one of the weakest if not the weakest tribe in Israel which is so weak that it hasn’t controlled its fortunes for over 7 years!
This is not a picture of a courageous hero; it is a picture of a defeated, discouraged man, filled with doubts and fears. Gideon appears to be a timid and bitter man. While being challenged to deliver Israel, he said to the Angel of the Lord inJudges 6:13, “Pardon me, but if the Lord is with us, why has such disaster overtaken us? Where are all his miraculous deeds our ancestors told us about? They said, ‘Did the Lord not bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and handed us over to Midian.”
How easy it is for us to make the same mistake as Gideon. How often do we see the troubles around us as evidence that God has left us. Why did he allow that conflict to come into the Church? Why has he allowed these anti Christian forces to win in our parliaments and courts? Instead of reading Romans 8:28 and looking for what good God is doing in those events, we complain that God has lost control.
And then secondly we are often waiting for God to do something to us or for us or wondering why God doesn’t just bring someone to help us. We so often say to God, why don’t you remove this problem, rather than asking God, why can’t you change me and make me the person who can handle or deal with this problem?
But God hasn’t left his people. And God will turn Gideon into a mighty warrior. As long as he goes with all the strength that is available to him. The strength that God has placed inside Gideon as well as the strength that God will give to Gideon. And that strength will grow as he is found to be obedient to the word of the Lord.
So what is the first task that God’s angel gives to Gideon with the Midianites now firmly in control of his country? It is to cut down the idol that is the centre piece of his family’s worship and his clan’s worship.
Private faithfulness is a prerequisite to public usefulness. Before Gideon can be used publicly, he must first take care of some things at home. He needs to clean up some bad stuff in his own backyard. The Lord gave him the assignment to take his dad’s special seven-year-old bull and tear down his father’s altar to Baal. Now only a few bulls were necessary to sustain a herd, so only the best stock would be kept for breeding. To kill this bull would cause the family grave financial difficulties and put Gideon at personal risk.But before God’s people face the enemy around them, they need to deal with the enemy within them.
Paul says something similar to elders in 1 Timothy 3. Unless men can manage well their own household, they shouldn’t be put in charge of the household of God & he says to deacons, those who manage the little things will then be worth considering for the big things.
Faithfulness starts at home. And Gideon proves faithful at home. He takes 10 servants (one of whom was always going to squeal), kills the bull, cuts down the Asherah pole and makes his sacrifice to God. A great journey begins with a single step, the old Chinese proverb says and Gideon has started his great journey.
3. The Sign.But he is not totally convinced. So once he has blasted the trumpet, raised an army of 32,000 soldiers, he begins to get cold feet. Give me a sign God. Convince me that this is what you really want me to do. Tonight I’m going to put out this fleece and if the sheep skin is wet and the ground dry, I will know that you truly are with me. And the Lord deals tenderly with Gideon’s weakness. And listens to the directions of a man.
But then we see the problem with signs, they are so easily misconstrued. Of course the sheep skin could be wet because there was a light dew and the ground has had time to dry before the sheep skin dries. So God let me ask you one more time. This time make the sheep skin dry and the ground wet. And God graciously accommodates himself again to a man. Sometimes God does answer these sorts of requests for signs, sometimes he doesn’t!
But the word of God should be enough for us as it should have been for Gideon. Understanding what God has done in the past should be enough for us as it should have been enough for Gideon. Friends we don’t need more signs, we need more trust. But God works with us, weak and feeble as we are. And in this case he sends Gideon the Spirit of the Lord so that God might indeed be with him as he faces this incredible enemy.
4. The army.And what an enemy it is. Around 135,000 soldiers. It looked like swarms of locusts filling this massive valley. And so here we see the Midianites, Amorites, Amalekites and other eastern people all joining forces to oppose Gideon and his army of 32,000 volunteers. It would seem he needed every man and some more to defeat this army.
But that is not what God thinks. If they have a huge army they might think that they had won the victory. That they had somehow become strong enough to win. Gideon then thinks we have too few men but in chapter 7, verse 2, God says to Gideon you have too many men. Too many men? What they are outnumbered 4 to 1 already. And they have all the troops, the training, the equipment? But God wants to show Gideon that a small number plus God can defeat any enemy, no matter how large it is.
So God says to Gideon, send home all those who are scared. And 22,000 go home. 22,000! These guys know they are not strong enough to win. Better to go home and be ready to fight another day. But in God’s eyes 10,000 is still too many. And so He devises another test. Those who lap up the water like a dog can go home, leaving just those who scooped up the water with their hands. Now I don’t think we are to see that these 300 troops are the crack forces, the ones who always have their eyes out for the enemy. I think this was just God’s way of getting Gideon to fight with a really small force.
But it is not that God can only win with a small force. A few chapters later he will win a victory with one man, Samson. Last week we saw that he won a victory with an army of thousands through Barak and Deborah. God reduces the number of the army so that the credit would not go to Gideon but to God Himself.That’s what this passage is all about. Who is going to win this victory? Who will get the credit? It is like a boy facing a giant Goliath. It is like the Hebrew slaves facing the might of the Egyptian army.
And so just to calm the nerves one more time, God gets Gideon to sneak down to the enemy camp. Gideon is filled with dread until he hears two Midianites talking about a dream that one of them had. About a small loaf of barley and how it rolled down the hill with such force that it knocked over the tents of the Midianite soldiers. It then confirmed how scared the hearer of that dream is. “This can be nothing but the sword of Gideon son of Joash, the Israelite. God has given the Midianites and the whole camp into his hands.”
God has given the victory to Gideon. God will fight for his people. God is with them. And if God is for them, no one can stand against Him. Even the way that Gideon wins the victory shows God’s power. He doesn’t even need a sword to do it. All the 300 men have is a trumpet, a torch and a shout. But by sounding the trumpets, smashing the clay jars with the candles inside them and shouting for Gideon and for God that is enough for the Midianites to defeat themselves. They attack whatever comes toward them and then run for the hills, the plains, anywhere in fact. Gideon’s army kills no-one in the decisive battle.
It all happens so that Gideon should be saying to himself, “The victory is God’s not mine. My only part was to trust and obey him. The glory is his and the privilege was mine.” And the men should be saying to themselves, “It was impossible for us to win, we were only 300 men against a force 1000 times bigger than us. The glory must be God’s. It was a real privilege though to see God working for us”. And the rest of Israel should be saying, “God is so strong that he didn’t need me at all to win my battles. Praise God.”
And isn’t that a song we could take up today in our Church? The victory that God has given us over sin, over Satan, over death was done for us without us helping one little bit. God used a weak man, a despised man, a rejected man but his chosen Saviour Jesus Christ to die on our behalf and on the third day he defeated death. He came to life. And so I wasn’t even there but that victory is given to me by a gracious God and all I can do is accept it by faith.
You see God doesn’t work in spite of our weaknesses, he works through our weaknesses.
We will achieve great things not when we are strong or we think we are strong but when we are weak because our weakness will turn us away from self and onto God. And so when God acts we will know that the glory should go to him and not to us.
This is one of the most important truths that I hold to as a Christian. But it wasn’t always so. You know I got a good education. I got a good job when I left school I worked hard and got promoted, I got an overseas secondment, I ran a big youth group and saw people saved. And then I went into the ministry pretty sure that I could do something to make a difference to the Church. And then I got chronic fatigue. And for 18 months I could do nothing. And for years after that I was weak. But God was strong. And God brought me to the passage in 2 Corinthians 12 where he told me, when I am weak, then I am strong. Because I will trust in god and his strength and I will rely on god and His grace. it was this passage from the apostle Paul that kept me going. It was this passage that became my favourite passage of Scripture.