Victory Against All Odds - Judges 6-7
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
And we have been in a series called Impossible Moments, And we have talked about tons of stories. We've been focused on the Old Testament, but stories like Moses and David fighting against Goliath and Noah and the Israelites having food just appear for them in the desert. So many different stories of God just coming through when it felt impossible. And the thing I love about this series, and really, I mean, let's be real, it's all of scripture, but the thing that's really cool about this is we get to see these stories and be reminded, maybe we've heard them many times, so maybe we're being reminded of them, but we get to learn more about who God is. That really is the whole point of the Bible. He wants a relationship with his people. There's no other God that wants a relationship like our God. He wants a relationship with his people. And how do you build a relationship? You get to know them. And so through these stories and through his word, He reveals more and more of Himself to us. Now He's infinite, we're never gonna understand Him completely, but how cool is it that He is so good and in His kindness, He shows us His character and who He is. And in turn, because we're learning about God and because He created us, we get to learn more about ourselves and how we relate to Him, how we relate to this world. And so I just, I am loving this series.
And today we are going to focus on a story where God basically says, you know, this army is just too big. Ever heard anyone say the army's too big? Not me. Usually it's the opposite problem. But God said this army is too big. We are gonna be talking about Gideon. We're gonna be in the book of Judges today. But before we get started, let me open us up with some prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you for the opportunity to get to know you better through your word, through the people that you've used, through your scriptures. I pray that you will be present in this place, that you will be felt. Holy Spirit, come speak to us and to our hearts. We thank you so much for this opportunity to worship together and to learn more about you in your name. So while you're gonna be in Judges, We're gonna start in verse six. I want us to have a little bit of background of who Gideon is. You may be really familiar with him, you may not. Gideon was a judge, hence the book of Judges, but he was one of the judges of Israel. And the Israelites at this time were under oppression from the Midianites. And so there was a lot of distress, a lot of struggle. And we find Gideon in Judges six. We're gonna start in verse 11. You can turn there on your phone, in your Bible. We got it on this screen. We also have blue Bibles in the chairs. We're gonna be in the NIV version today. So turn with me to Judges 6, verse 11. And we find him in a winepress. So let's read. The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiserite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites. Pause for a second. He was threshing wheat in a winepress, not typically what the winepresses were for, but he was scared of the Midianites. So he was basically hiding while he was getting his work done. So this little section's gonna tell us a lot about Gideon, and we're just making a note of that here. Okay, verse 12. When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, "The Lord is with you, mighty warrior." Another translation says, "Mighty man of valor." 13, "Pardon me, my lord," replied Gideon, but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about? When they said, "Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?" But now the Lord has abandoned us and given 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?" "Pardon me, my Lord," Gideon replied, "but 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, leaving none alive." Gideon replied, "If now I have found favor in your eyes, give me a sign that it is really you talking to me. Please do not go away until I come back and bring my offering and set it before you." And the Lord said, "I will wait until you return.”
So Gideon goes off and prepares a meal, and brings it back to the answer of the Lord, and it burns like a burnt offering, and he receives that. And that's the sign for Gideon to know, oh, this is real, this is really the Lord talking to me. Okay. So, like I said, we learn a lot about Gideon here in chapter six, and he's not, doesn't seem like the guy for the job, you know, by human standards. He's hiding in a wine press, threshing wheat, first of all. But God calls him a mighty warrior. And God calls him that before he's ever gone into battle. That I find that so interesting. Gideon hadn't done anything of valor or of warrior likeness, but God calls him that. Gideon himself actually didn't really think very highly of himself because in verse 15 it says, "My clan is the weakest in Manasseh and I am the least, "I'm the youngest in my family." Birth order and clan order, that was all very, very important in this time. So he's like, "Are you sure you got the right guy? "Because I don't think I'm it." But something else we learn is that God says, "Go in the strength you have, not that you will have, "but that you currently have." So God is speaking into Gideon's life saying, "You have this strength. "I am giving it to you now. "You are a man of valor. "You are a mighty warrior right now, "before you've done anything." We see Gideon's lack of courage in this, and we see maybe his fear or his lack of confidence in God's choice of warrior.
But we also see some other really cool things from Gideon. He starts asking God for signs. You may have heard the idea of asking, laying out a fleece for the Lord. This is where it comes from in chapter six. He puts out a fleece and he says, God, if this is you, make the fleece wet and the ground around it dry from dew and God does it. And then the next night he said, okay God, I'm gonna ask you to do it again, but the opposite. I want the fleece dry and the ground around it covered with dew and he does it. Now, at first reading, I'm kinda like, oh, Gideon. Kinda pushing the limits here, asking God for all these signs, but it's okay. God wasn't offended by it, he wasn't intimidated by it. He actually, in his goodness, allowed Gideon to have these confirmations so that he could build his confidence. We may look at Gideon as modern day readers and say he had a lack of faith, but how many times have we done it? How many times have we questioned? God, is this really you? Are you sure? I don't think you have the right guy. I've definitely given God plenty of reasons of why I'm not the right person for the job, why I'm not capable or equipped or good enough. And God doesn't make mistakes. So, he has the right person. I think a lot of times we want to be available. I think Gideon, as an Israelite, as a follower of Yahweh, wanted to be available, but are we willing to follow up that availability with obedience? Honestly, for a lot of us, I think the answer's no. If we're truly honest with ourselves, because we're scared or we're unsure, we actually are putting more faith in ourselves other than God, or over God.
But the funny thing is, in this series, and really throughout the whole Bible, Every person that God used was not good enough. David was too small to fight Goliath. Moses should have been killed as a baby and then as an adult and had a stutter. Elijah was rolling solo up against 300 of Baal's prophets. Noah built an ark for somewhere that never had rained before. It didn't make sense. But God made them enough. He gave them what they needed. He equipped them and he called them to do it. So he was gonna make them enough. Same thing with Gideon. Maybe he was the least of his family. Maybe he was in the smallest clan. But God, as we'll see, as we continue, we'll see that God gives Gideon exactly what he needs. And he'll give us what we need too. He is not gonna call us to something that he will not equip us for. He's gonna give us exactly what we need. So now we have a little bit of background of who he was. We can see that he is not wildly courageous or wildly confident in himself, but he asked God to build his trust. He asked for signs. He even went so far as to tear down an altar of Baal. Now in that time, Yahweh and Baal were basically worshiped equally. For many people in the area, including Israelites, both of them were worshiped. So it was a big deal for him to tear down this altar. In fact, he was so scared to do it that he did it in the middle of the night. But in that time, he can't really tear down a altar of a god and it not be noticed. So they figured out who it was, but he did it. It also says that He was, that the Spirit came upon Him.
Now, as Christians and Christ-holders, this side of the resurrection, we hear that more of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, or when a Holy Spirit comes into our heart or our lives. We are given the Holy Spirit. But in the Old Testament, most of the time, it's understood as the Holy Spirit coming upon someone. And we see here that Gideon had the Spirit of God upon him. He was anointed. He wasn't just told to go do something. God was going to go with him. Gideon also started building an army. He's like, "Okay, well, I gotta go defeat the Midianites. "I guess I need some people to do this with me." So he started growing an army. His trust in God grew. His confidence in who God said he was grew. So we're gonna go ahead and jump ahead to chapter seven. We're just gonna work section by section here. So Judges seven verse one, early in the morning, Jerubal, who's called Gideon, and all his men camped at the spring of Herod. The camp of Midian was north of them in the valley, near the hill of Morah. The Lord said to Gideon, "You have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands, or Israel would boast against me." They would say, "My own strength has saved me." Now announce to the army, "Anyone who trembles with fear "may turn back and leave Mount Gilead." So 22,000 men left while 10,000 remained. The math is not mathing, okay? This is not making sense. First of all, just for some context, the army, the Midianite army had what was estimated as 135,000 men. So with 32,000 Israelites in their army, they were already severely outnumbered. But God said, "No, you're too big. "Because if you defeat them with 32,000 men, "you're gonna take the glory. "You're gonna say that you did it in your own power." And that's not how this is gonna go. So he said, "If you're afraid," which obviously many were, because they saw this vast army in front of them that they were going up against. So 22,000 went home. and they were left with 10,000. Seems really small amount of men to go against this army. I was reading a commentator on this passage and he said, "If we really believe the principle from Zechariah 4.6 "that says not by might nor by power, "but by my spirit says the Lord of hosts, "then our smallness does not matter. "If we really believe the principle, "some trust in chariots and some in horses, "but we will remember the name of the Lord our God," from Psalm 20, verse seven, then smallness does not matter. 10,000 men was small, but it didn't matter. All right, on to verse four. "But the Lord said to Gideon, "There are still too many men. "Take them down to the water, "and I will thin 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 "as the dog laps from those who kneel down to drink." 300 of them drank from cupped hands, lapping like dogs. All the rest got down on their knees to drink. So God basically said, if they get on their hands and knees and they put their head in the water and they're just drinking, They're not being alert, they're exposing their backs. Send them home. The ones that picked up the water and laughed at like a dog and stayed alert, stayed ready, were on the lookout. Those are the ones God wanted. Unfortunately, it was only 300 of them. But small doesn't matter with God.
The same commentator wrote, Now the Israeli army was less than 1% of its original size, and the proportion was 400 Midianite soldiers to one Israeli soldier, 400 to one. Gideon could only trust in God because there was nothing else to trust. Gideon already didn't have a lot of confidence in himself. Now he didn't have an army to put his confidence in. He only had the option to trust in God. Sometimes we feel that way, we get to the end of our rope, we got nothing left. Hopefully we put our trust in God before we get to that point, but sometimes it takes us getting to the end of our rope to realize he's all I need to put my trust in. All right, verse seven. The Lord said to Gideon, with the 300 men that lapped, I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands. Let all the others go home." So Gideon sent the rest of the Israelites home, but kept the 300 who took over the provisions and trumpets of the others. God was gonna use 300 men. So now Gideon has asked for signs and he's received signs, building up his confidence. And then God pared down his army to 300, probably broke his confidence down a little bit. But God knew and He is good and He is kind. And so He's like, you know what? I'm gonna give you another sign, Gideon. I'm gonna show you that you can trust me. So we head into verse nine. During that night, the Lord said to Gideon, get up, go down against the camp because I'm going to give it into your hands. If you are afraid to attack, go down to the camp with your servant, Pirah, and listen to what they are saying. Afterward, you will be encouraged to attack the camp." So he and Pera, his servant, went down to the outpost of the camp. The Midianites, the Amalekites, and all the other eastern peoples had settled in a valley thick as a locust. Their camels could no more be counted than the sand on the seashore. Gideon arrived just as a man was telling a friend his dream. "I had a dream," he was saying. "A round loaf of barley bread came tumbling into the Midianite camp. It struck the tent with such force that the tent overturned and collapsed. His friend responded, "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." He was telling the Midianites that they were already gonna lose. That's a confidence builder. When Gideon heard the dream and its interpretation, he bowed down and worshiped. He returned to the camp of Israel and called out, "Get up, the Lord has given the Midianite camp "into your hands." Dividing the 300 men into three companies, he placed trumpets and empty jars in the hands of all of them with torches inside. "Watch me," he told them, "follow my lead. "When I get to the edge of the camp, do exactly as I do. "When I and all who are with me blow our trumpets, "then from all around the camp, blow yours and shout "for the Lord and for Gideon." Gideon heard the dream and the interpretation and his confidence was built again.
He knew God was gonna give him the victory. And what was the first thing he did? He worshiped. So I wrote this as a quick side note, but in the middle of the night, the Lord kept bringing this up to me. And I feel like this is maybe the most important part of this passage. Gideon worshiped God before he had the victory. So whether you're on a mountaintop and things are going well, and your relationship with God is good, and things seem to be smooth sailing, you get to worship him then. But even if things aren't going well, if things feel really low, if you are in the thick of anxiety or depression or financial crisis or relationship issues, whatever it may be, we still get to worship. Gideon knew that God was gonna come through. He knew he was gonna give him the victory. So he worshiped that part of God. He worshiped that God was good. He worshiped the God that was going to bring the victory before the victory came. And I know so many of us are praying for a victory in some area in our lives. And it feels really hard to worship right now. It feels like, what am I worshiping? You haven't given me the victory. I haven't seen the end. And for some of us, we may not even get the victory this side of heaven, but it is coming. And we get to worship now. We get to praise Him because of who He is, not because of anything He's done. So, even before they took the Midianite camp, even before they did anything, Gideon worshiped God because he was worthy. He was worthy of being worshiped. He was worthy of being honored and praised, simply because of who He was. So Gideon receives the signs, he builds his confidence, and then he gives his men empty jars, trumpets, and torches. What I find interesting here is that Gideon, of all the things he questioned, he did not question the weapons of choice. Now, scripture's not clear on whose plan this was, but because we know that the Holy Spirit came upon Gideon, it's safe to assume that this was the Holy Spirit's idea, to fight with torches and trumpets and glasses and essentially household items. If there's ever a time that I'm going to question God's plan, it's when he gives me a household item to go into battle. That's what I'm gonna question it, personally. Call me having a lack of faith, I don't know. But it's just, I struggle with that. But Gideon didn't, he just was rolling with the plan.
So, verse 18, we'll jump back in. "Gideon and the hundred men with him "reached the edge of the camp at the beginning "of the middle watch," so the middle of the night, "just after they had changed the guard. "They blew their trumpets and broke the jars "that were in their hands. "The three companies blew the trumpets and smashed the jars. Grasping the torches in their left hands and holding in their right hands the trumpets they were to blow, they shouted, "A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!" While each man held his position around the camp, all the Midianites ran, crying out as they fled. When the 300 trumpets sounded, the Lord caused the men throughout the camp to turn on each other with their swords. The army fled to Beth-Shi-ta toward Zor-ah, as far as the border of Abel-Meholah near Tabeth. Israelites from Naphtali, Asher, and all Manasseh were called out and they pursued the Midianites. The Israelite army, the 300 men, barely had to lift a finger. They blew their trumpets and they shouted. And now, granted, if you were in the dead of night, dead asleep, and then you're suddenly surrounded by fire and shouting and torches, That would freak me out too. But it says that the men held their ground. They literally just stood there. And the whole army, the whole many army got up and fought against each other. And the ones who didn't die ran. And then as we see more tribes of Israelites joined in and pursued them as they fled. But the 300 men didn't even have to fight. God fought. God won that battle. God did the work. Gideon and those 300 men just had to be obedient.
I'm not well versed in war strategy, but glass jars and trumpets don't seem like a great strategy to me, but it doesn't matter. He just wanted their obedience. And even more so, God got the glory. 'Cause not only were they severely outnumbered, it didn't make sense who he chose. The weapons of choice made absolutely no sense. So God got the glory. There was no argument of who won this battle. It was God. Gideon was the weakest. He was everyone's last choice to be called to do something impossible. It didn't make sense on paper. It didn't add up for our human minds. It doesn't add up. But it doesn't have to because in God's upside down kingdom, it works somehow, but it works. He doesn't need it to make sense. He just needs our obedience. He just needed Gideon to say yes, I'll go. It seemed like an impossible moment. It seemed impossible with 32,000 men. And then it seemed even more impossible, and more impossible. But that is when God shows off in the coolest ways.
So, a few truths for us today that we can take away from Gideon in his story. First of all, we can trust who God says He is and who He says we are. God is mighty and powerful. Scripture talks about that. He is all powerful. He showed that through this story, how powerful He is. But He's also trustworthy. And I know that through the failure of some human relationships, it can feel really hard to trust a God you cannot see. But I promise you, he is trustworthy. And because he is trustworthy, we can believe what he says about us. Not only can we believe what he says about himself, but we can believe what he says about us. He called Gideon a mighty man of valor, a mighty warrior before he ever went into battle. Gideon had to trust that. He had to trust God that he was gonna make good on it. God calls us beloved more than conquerors, his sons and daughters co-heirs with Christ. It may not always feel like those things are true. We may not always believe it, but it's true. And we can trust that.
Number two, we can know that He will equip us to do whatever it is He's called us to do. 2 Corinthians 12, nine says, "My grace is sufficient for you, "for my power is made perfect in weakness." God's power is made perfect in our weakness. I don't really know a better promise 'cause I feel pretty weak sometimes. But then God gives us his power, and he equips us, and he strengthens us. Sometimes we get caught up in our ability and what we can do, or our lack of ability. And we discredit ourselves, we discount ourselves, we tell God he's got the wrong person. Like Gideon, we list all the reasons why not. But we know that he equips those that he calls to do his work. We just have to be more focused on our availability over our ability. Second Peter 1.3 says, "His divine power "has given us everything we need for a godly life "through our knowledge of Him "who called us by His own glory and goodness." He's gonna give us everything we need for life and godliness and for what He's called us to do.
Lastly, we too are called to obedience even when it doesn't make sense. This kind of goes hand in hand with the last point of knowing that God's going to equip us, but we can know that he will equip us, we can know it in our head, and still choose to not be obedient. Gideon could have seen all these signs and know that it was truly God talking to him and still not been obedient. We can desire to be used by God, we can desire to be available and not actually take any action. But as Christ followers, we are called to a life of obedience even when it's hard, even when it doesn't make sense, even when we don't understand it. Which is like usually, right? Like, it's like most of the time. Just like Gideon, it's okay to ask for confirmation, to ask God for a sign, maybe it's in his word, maybe it's seeking wise counsel and receiving confirmation from another believer. Maybe it's just praying about it until you have a piece. But we can't let those things delay our obedience. We can't let those things be an excuse to not obey. Hold on, I gotta pray about it. Hold on, let me just, let me just say, pray about it, please, pray about it. But don't let it be an excuse. So often, God only gives us the next step. We don't get to see 10 steps ahead. We don't get to see the whole picture. Wouldn't that be nice? Can I get a text message, God? Like that would just be super helpful. Unfortunately, no, it's usually just the next step. But we can be obedient with that next step. And then the next, and then the next. Because God is trustworthy. He wants us to lay down our selfish desires. He wants us to lay down our own sin. He wants us to give up our own need for comfort. I don't like that one. He wants us to surrender to Him, to His calling, and to be obedient to what He's calling us to do. But the cool thing is, if we trust in who God says He is and who He says we are, if we believe that He will equip us to do what it is He's calling us to do. It's gonna be so much easier to be obedient and following Him every step of the way, even if it's just the next step.
Pray with me. Heavenly Father, I just thank you for this story, for Gideon and all of his fear and anxiety and lack of confidence. God, He still trusted you. He still took those steps of faith. He asked for signs and in your goodness, you gave them to him, God. And I just pray that you will help us as you call us to new things, new situations, new stages of life, God, whatever it is you're calling us to, no matter how big or small, God, give us confidence in you, not in our own ability, but in what you can do in and through us. God, you want to use us. You want us to be co-laborers with you. Help us to be available, to be open, and to just take action, to be obedient, to choose obedience even when it doesn't make sense. We love you, Lord. We thank you and we praise you in your precious name. Amen.