THE times of the Judges afford most profitable instruction for our own day. Then, as now, man’s heart was ready to depart from the living God, and to turn to idols. The result of the departure was invariably the same―distress and misery. In their season, the suffering and the sorrow wrought their wholesome service, and the faithful in Israel remembered the days gone by, thought of God’s goodness and favor, and cried to Him for pardon and for deliverance. God then raised up judges, and for the term of the life of the judge there was in Israel return to God, victory, and prosperity. The history of the Church is not unlike that of Israel. Over and over again the Church has lapsed into the practices and the religion of the world, and ever with the same bitter result. Ease has produced laxness, prosperity worldliness, and God has been forsaken. In many centuries the Scriptures have been snatched away from the people of God, and they have wondered whether they were forgotten. But the Christian life of the Church revived. It grew in the furnace of affliction. God’s people cried to Him for deliverance, and He raised up deliverers for them.
Amongst the judges, Gideon stands preeminent. For seven years the Midianites and Amalekites had so prevailed, that dens in mountain caves had become Israel’s refuge the enemy had devoured the food; the land was famished. Then it was that Israel cried unto the Lord! In the multitude and the might of the enemy, in the hunger of God’s people and their repentant cry, we see the broad features of those periods of darkness in, the Church, which end in light and peace.
To Israel’s cry, God’s answer was a prophetic message to the people generally, which could but deepen their sense of sin, while it was also a word to a man privately, who thereby should become the deliverer. In prayer deepened and in sin felt to be exceeding sinful by the Church, are the signs of coming revival.
Gideon was threshing wheat by the winepress―his food had to be bidden because of the Midianites, like many a pious man who, in days of persecution, hides his Bible from the foe and threshes out the wheat where he is unseen. To him the angel of Jehovah said, “The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valor,” and out of a full heart Gideon at once replied, “If the Lord be with us, why then is all this evil befallen us?” and he spoke of the miracles and the might of the days of old.
The Lord looked on him! ―on His chosen man, hiding the bread, but remembering the power of God, and lamenting Israel’s sin. We note how the Angel of the Lord and the Lord are interwoven in the story. It is Jehovah-Jesus who is before us, and thus the ways of the Angel of the Lord are deeply interesting. Now how did Gideon act?
First he became the worshipper―he offered sacrifice, the Angel touched it, and the fire consumed the offering; next he cast down the altar of Baal which was nearest his home; then the Spirit of Jehovah came upon him, and he blew a trumpet. Upon this call the immediate neighborhood arose and gathered to Gideon. These moral stages― worship, cleansing, the power of God, and then the gathering call―are deeply instructive.
Gideon’s trumpet and messengers had assembled together an army, but God would not work deliverance for Israel by a multitude, lest Israel should boast. The victory was to be divine. Hence, at length the army was reduced to a handful―to three hundred. These were tested men. They were fearless, and not only so, they were whole-hearted. Courage and singleness of purpose are noble qualities in the soldier of Christ. Yet not to their swords was the victory; their trumpets and their torches were to be used, and these only as the signal of Jehovah’s deliverance.
We are shown not only the acts a Gideon before the foe, we are graciously given also to see him in private. The “mighty man of valor,” around whom Israel had gathered, had his exercises and his fears. He sought for more and more personal assurance that God was indeed with him. And in this many others of God’s deliverers resemble him — being brave before the foe, in anguish before God!
When he had his army at his back, when he might have trusted to the thousands of Israel, he cried to God, for a sign that He would indeed save Israel by his hand. He placed a fleece of wool upon the floor, and asked that the dew might fall upon it, and nowhere else. God answered, and Gideon wrung out a bowl of water from the fleece. He asked again, and the fleece was dry, and the floor wet with dew.
Gideon sought these signs for his own personal establishment before God. The Christian does not perhaps seek for natural signs, the dew he looks for is that of the Spirit of God filling himself; but none the less far from it; we should rather say, God wrought in them by His Spirit such consciousness of utter helplessness in self, that their only refuge was God Himself. It is no light thing to wrestle with principalities and powers, with spiritual wickedness in heavenly places, and in these struggles the deliverer is often in anguish of soul; but that battle won, he comes forth before men, “strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.”