Hilton Head Island, SC – January 31, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Judges 6:11-18; Judges 6:36-7:7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon and said to him, “The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor.” – Judges 6:12
In the first of these four sermons about the Book of Judges, the first enemy of the Israelites was the Moabites, whose king Ehud dispatched with a sword. Last week the enemy was the Canaanites, whose general was dispatched by a woman named Jael, who drove a tent peg through the skull of the Canaanite general Sisera.
Today the enemy is the Midianites, and the “judge” chosen by God to defeat them is a man named Gideon. The Midianites were a nomadic people from the east, perhaps in eastern modern-day Jordan or in Iraq or even as far east as Iran. They moved around the desert areas in search of better pasturage for their sheep and goats. Apparently no people in the eastern Mediterranean region were their friends. They had once again entered the lands of the Israelites, stolen the produce of their fields, and burned their villages. They were like the Mongol hordes 2500 years before there were Mongol hordes.
The early Israelites truly believed that God approved only of them and of no other tribes or peoples. That’s why they had so many enemies. People who believe God loves only them and no one else are bound to have countless enemies. It follows as the night follows the day.
When we first encounter Gideon, he is threshing wheat in a wine press. And now for a brief glimpse into Middle Eastern agriculture. Normally farmers threshed wheat on a windy day on a flat, rocky mountaintop. The wheat kernels would fall onto the rock, and the chaff would blow away. However, Gideon is down in a valley threshing wheat in a wine press. A wine press was a circle dug into the ground whose sides and floor were smoothly plastered. When the grapes were ripe, they were put into the huge vat and were stomped to make wine. Think of the famous scene from I Love Lucy with Lucy and Ethel in the wine vat happily tromping on grapes, and you have the picture. And if you’re thinking it wasn’t very antiseptic for people to crush grapes with their bare feet, I guess by the time the grape juice fermented, the alcohol would kill any bad bacteria.
It probably hasn’t occurred to you, but you might ask why Gideon was threshing wheat in a valley in a wine press rather than on a mountain top on a windy day. The answer to that is easy: The Midianites might see him up there and come and kill him and take his wheat; that’s why. Gideon did not just fall off the turnip truck, had there been a turnip truck to fall off of.
Despite this baffling back-story, an angel of God comes to Gideon and says, “The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor” (6:12). That’s the last thing Gideon is. He is a timid mouse in a wine press, threshing wheat, hoping that the Midianites won’t think to look for him there. In the Book of Judges, a more unlikely man than Gideon to lead Israel against their foes does not exist. So he tells the angel in no uncertain terms that he has chosen the wrong champion.
The narrative now says it is God Himself who speaks directly to Gideon through the messenger (which is what the word “angel” means: messenger). God says, “Go in this might of yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian; do not I send you?” (If God did indeed speak directly to Gideon, in the first part [“Go in this might of yours”], I think He is pulling Gideon’s leg with a stout divine yank. In the second part, where God asks, “Do not I send you?”, irony seems to be dripping from the voice of God.) In any case, Gideon offers God more excuses about why he is the wrong man for the job, until he is almost convinced that God may actually be serious about this, which I am convinced God was not. (Maybe Gideon wants to become a legend in his own mind.) But before he agrees to his purported divine assignment, Gideon wants still more assurance from God. He puts God through several tests, and God also puts Gideon through a couple of tests. We heard about some of that in our second reading. Incidentally, if this is confusing to you, read chapters six through eight of Judges. In fact, read the whole book. It’s very interesting, and I guarantee it won’t hurt you.
What is going on here is a proclamation that if God uses us to do His will, His will will get done. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” But here’s the question: Does God really want the Midianites to be obliterated, or is that what Gideon and every other Israelite think it is what God wants? Presumably God won’t allow Israel to be utterly defeated. However, they might defeat themselves from within (which they too often did).Nevertheless God won’t let the Israelites to be exterminated from without.
After the wet or dry fleece test of God by Gideon, which was read earlier, God put Gideon through a test. Gideon had commandeered an army of 22,000 men. God told him to tell everyone who was afraid to fight that they could go home, and twelve thousand of them did just that. Then God told Gideon to take the army down to a brook to get a drink of cool water. God said that after the men had drunk from the stream, Gideon was to divide the army into two groups --- those who had knelt down into the water to drink, and those who put their cupped hands and brought the water to their mouths. All but three hundred of the soldiers were stoopers, while three hundred of them were cuppers. The 9,700 were sent home, and the 300 went with Gideon to fight the Midianites. Bible scholars interpret that to mean that the scoopers were not watchful, but every moment the cuppers had their eyes open, looking up, watching for pesky Midianites. They were special ops types.
As you may have guessed, the Israelites won. They made the Greeks at Thermopylae (also known as Marathon) look like a huge throng by comparison. Into the valley of death marched the three hundred, as Lord Tennyson might have written, but didn’t.
Gideon’s fleece test, and God’s demand for Gideon to whittle his purported army down from 22,000 men to 300 men, seem absurd. The writer of Judges may possibly be meaning to tell us that without clearly saying it. In other words, the Book of Judges may be surreptitiously saying that constant warfare against theological or ethnic enemies is guaranteed to be a lost cause. It can never succeed. I am not quite willing definitely to declare that is what the writer meant, but I am asking you to ponder whether that might be what he meant. These stories are too bloody, too bloody awful, to think that they are really what God wanted of His chosen people. God surely didn’t choose them to become perpetual pugilists for purity. He chose them to become, as the prophet Isaiah said, a light to the Gentiles, not a fight against the Gentiles.
The Book of Judges is certainly not a compilation of objective history. Instead it is what some nineteenth- century German biblical scholars called Heilsgeshichte: salvation history. The stories (plural) are not necessarily accurate, but THE Story (singular) is ironically true. And here’s the thing about the story of Gideon: He was the last person you would think God would inspire to deliver Israel. He was the opposite of The Little Engine That Could. Remember him from your childhood? “I…think…I…can, I think I can, IthinkIcan, ITHINKICAN!” And he did.
Not so Gideon. He didn’t think he could do what God wanted, and he did everything he could to weasel out of it. It is impossible to believe God wanted from Gideon what Gideon thought God wanted. Gideon nearly succeeded in failing, but God wouldn’t let him off the hook. God is God, after all. But if we welcome God into our lives, all of us can become more than we are.
On the front of the bulletin is a quote from Aristotle. “All admit that in a certain sense the several kinds of character are bestowed by nature. Justice, a tendency toward Temperance, Courage, and the other types of character are exhibited from the moment of birth.”
Gideon seems to be an exception to the Aristotilian rule. He was willing to allow the Midianites to wreak whatever havoc on the Israelites they wanted to fling at Gideon’s relatives and friends, he was very intemperate in exhibiting any bravery, and of courage he seemed to have none, either by nature or by nurture.
Yet, says the Book Judges, God chose Gideon. Why? When God had so many other possibilities, why would He ever select someone like Gideon as His champion? It was precisely because Gideon was so unlikely! Gideon was Tom Thumb, he was a Lilliputian, he was Danny DeVito! Don’t get a midget to take on a giant! Don’t get David to take on Goliath! Is the Book of Judges approving those ideas, or is it really telling us that is not how God works?
For a hundred and fifty years, from Joshua to King Saul, there was no unifying social, cultural, and political force in Israel. Because of these various undisciplined and sometimes unprincipled warlords, Israel somehow managed to muddle through, but it was no way to run a railroad. It was no way properly to govern God’s people. So in the absence of any strong leaders, God had to try to find His own governors, such as they were.
In those turbulent years, there was no glue in Israel. Things fell apart; the center did not hold. The knowledge of God among the Israelites was imperiled by the impermanence, and that God could not and would not abide.
I am convinced the whole purpose for the composition of the Book of Judges, whoever wrote it, is contained in the last verse of its last chapter: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes” (21:25). Read the whole book. But if you don’t do that, at least memorize the last verse in the book. In a mere handful of ordinary words, it depicts the perils faced by any people when they cast away all the benchmarks of stable government.
The judges managed to lead Israel through a very dangerous period, during which they might have perished as a people. Thank God for all of them. But Israel would have avoided a great deal of bloodshed --- that of their enemies and also of their own blood --- if they had simply agreed on a permanent method for governing themselves. That did not mean a theocracy, though they often thought that. Theocracies always become far too heavy-handed. The Book of Judges, I think, is promoting a monarchy, which was the only common form of government nearly everywhere in the world that made sense up until the American Revolution.
Why did Israel have so many enemies at the end of the second millennium Before the Common Era? It was because they were unsustainably weak. Weak nations get pushed around by strong nations. Ask the Lebanese or the South Sudanese or the Poles.“It’s still the same old story,/ A fight for love --- but gory,/ On that you can rely/ The fundamental things apply/ As time goes by.”
Judges seems to be telling us it was because Israel had no king, no central authority, that they were being attacked by external enemies on a regular basis. All they had to lead them were these periodic warlords. No people can be strong or prosperous without some kind of a relatively smoothly functioning government. Those who deny that do not know history, and their claims are lies. The period of the Judges was a time of extremist Jewish nationalism.
In the end, human history ideally should be perceived as the unfolding drama of the providence of God. If we look carefully, in the pages of history we can observe the very hand of God. The record is not always clear or inspiring by any means. Sometimes history is brutal, fearful, and chaotic. But if we reconnect and redirect and recommit ourselves, we can bring it all back together again, and the human city can once again become the city of God, as St. Augustine proclaimed.
“We are living, we are dwelling/ In a grand and awful time./ In an age of ages telling;/ To be living is sublime./ …Worlds are charging, heaven beholding;/ Thou hast but an hour to fight;/ Now, the blazoned cross unfolding,/ On, right onward for the right!” (Arthur Cleveland Coxe)
For almost four years, and with increasing examples of profound unrest, our nation has gone through a period of anti-regulatory, anti-governmental turmoil. After the national election almost three months ago, it appeared that the tide might have turned. But in one major anarchistic counteroffensive, and in the most threatening eruption of all, on January 6 the members of the United States Congress came within mere minutes of being overrun by an out-of-control mob, and we may never know what their precise intent was, if they had one.
Samuel L. Perry is a professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma. One of his special interests is what has come to be known as “Christian nationalism.” In an interview with the journalist Thomas Edsall, Professor Perry said, “The Capitol insurrection was as Christian nationalist as it gets. Obviously the evidence would be the use of sacred symbols during the insurrection such as the cross, Christian flag, Jesus Saves signs, etc…. (It) indicates the views of white Americans who obviously thought Jesus not only wanted them to violently storm the Capitol in order to take it back from the socialists, globalists, etc., but they also believed God empowered their efforts, giving them victory.”
God never abandons America or any other nation. His spirit constantly moves among everyone on earth. The way ahead may be hard, but it is never impossible. God truly goes with us. However, only the eyes of faith are able to see that.