Ralph preached on ‘The Courage of Faith’ last night, looking at the story of Gideon from Judges 6 and 7. I have to say that Gideon is one of the unlikely heroes of the Bible with whom I readily identify. He’s insecure, full of doubt and finds it hard to accept God’s assessment of him, all qualities I readily identify with!
When the angel of the Lord first appears to Gideon, he is threshing wheat in a winepress to stop the Midianites from getting it. His response to being called a ‘mighty warrior’ with whom the Lord is present is:
“But sir,” Gideon replied, “if the LORD is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about when they said, ‘Did not the LORD bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the LORD has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian.” (Judges 6:3)
‘If, why, where, but?’ – these were the questions Gideon had and so often are the questions we have. We feel that God can’t be with us because of the things that are happening in our lives. We feel that we can’t see God working in our lives. We feel abandoned at times, as though we are left to struggle on on our own. It’s a lonely place to be.
But in God’s graciousness, three things happened to Gideon as a result of this encounter with God:
1) he became converted (he heard the call of God and responded to it; he built an altar of worship and sacrifice and drank from the well of salvation)
2) he became consecrated (he yielded his own will to the will of God, obeying God’s command to wreck Baal’s altar and rebuild an altar to God, acts of faith which clearly had repercussions for other people)
3) he became controlled by God (and as a result was able to become a leader and deliverer, drawing 32,000 men to follow him initially – though God reduced this number to 300 to prove that the victory belonged to Him and not to Gideon’s strategies or strengths)
God is working behind the scenes all the time (he was able to instil fear into the Midianites and bring about victory through the most unlikely of weapons, as Judges 7 clearly demonstrates.) Gideon started from a place of doubt, but ended in the place of victory through faith. We can be encouraged by God’s faithfulness (1 Thess 5:24) and by the fact that He is the Saviour of the world (John 4:42, Luke 2:11) Even more amazing is the fact that He can by MY Saviour (Luke 1:47)