Messy Obedience: Gideon's Story (Part 1)

It's good to be with you this morning. If we've not met, my name is Josh and I'm glad that you're here. I don't think it's any accident that any of us showed up here today, or any of us specifically are watching online right now. I think it's all on purpose. See, I believe that there's a creator who created the universe and he holds everything in his hands, including the fact that you showed up today.

And I believe that he has something very specifically in mind for, for all of us today. Whether that's a challenge or a connection, a new relationship or healing or confession, whatever that might be, my hope is that we'd all be willing to step into that today. And so I want to call us, as the pastor of this church, I want to call us out to more. More than showing up and sitting in a seat, more than singing nice songs, more than even hearing some good words from the Bible, more than more. More community, more growth, more like Christ.

And so I hope you'll step into that today. Today we start a new three week series. It's a character study on a guy named Gideon. Gideon's life story, or part of his life story is found in the Old Testament book of Judges. And I love this story of Gideon because no matter where we are in our lives, whatever segment of our life we're in, however great or small our faith is, we will find something that resonates with Gideon's story.

But before we zoom in on Gideon, I want to zoom out just a little bit and look back on the history of what got Israel to this point where they are as we meet Gideon. So we'll remember the story of God's people being in bondage in Egypt. God sends Moses to get them out of Egypt. They cross through the Red Sea and into the wilderness. And God faithfully takes care of them in the wilderness, providing for every need that they have.

And he says, if you will just simply honor me and worship me alone, I will take care of you. I'll fight for you. I'll go ahead of you. I'll provide everything that you need. But he also gives them a very serious warning.

And we read this in Deuteronomy 30, starting in verse 17, he says, this is Moses. God is speaking to the people through Moses. He says, but if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, if you're drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. This is strong language you will not live long in the land you're crossing the Jordan to enter and possess this day. I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.

Now choose life so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God. Listen to his voice and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life. The Lord is your life. And he will give you many years in the land he swore to give your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

For God. The terms are crystal clear. Crystal clear. Worship and obey me, and I will bless you beyond what you can imagine. Don't obey and specifically worship other gods, and you will be choosing death and destruction.

Well, not long after this, Moses dies. Joshua becomes the leader of the people, and he leads them across the Jordan river. And then he resets with them and he reestablishes this same thing with them. With them. We read this in Joshua 24, starting in verse 20.

If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you after he has been good to you. But the people said to Joshua, no, we will serve the Lord. And as we read the opening chapters of the Book of Judges, everything looks pretty promising. It's optimistic. Judges 2:7.

The people served the Lord throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the Lord had done for Israel. But it just takes a few verses for optimism to fade and the people to turn away from God. And as we read in verse 10, we're reminded that in just one generation, all it takes is one generation. Faithful people can completely lose sight of God altogether. Verse 10.

After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals. Those are the false gods. They forsook the Lord and the God of their ancestors who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them.

They aroused the Lord's anger because they forsook him and served BAAL and the ashtoreths in his anger against Israel. The Lord gave them into the hands of raiders who plundered them. He sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist. Notice the first domino that fell for the people to begin worshiping false gods. Another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel.

This is not the fault of one parent. This is not the fault of one leader. This is the fault of an entire generation who got fat and happy in their blessing from God and stopped teaching the next generation about who God and what he has done. Church hear me out on this. We must proclaim God's faithfulness to the next generation.

We must. Because there is far too much at stake if you spend any amount of time grumbling about how this generation is more worldly than the last generation, but you have done nothing to actually tell them about God's faithfulness in your life. Share his stories of faithfulness in your life. If you've not proclaimed his goodness and his kindness and his mercy to them, then you are not part of the solution. You're part of the problem.

Maybe you've never taken time to consider this, but young people. Young people don't have their own history with God yet. They need our stories. God's faithfulness. This is why they get so easily dragged away by fine sounding arguments.

What we talked about in the Book of Colossians series. Young people need our stories of God's faithfulness to sustain them while they start to write their own stories of God's faithfulness. And while every church has a number of people who are moaning and complaining about the next generation, every church I've ever been a part of and every church that I know about also has another problem. A huge shortage of of servant leaders who are willing to invest their time, energy and love into the next generation by serving in kids and students ministry. So if you've been on the fence about serving in one of these areas, let this be the swift kick in your pants.

It's time. Step up. Invest in the next generation. You can do that by stopping by kids check in. You can talk to them at the information desk in the foyer.

Just show up and tell them you're ready to make sure that the next generation does hear of God's faithfulness. From babies to high school seniors to young adults, we need people to step in. We have unmet needs every week that go by. We're always one generation from a new generation. Who knows not the Lord or what he's done.

May it never be said of us that we failed to teach them. Side speech over.

Another thing to note here. When God chooses to punish his people, it isn't quick. He warned them and warned them and warned them. And another thing is he's not just being a grumpy egomaniac like a Cosmic toddler throwing a tantrum because he didn't get what he wanted. Parents in the room.

How many times, how many times have you explained to one of your kids, if you choose to do this thing, thing, whatever this thing is, you are choosing to punish yourself, and yet they still do this thing. And if you are a decent parent, you will give them discipline because they forced your hand to do it. That's what God is doing here. He set up the boundary. They cross the boundary, just like all human beings do.

And when they do, God says, you chose what's coming next. And we can't miss the fact that the Israelites weren't just generally breaking some rules. It's not like God said, if you cuss or drink too much or lie or steal a candy bar or cheat on a test or smoke behind the dumpster, that I'm going to come down on you with the fire of heaven.

He said, if you worship false gods, then you're proclaiming that I am not your God. And if that's what you want, then that is what you will get and you will begin to experience what it's like to not have me on your side. God didn't walk away from them. They walked away from God. So God allows them to be oppressed by a pagan nation.

Eventually, they suffer for long enough, and in their suffering, they cry out to God. They humble themselves and God sends someone to help. A judge comes to rescue them, and they turn back to him in faith and he restores them. And then once they're comfortable again, they forget what he has done for them. They forget that he was the source of their rescue and they turned their backs on him again.

And the cycle repeats and repeats and repeats. And this is what the Book of Judges tells us all about lots of these cycles. But don't miss that this isn't just a cycle of God's people falling into sin and rebellion. It's also a beautiful cycle of God's redemption, of his grace, of his kindness. This terrible mean God of the Old Testament is so patient and generous with them.

It's a cycle of God's lavish grace and forgiveness, too. Now, when we read the word judge, we might think of a person in a black robe with a gavel in their hand making judgments. But this is not what that word means. In fact, in Hebrew, the word for judge is shaphet, and it describes a leader raised up by God. In times of crisis, these judges would come in and rescue the people from other nations, very often through military power or war.

They were also the restorers. They came to call God's people back to faithfulness. God. And they served as leaders. They guided the nation, often like political leaders.

Now, by the time we get to Judges 6, the cycle has repeated and Gideon becomes the fifth judge of Israel. Chapter 6, verse 1. The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and for seven years he gave them into the hands of the Midianites. Because the power of Midian was so impressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves and strongholds. Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, the Midianites, Amalekites and other eastern peoples invaded the country.

They camped on the land and ruined the crops all the way to Gaza and did not spare a living thing for Israel. Neither sheep, nor cattle nor donkeys. They came up with their livestock in their tents like swarms of locusts. It was impossible to count them or their camels. They invaded the land to ravage it.

Midian so impoverished the Israelites that they cried out to the Lord for help. It's significant, the note of camels here. The camels gave them a military advantage. And they also allowed them to travel very quickly, to come here from a long way away to take over when the harvest was ready. So God appoints a very unlikely new judge in a very interesting way.

Let's pick up in Judges 6, verse 11, it says the angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite. We where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites. Now, anytime you read in the Bible that the angel of the Lord shows up, you're reading about a moment when God shows up in human form. This isn't just any angel. In fact, most theologians believe that this is Jesus, pre incarnate Jesus before he was born onto the earth as a baby, that he came in the form of a human, the second person of the Trinity.

This is Jesus here. So the angel of the Lord sits down under a tree that belongs to a guy named Joash, that's Gideon's dad. And note what Gideon's doing. He's threshing wheat in a wine press. Now, we don't really understand this in our lives today because we don't often do much wheat threshing.

I mean, maybe you do, I don't. But you don't thresh wheat in a winepress. This was normally done out in the open on a big flat place, often on top Of a hill where the wind could help with the process. The wheat stalks would be laid out, and they would be beaten with sticks, or they would use animals to trample across them and break up the stalk from the grain head. They'd be spread out, and then they would be tossed into the air.

And the wind then would pick up that stalk, the chaff, and blow it away. And the grain would fall down, and it could be gathered for food. But Gideon is down in a winepress, which would have been more like a pit. There's no wind in a pit, and he's threshing wheat there to hide it from the Midianites. This is how Gideon and has adapted to surviving in this kind of environment.

Now, to help us get into Gideon's shoes here, I want us just to take a minute to remember what it was like when we all lost our minds at the beginning of COVID okay? We all lost our minds when toilet paper and canned goods and pasta was missing from the shelves. We were all, like, shamefully walking through with our masks with our cart, right? And we were all panicking. I mean, the news was showing stories of people getting in fist fights over toilet paper.

And I don't know anyone who actually starved to death, and I don't know anyone who went months without toilet paper. Okay? This was all about fear. But imagine how demoralizing it would have been in that time, if for seven years, every time a new shipment of food, a new shipment of toilet paper showed up, an army came in and took it. Imagine what we would be willing to do.

Imagine what we would have to do to be able to survive. This is the environment that Gideon's in. I want us to note that I think Gideon gets a bad rap for being fearful, but he's living in a terrible environment.

And pay attention to this theme of threshing that's on repeat as Gideon's story unfolds. We'll see God threshing Gideon, too. Removing this chaff, stripping away what's unnecessary, until only what is most valuable and useful in him is what remains. God will thresh out Gideon until he's ready to be used. Let's pick up in verse 12, when the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon.

He said, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior. This is a very odd greeting to a guy that's threshing wheat in a pit. He's trying there. He's hiding there, trying to survive. There's an uncountable army oppressing his people.

And this guy that Gideon doesn't know who this is. This guy shows up and greets him as mighty warrior. And I just imagine Gideon literally laughing out loud, like, who the heck does this guy think I am? Here's how Gideon responds. It sounds much more proper than I imagine it happening.

Pardon me, my Lord, Gideon replied, 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? Gideon's like, yeah, sure, pal. God's with us all right? If God is with us, why the heck am I threshing weed in a winepress?

And then the Bible makes it really clear to us who the angel is. It doesn't say the angel of the Lord this time. It just says the Lord Yahweh, God himself. The Lord turned to him and said, go in the strength you have. That's a whole sermon on its own.

Go in the strength you have. Gideon didn't know he had strength. And the angel of the Lord is proclaiming it over him. 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. I will be with you. These are the words that God spoke to Moses when he called him to Egypt.

These are the words, I will be with you, that he said to Joshua when he said, go in there and fight, and I will go with you. I will be with you. Do not be afraid. These words get Gideon's attention, and it draws him back to this memory of something that he would have known about that happened in Abraham's life when the angel of the Lord came to visit him. And to test this out, he does the same thing that Abraham did in Genesis 18.

He prepares a meal for this person. He says, will you stay here while I go prepare a meal? And he brings the meal back to the Lord, and the Lord instructs him to put it out on the rock. And then he takes a staff, the angel of the Lord, and he touches it. And fire comes up from that rock and consumes the meal.

And then God disappears. Talk about an eventful afternoon.

This is the moment that Gideon realizes who he's been talking to. And he is so afraid, because he knows the stories that those Who. Who interact with God face to face should be afraid for their lives. And somehow God communicates to him. Hey, it's okay.

Calm down, buddy. I'm not going to kill you. So I lost my spot. Here we go. Oh.

So he's afraid he'll die, but God tells him to calm down. So he builds an altar and sacrifices one of his dad's bulls on that altar. And then God gives him instructions to tear down his father's altar to baal. See, apparently Gideon's dad, Joash has an altar to BAAL and an ashtoreth pole, and he worships false gods there. Now this is interesting.

Gideon's name in Hebrew means hewer, like one who chops down trees. And God's calling him now to chop down this Asherah pole. An Asherah pole was a large pole, think like a totem pole that was propped up, or sometimes it was a whole trunk of a tree, or even a whole live tree. Now, the Bible doesn't say this, but I tend to believe that maybe Joash's Asherah pole is actually the tree that was mentioned in verse 11 that the angel came and sat under. And God is calling Gideon to chop this down.

So Gideon is obedient, but he's also not dumb. He's scared. So he waits until dark, and he brings some others with him, and they destroy the altar and they cut down the Asherah pole. And then in the morning, the people from the town come, apparently to worship at this location, and they're pretty ticked off that somebody messed up their stuff in the middle of the night and desecrated this super holy pagan worship site. So after some asking around, they find out that it was Gideon that did it.

His friends ratted him out and they want his head on a stick. Verse 30. The people of the town demanded of Joash, bring out your son. He must die because he has broken down Baal's altar and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. So Joash comes to Gideon's defense a little bit and he says, hey, everybody, calm down.

If BAAL is a real God, then surely we don't need to kill Gideon ourselves. BAAL will take care of him himself. Let BAAL contend with Gideon. So Gideon gets a new nickname from the people. They call him Jerubbaal, which means one who contends with baal.

Gideon becomes the guy who's known as the guy who goes up against false gods. That's so tough. So soon after this, a huge army of the Midianites and other Eastern peoples, they cross the Jordan river, and they encamp in the valley of Jezreel. And I looked at all of this on Google Earth, and when you do, you can see where the people would have been and then this huge valley that this army would have been in. And so where there are settlements and where there were people, they could look out and see this massive army down there.

Judges 6:34. Then the spirit of the Lord came on Gideon, and he blew a trumpet, summoning the Abiezrites of to follow him. Suddenly he's got this boldness in him, and he blows this horn, and it says, then the spirit of the Lord came on Gideon. Now, this sounds pretty familiar. We've heard language like this lots of times in the Bible, and at first glance, it doesn't look like anything special.

But when you look at the Hebrew, there's something awesome happening here. It's out of order. Normally, the Bible says the spirit came upon someone or someone was clothed in the spirit. But here in the Hebrew, it's flipped. Literally, it says, the spirit of the Lord clothed himself with Gideon.

Imagine the Holy Spirit putting Gideon on, like a coat, working through him, wearing Gideon, moving him, speaking through him. Gideon isn't the one working for God. God is working through Gideon. And when Gideon lifts that trumpet to his lips, it's not just a man calling an army. It's like God's very breath blowing through this horn, rallying his people to fight.

And we'll read later that 32,000 show up to be on Gideon's team. More on that next week. But even with the Holy Spirit animating him, Gideon is still human. He's still weak. He's still unsure.

He's still afraid because he's smart. He should be afraid because there are at least 135,000 warriors in his backyard, and God's asking him to go fight them. That's crazy. And so he asks God for a sign. Verse 36.

Gideon said to God, if you will save Israel by my hand, as you have promised, look, I will place a wool fleece on the threshing floor. If there is dew only on the fleece and all the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you said. And that's what happened. Gideon rose early the next day. He squeezed the fleece and wrung out the dew.

A bowl full of water. Then Gideon said to God, do not be angry with me. Let me make just one more request. Allow me one more test with the fleece, but this time, make the fleece dry and Let the ground be covered with dew that night. God did so only the fleece was dry.

All the ground was covered with dew. Two things I want us to notice here. First, like I said earlier, I think Gideon gets a really bad rap for being a coward.

He just can't trust God and he's got to keep asking for a sign and another sign and another sign. And every sermon I've ever heard on Gideon kind of points out that he's such a fearful wimp.

I promise you, if God called me to fight 135,000 people, even if 32,000 showed up, I'm going to be like, are you sure, God? Like, are you? Are you sure that you're sure that you're sure? Like, maybe it was another Josh. Did you mean a different Josh?

There are lots of Josh's, right? Notice where Gideon goes. Don't miss this. This stuck out to me as I was studying this. Notice where Gideon goes to lay out the fleece.

He goes to the threshing floor. When we first find Gideon, he should be on the threshing floor, but he's in a winepress hiding. But now this new layer of faith is showing up in Gideon's life. He goes to the threshing floor now, to the high place out in the open. And that's where he tests God.

But it's also the place where God is testing him. It's the place where Gideon steps out onto the threshing floor to be threshed by God so that the good stuff can be left behind and all this weakness and all this chaff and all of this humanity can be blown away. Now the second thing to note is that while this is a story of what Gideon did, it tells us what Gideon is. I don't believe that we should take this as a step by step guide on how we discern God's will. I don't think that that makes sense.

This isn't a holy decision making formula. It was a sign of a man wrestling with God. It's what he did. And while God graciously answered Gideon, the rest of scripture shows us a very consistent way for us to discern God's will in our lives. While the whole fleece thing feels a lot more miraculous, it feels a lot more exciting.

Instead of just setting up our own fleeces, the New Testament tells us that those who are in Christ have the Holy Spirit indwelling us as a guide, that we have His Word to instruct us. Gideon did not have God's word like we do, that we're to seek wisdom in prayer. And we're to walk by faith and not by sight. So don't get too worked up by the idea of laying out a fleece for God. We started this chapter with Gideon hiding in a winepress.

We end it with him meeting God on the threshing floor. I said that word threshing means to be beaten out, ready for God to do his mighty work of blowing away the chaff. Same guy, different posture. And the difference isn't because Gideon suddenly finds courage inside of himself to go do something awesome. It's because God meets him in his fear and calls him something he isn't yet.

Mighty warrior. God called him by a name that made no sense. The Lord is with you, mighty warrior. Gideon's not fought one battle yet, but God is already speaking to the man Gideon will become once he's been through the threshing process and once God's spirit is at work in him. Now, next week, we're going to see just how God plans to do this in Gideon's life as he uses him to defeat, miraculously defeat, the Midianites.

But Church God still works like this. He meets us in our mess, in our uncertainty, in the gap between belief and obedience. And he calls us by a name that doesn't yet make sense and into a life that we can't even yet imagine. And if we're going to become who he says that we are, we have to step onto the threshing floor. Because the threshing floor is where God removes what's holding us back.

The threshing floor is where he blows away all that chaff so that the most valuable stuff is left. He does it to make us useful. And the question is, will you step onto the threshing floor? Most of us are unwilling to do so because we know it will hurt, because we know there will be something to give up, because we know we will be pressed and beaten. It will cost us something.

The threshing floor is where God removes what's holding us back. And today, stepping onto the threshing floor might look like accepting Christ as your savior for the very first time. Maybe that's what it looks like for you today. If that's you, don't leave today without having a conversation. Come talk to me.

Come talk to our prayer team at the bottom of the ramp. Come talk to someone at the information desk. Today could be the day that you step out onto the threshing floor. Maybe stepping onto the threshing floor for you looks something like obeying in an area that you know you're being disobedient in something God's been calling you to obedience in, but you have just been surviving in a wine press instead. Maybe God's calling you toward forgiveness or reconciliation or generosity or baptism or confession, but fear is keeping you in the winepress, and I want to encourage you to step onto the threshing floor.

Or maybe it looks like taking a faith risk, like signing up to serve in NextGen, like leading a faith community for the first time, instead of just sitting back and saying, well, the church didn't provide a community for me and I don't know what to do. Maybe God's calling you to start a faith community. Maybe it looks like inviting someone to join you to sit in here at this place. Maybe it looks like discipling someone that you know God has put in your life to disciple. Maybe it's just starting a faith conversation with someone at school or at work.

God's calling us onto the threshing floor, and we can live small, hiding in a winepress, just surviving. Or we can step out onto the threshing floor and so will we cower. Will we cower in the winepress, or will we trust the one who calls us by a new name? For Gideon, that name was mighty Warrior. For you, it might be peacemaker or servant or witness or encourager, overcomer, forgiver, builder, disciple, maker, ambassador of reconciliation.

So will you stay hidden in the winepress or will you step out onto the threshing floor? Because that's where we get refined. And here's some good news. We have something Gideon didn't. We have the life, the sacrifice, and the resurrection of Jesus.

Jesus came to make dead things alive. He came to make weak things strong. He came to make old things new and impossible things possible and dead things alive.