I wonder if you would turn with me this evening to the passage that Liam read from Judges chapter 6. I want to spend some moments this evening reflecting upon these specific events in the book of Judges, but start by making a few general observations about the book in hand. Judges, I think, in terms of the culture of the Christian Church, is rather strange. It's arguable that Judges contains some of the most memorable stories in the whole of the Bible. Gideon and Samson, even more minor characters such as Jephthah, loom large, I think, in the kind of stories that people even today will know about the Bible, even if they have very little interest other than that in the Scriptures. I remember when my children were small and we would have family devotions with them and every now and then my wife and I would just say to the kids, OK, well, I'll have you to choose the passage tonight. Which passage would you like us to read tonight? And it was always the same chapter. It was always Judges chapter 3. If you're familiar with Judges chapter 3, it's Ehud and Elam. It has everything that a 7 or 8 year old boy could want. It has a hugely fat man. There's a comic aspect to it. It has lavatorial humor and it has a violent disembowelment. So the stories are often very familiar to us and yet it is a book that is rarely preached on in the Christian church. And that I think is because in some ways the very same reasons that make it appealing to little boys. It is a book of very dark violence a lot of the time. And of course, it's the story of the whole of a more or less failed attempt at ethnic cleansing. And we live at the end of, well, no, we live at the beginning of a century where the last 100 years, certainly in European history, were marked by a series of very traumatic and bloody acts of ethnic cleansing. 1915, the Armenian genocide. You go to Asia, you have the rape of Nanking in the 1930s, the Holocaust. 1941-42 onwards. And the century, of course, ended with the brutal ethnic cleansings in the Balkans. And it makes the Book of Judges quite disturbing and distasteful, I think, from a modern perspective. There are problems here. There are dark passages that are difficult for us to understand. I don't really wish to address any of those this evening but I want to highlight something else that is perhaps problematic in the book of Judges and that is so many of the great figures of the book of Judges who are flagged up in Hebrews 11 as great examples of the faith When you get into the nitty-gritty of their lives, they seem somewhat less than stellar. And Gideon is the great example. Gideon, of course, is raised up by the Lord at a time when Israel has plunged into idolatry. Gideon's own family, as we shall see, are at the center of the idolatry in Israel at this point. He's used to relieve Israel of the pressure that comes from these external tribes pressing in on the people of God. But when he dies, he leaves Israel probably worse off than when he found it. And yet he's cited in Hebrews 11 as one of the great heroes of the faith. Context of Judges 6 is this. Well, the story of Judges as a whole is a series of sort of cyclical attacks on the people of Israel by those that they fail to clear from the land. And when we get to Judges chapter 6, we find that it's the people of the tribe of Midian who are oppressing the children of Israel. And their strategy, they described at the beginning of Judges chapter 6 as being like locusts, and it's a very appropriate description. First of all, it speaks of a vast number of them. They were like locusts. But secondly, it speaks of what they were doing. Israel, of course, is an agrarian society. It depends upon the growing of grain. If you have a disastrous harvest for more than a year or two in a row, you're going to die. Imagine living in Phoenix and finding that the water's cut off. You die very, very quickly. It's like that in ancient Israel. If the harvest is bad, they're going to starve very quickly. And the strategy of the Midianites was to stay up in the hills and they would wait until the time of harvest and then they would sweep down on the children of Israel and take away the grain. And we're told at the beginning of Judges chapter 6 that the Midianites had made Israel small. They had reduced them. These are the people of God. But the Midianites had reduced them and made them small. They were crushing them economically. And in this context, the children of Israel cry out to the Lord. It happens again and again in the book of Judges. The enemies come and put pressure on them. They squeeze the Israelites until the pips squeak. And the Israelites cry out in pain, not in repentance, but in pain to the Lord. And the Lord raises up a deliverer for them. And this must have been a very, very terrifying time for the Israelites. Whenever I read Judges chapter 6, it takes my mind to one of my favorite films. It was a film made in the early 1960s. Probably, I think, the first film which Michael Caine, famous English actor, had a starring role in. It's called Zulu. It's based on a factual military encounter. Sometime in the late 19th century, the Zulu nation You're on the warpath and one morning they wipe out an entire detachment of British troops. An entire detachment. Biggest disaster up until that point in British military history. And they move on to a tiny little mission station in a place called Rorke's Drift where there's about 150 Welsh Fusiliers trapped in this mission station. And in the movie there's this great scene where you have these 150 soldiers. It's about sunset. and they're looking out to the waste and they can hear this bang, bang, bang noise. They can't see anything. They can hear this pounding. And the viewer knows what it is. It's the Zulus banging their spears against their shields. And there's this electric scene in the movie where suddenly one figure appears on the horizon, then another, then another, and then suddenly there are countless thousands. They're like locusts on the horizon. And you feel, as you're sort of drawn into the movie, you feel small. These men, they are bloodthirsty. They've just wiped out a detachment of British troops. And now there's 150, 150 Welsh Fusiliers facing the might of the Zulu nation. It's just like Judges chapter 6. Israel has been made small. These warlike people, they're there on the horizon, thousands of them. Who is going to save Israel at this point? And it's then that the Lord raises up or approaches this man Gideon. He's not particularly promising material. He's from a family in a fairly minor tribe in Israel. When we hear about him, when the Lord sends his angel to approach him, he's threshing grain in the wine press. Tells you all you need to know. Israel is in such a predicament that men can't thresh the grain out in the fields because guess what? As the grain is thrown up in the air, the locusts in the hills will see it and will come sweeping down and take it away. So Israel is very, very small. Gideon is this minor figure. Worse than that, his household seems to be the center of Baal worship. in the town where he's based. Problem, of course, is the Lord keeps allowing these enemies to oppress Israel because they're being unfaithful, because they're looking to other gods to save them. And Gideon, if you like, he doesn't look like the solution to the problem at this point. His family looked like piece of evidence number one of the problem in Israel. And yet, the Lord calls him. And the Lord says to him, you know, the first thing that's got to be done here is you've got to put your own house in order. So Gideon goes straight off and he tears down the altar of Baal. And we think, great. Gideon has been called by the Lord and now this super strong hero guy, he gets the message and he goes straight off and he tears down the altar of Baal, the Asherah. The problem of course is that the writer of Judges tells us that Gideon does this not because he's zealous for the Lord, but because he's frightened that if the townspeople seeing him doing it, they'll lynch him. And he's absolutely correct because where we picked up the reading, where Liam read from today, we pick up the story when the men of the town rise early in the morning and they see that the altar of Baal has been torn down and the Asherah pole has been destroyed, their response is not great, the Reformation has started. We can go back to being faithful to the God of Israel. Their response, one would say it's an ironic somewhat Presbyterian response, their response is to form a committee. to find out who did it and have him lynched. And it's then of course that Gideon's father steps into the breach and makes the perfectly reasonable point, if Baal is a god let him look after himself. If he's so great, if he's the almighty powerful God who gives us rain so that we can have a good harvest, let him look after himself. And thankfully, that intervention is what saves Gideon's hide at this point. And then something very, very strange happens. Well, we hear that the Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the East came together and they crossed the Jordan and they're encamped in the Valley of Jezreel in a sort of in-your-face move. The enemy crosses into Israelite territory and sets up camp. And then we read this, but the Spirit of the Lord clothed Gideon and he sounded the trumpet and the Abiezrites were called out to follow him and he sent messengers throughout all Manasseh and they too were called out to follow him and he sent messengers to Asher, Zebulun and Naphtali and they went up to meet them. Just think about that for a second. That's remarkable, isn't it? Here was this man, he was deep in idolatrous worship in Israel He was a coward. Even when the Lord said, I'm going to save Israel by your hand, he went straight off to do it at night because he was worried that he'd get beaten up by the townsfolk. He's an absolute coward. He's a man, himself said, a man of no stature in this community. He blows the trumpet and the tribes rally. Tribes rally to his cause. That is absolutely stunning. Given his weaknesses, given his unpopularity, He should be the last man who's able to rally the troops at this point. But he does so. And the key, of course, is in the text. What makes the difference? What's the discriminating factor here? It's the spirit of the Lord clothed Gideon. If you have time in the next week to go and read the Book of Judges, it doesn't take very long to read, and as I say, it's full of great stories. It's not a tedious read, it's full of great stories. Notice how often the Spirit rushes upon somebody or clothes them and immediately they are transformed. The weak become strong and the despised become great. It's of course a pattern that carries over beautifully into the New Testament. I wonder if you would turn with me to the book of Luke, one of my favorite passages in all of the Bible, Luke chapter 1. It's such a beautiful little anecdote, and yet so often we pass over it and don't realize quite what's being said here. Luke chapter 1 of course, famous chapter, Mary and Elizabeth have both received messages, divine messages, telling them that they're going to have miraculous children. Mary of course is a virgin, the Holy Spirit comes on her and she conceives. Elizabeth is a lady who's past the age of childbearing. and she is told she's going to bear John the Baptist and in her excitement when she finds out she's pregnant Mary decides to visit Elizabeth. It's important to understand what's going on culturally here. Mary would have been a young girl, this journey that she makes would have been a dangerous one but it's an appropriate one because Mary is clearly younger and in this kind of society, we live in a society now where youth is adored How many millions get spent by old people trying to look young, whether it's clothing or surgery these days. But that is not the way it was in the first century. In the first century, age would have been respected. I've mentioned my wife comes from the Outer Hebrides. Whenever we go back to the Outer Hebrides to visit my in-laws, it doesn't matter that we have travelled all that way to be there. We can't sit in my parents' in-law house and expect all our relatives to come to us. It doesn't work that way. We're younger than those we've come to visit and so we're still expected, in this very rural society, we're still expected to make the rounds that we should go and visit. That is the appropriate order of things. And that's what Mary does here. It says, in those days, Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country to a town in Judah. She's doing absolutely the right thing. The younger woman is going and visiting the older woman. And she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And then it starts to get interesting. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. It's great, isn't it? John the Baptist is already doing in the womb that which he will do for the rest of his life. Point to the Lord Jesus Christ. Point to the presence of the Lamb of God. says, "...and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb." I'm guessing when we read this passage at Christmas quite often, that's the bit of the verse that most of us focus on. The blessing of Mary, isn't this wonderful? The mother of the Christ has come and isn't she blessed among women? Now we're Protestants and we're very edgy about saying anything good about Mary, but wasn't she blessed? the one who was to bear the Christ child so Elizabeth is right to declare this but then I think verse 43 is in some senses much more interesting and why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? You see the significance of that? Mary's done exactly the right thing, the younger has gone and visited the older But if she walks through the door and the Holy Spirit clothes this woman, this older woman, Elizabeth's reaction is, what are you visiting me for? I should have come to visit you. When the Holy Spirit comes, the normal rules don't apply. It doesn't matter what society judges as strong and important and powerful and potent and effective. When the Holy Spirit comes, The normal rules don't apply. And we see here, we see here in Judges, we see here at the beginning of Luke murmurs of what we will see supremely on the cross, of course. What is the cross? 1 Corinthians 1. Well, it's foolishness. It's foolishness to Greeks. They come to the cross, they know what God is like and He doesn't look like a man hanging on the cross. It's idiotic. The Jew goes to the cross. What does the Jew say? Cursed is the man who hangs on a cross. It makes no sense for God to be cursed. Christ was of all men the one in whom the Spirit dwelt most richly. What happens when he's baptised? The Spirit descends upon him and immediately we're told in the Gospel of Mark the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness. Christ is saturated in the Holy Spirit and the normal rules don't apply. How does that apply to us today? Well, what is the church? The church is described in the New Testament as the body of Christ. It's also described as the temple of the Holy Spirit. What does that mean? It means the church is strong because she's clothed in the Spirit. I want to suggest to you this evening But that is where the church corporate strength lies and it's where the individual Christians strength lies. 10th is one of the bigger churches in Philadelphia, certainly one of the bigger faithful churches in Philadelphia. Maybe you have three or four thousand, I don't know, on a Sunday morning. That's a large church in a city of a million and a half. Even 10th Presbyterian is a drop in the ocean. When you think of it in those terms, that could be immensely discouraging. What are we against so many? There are millions of them out there and even a big church like 10th looks like a drop in the bucket. Do not be discouraged brothers and sisters because clothed in the Spirit, the normal rules don't apply. Clothed in the Spirit, Gideon can be a great man even Even a broken stick like Gideon can be used to do great things. Even the church that looks by worldly standards so small and so weak, it looks laughable, it looks like foolishness. The church clothed in the Spirit of Christ has nothing to fear from the normal rules because the normal rules don't apply. saying this morning as we celebrated communion in my home church, if you were to go today and say, I want my organization to grow, I want it to spread, I want it to become worldwide and I want it to last for thousands of years and the consultant would say to you, well what you need to do is just get a lot of ordinary people passing on the message by word of mouth and you need to get together, hear somebody talk about the message once a week and you need to eat bread and drink wine together once in a while. You tell them they were an idiot. No organization can grow on that basis. No organization can last 2,000 years on that basis. Except the Church. Clothed in the Spirit, the normal rules don't apply. And it applies to us as individual Christians as well. You feel weak as an individual Christian? Do you feel defeated? Do you feel the odds are too great? Clothed in the Spirit, The normal rules don't apply. As a believer you have God's Spirit. Pray that His Spirit would really impress upon your heart the significance and the power of the Lord Jesus Christ. So Gideon then, he's a... Well, if I found myself in a fight, I'm not sure Gideon would necessarily be the first man I would go to. but he does manage to rally the troops at this point, clothed in the Spirit, and yet almost immediately, almost immediately, things start to go wrong again. It really starts in verse 36, and as you read the book of Judges, something to look out for, the writer is very clever. The writer never wastes a word. And when the writer uses the word God rather than the word Lord, it's a sign that something's going wrong. The word Lord, of course, brings to mind the great promises that God has made to Abraham. You think of the word Lord, you think of the Lord, you think of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. You think of God bringing the people of Israel out of Egypt in the Exodus. The God of the covenant, the God of faithfulness, the God who has worked so many particular things for his special people. So when we get to verse 36 and the text says this, then Gideon said to God, the writer of Judges is sending us a signal. He's telling us what follows, not to be taken necessarily at face value, this is not good stuff that's about to happen here. Of course, it's a very famous passage, the sign of the fleece. When I was a student in the 80s as a new Christian, it was regularly trotted out as a great way to find guidance. Trivial examples, you know, should I ask this girl out? Well, what I do is I pray that something weird will happen, and if that weird thing happens, then yes, I should, or no, I shouldn't. That was how it was sort of trotted out as a way of using this passage. In actual fact, of course, the passage is nothing about guidance. It's actually all about manipulation and about denial of God's Word. Let's have a look at it. Then Gideon said to God, first bad sign, the God words being used rather than the word, the Lord. Now, let's just look at the logic of what Gideon says here. If you will save Israel by my hand as you have said, behold, I am laying a fleece of wool on the threshing floor, etc., etc. Think of the logic of that sentence. Let's break it down into sort of propositions. God, you have said you are going to save Israel by my hand. If you meant what you said, then do the following. If you are speaking truthfully, do the following. If your word is an accurate account of what's going to happen, do the following. It is very obvious that what Gideon is doing here, he's doubting the word of the Lord. God has said he's going to save Israel by Gideon's hand. Gideon says to him, well if you mean what you say, then perform what is frankly, from God's perspective, little more than a cheap conjuring trick. Of course, the Lord does it and Gideon then switches it back. Okay, let's do it the other way. Let's make sure there's no natural explanation for what's gone on. Gideon even uses a rather bad word. He says, In verse 39, my eyes... I probably need glasses. I think it's verse 39 or a bigger Bible. Yes, verse 39. Then Gideon said to God, not let your anger burn against me. Let me speak just once more. Please let me test just once more. That's a bad word as well. If you look up the word test in your concordances and go back and see how it operates in the Old Testament, you'll find testing is generally speaking what the children of Israel did in the wilderness when they didn't believe God. They kept testing him. They kept putting him to the test. Exodus 17 verses 2 and 7, good examples of that. What Gideon is doing here then with the act of the fleece is not a paradigm for guidance. It's an example of lack of faith and manipulation of God. What is guidance? Guidance is knowing the word of God and doing according to what it says. I had a friend, an academic friend a few years ago who was told by God, he was a Christian guy, was told by God to leave his wife and marry one of his research students. He's a European academic, he's not somebody locally, and he genuinely believed that. He thought God had told him. Well, God hadn't told him any such thing. It's very clear in the Bible that marriage is for life and one shouldn't commit adultery. God hadn't told him at all. He had told himself that. He sanctified what he wanted to do by saying God had told him. Now, I know there are always difficult issues with guidance. Sometimes, if the current economy, this may not happen very often, but perhaps you're offered two really great jobs simultaneously in different parts of the country. And it can be tough to know which one to take, which one would the Lord have me take? It can be difficult, all things being equal. But if we're honest, 99% of guidance issues in the Christian life are not like that. They're really about knowing God's Word and putting it into action. The problem with Gideon here is he's ignoring God's Word. He's not looking to follow God's Word, he's looking to get out from under God's Word. So, as we think about this passage then, We've seen the importance of the Holy Spirit. We've seen the importance of God's Word in guidance. Is there anything positive though we can find from this exchange between God and Gideon, specifically relative to the fleece? I would say it's this. Behold how long-suffering God is. Isn't this a remarkable incident? God has said to this man, I'm going to use you to deliver Israel." This man has then blown the horn and the tribes have rallied to him. Great evidence that he's not the man he used to be. He's not the weed who's worried about being lynched. Now he's the mighty general about to lead Israel into battle. And yet he throws it all away and says, OK, I'm having second thoughts. Did you really say that? Did you really mean it? How does God respond? Well, one would have expected If you believe the standard sort of view of the God of the Old Testament, particularly the God of judges, this God of unremitting violence and judgment, if you believe that view, what happens is incomprehensible. God allows himself to be manipulated by this man. Behold how long-suffering God is. God's eye at this point is surely on the main prize. He wants to deliver his people. Gideon is the man he's chosen to do it. He has to get Gideon out onto that battlefield. One might say, if he has to humble himself and humiliate himself in order to get Gideon to do that, then this God will do it. Isn't that stunningly like the God of the New Testament? What is the God of the New Testament if he does not demonstrate himself to be long-suffering, to be gracious, to be merciful, to be a God who meets us in our weakness, uses our weaknesses to overcome our weaknesses? What a delightful God that God is, and he's here in the Old Testament. Don't let anybody tell you, oh, the God of the Old Testament, he's just a rather unpleasant and angry person. I like the God of the New Testament. He's just gracious and merciful. We see the grace, the mercy, and the long-suffering of God in the Old Testament in the most unlikely places. Here, as God allows himself to be manipulated by Gideon. And of course, once again, this is just a pale echo of what God will do in the New Testament. What does God do in the New Testament? He takes death itself, the great result of our rebellion and sin. Death. He takes death itself and he uses it to do what? To destroy death. He uses death to destroy death. He uses the greatest weapon that the evil one is able to throw at us. He submits himself to it and he comes out the other side vindicated. The God of Judges, there are so many other passages one could look at for this, but the God of Judges is an incredibly long-suffering and gracious God. Finally, and let this be an encouragement to you, sometimes Hebrews 11 It can be a very depressing chapter. There are a lot of Christian biographies, and I'm not a huge fan of Christian biographies. I know that your former minister loved them, and he and I sort of disagreed about this once or twice, but he would love Christian biographies for their inspirational content. Maybe I'm just sort of more cynical, I don't know, but that's what always worried me about Christian biographies. Because so often I can read Christian biographies and come away thinking, I can never measure up. I read a biography of Jonathan Edwards. I can never measure up. I read about Jim Elliot through Gates of Splendour. And I appreciate the glorious things that were done by that man and have been done through the retelling of his martyrdom. But part of me reads that and thinks, I can never measure up. And then I turn to Hebrews 11 and I see this great list of heroes of the faith and I think, man, I can never measure up. These were great ones. Then you start to dig below the surface. Gideon. He actually wasn't that great. He wasn't that great when you look at the details. Jephthah. I happen to be convinced, I know that the opinion is divided on this, but I'm pretty convinced that Jephthah did sacrifice his own daughter. Samson. Samson is a wild man. There's not only the explicit stuff in the Samson story that's weird, but remember he's a Nazirite. One of the events takes place in a vineyard. What's a Nazirite doing hanging around in a vineyard? Everything Samson does has a sinister edge to it. When you look at the great heroes of Hebrews 11 and you track them back into Judges, you know what? They actually don't look that different to us after all. I can read Hebrews 11 and think, yeah, it's not because I've got to measure up to these guys that they're being paraded as heroes. It's because actually, they're like every other Christian. I know. Hebrews 11, of course, we tend to read it as a unit, but it goes straight on into Hebrews 12. What does Hebrews 12 say? These men did not look for something in this world. They looked for the world to come. And they looked to Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our salvation. That's what made them great. Clothed in the Spirit, they looked to Jesus Christ. And thought of in that way, yeah, I can read this and I can read the sign of the fleece and I'm not tempted to stand back and condemn Gideon. I've done the same. I've tried to get out from under the word of God. I've done things when I knew that I should have done the opposite because God's word was clear. And yet I rejoice that I have a God who allows himself to be manipulated in that way because he loves his people. and in Christ will bring us home to glory. So I commend Gideon to you as a hero of the faith. Not because he's a hero, but because he's of the faith. Praise God for his gospel this evening. Let us respond to the preaching. I see that we have prayers. I will pray and then we will respond to the preaching of God's word. Oh Lord God, we do praise you. For you are indeed a loving and a gracious God. Too often, Lord, our thoughts of you are too small. We pray this evening that you might once again clothe us in your Spirit and that our minds might be full of great and mighty thoughts of you. and that, Lord, we might adore you, not only in your holiness and your greatness, but in your infinite mercy and condescension towards us in the Lord Jesus Christ. Above all, Lord, as we look at the lives of the judges, we would pray, O God, that you would keep us safe and that you would allow us to finish well and bring us safely home to that promised land where we will gather with a countless number of individuals from all nations, all continents, all races, and all time, and be united in our praise of the Lamb who was slain. We pray these things to you, God our Father, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, by the power of your mighty Holy Spirit. Amen.