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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.
Guidance: False and True
Judges 6:28-40
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| Sermon ID | 25122243395 |
| Duration | 35:56 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - PM |
| Bible Text | Judges 6 |
| Language | English |