Gideon's Epitaph

A lesson this morning will be taken from Judges chapter 8. We're going to be looking at verses 24 through the end of the chapter. The subject of these verses, I believe, is Gideon's epitaph. God wrote an epitaph. He always does concerning his saints. And he gives us the account of it in these verses. So let's read these together, beginning with verse 24.

And Gideon said unto them, I would desire a request of you, that you would give me every man the earrings of his prey. For they had golden earrings because they were Ishmaelites. And they answered, we will willingly give them. And they spread a garment out on the ground, did cast therein every man the earrings of his prey. And the weight of the golden earrings that he requested was 1,700 shekels of gold, beside the ornaments, collars, and purple raiment that were of the kings of Midian, and besides that, the chains that were about the camel's necks.

And Gideon made an ephod thereof, and put it in his city, even in Orba. And all Israel went thither a-whoring after it, which thing become a snare unto Gideon and to his house. Thus was Midian subdued before the children of Israel, so that they lifted up their heads no more, and the country was in quietness forty years in the days of Gideon. And Jerobael, the son of Joash, who is Gideon, went and dwelt in his own house. And Gideon had threescore and ten sons of his body begotten, for he had many wives. And his concubine that was in Shechem, she also bare him a son, whose name he called Abimelech. And Gideon, the son of Joash, died in a good old age and was buried in the sepulchre of Joash his father in Orpah. And it came to pass, as soon as Gideon was dead, and the children of Israel turned again and went a-whoring after Balaam and made Baal-berith their god.

And the children of Israel remembered not the Lord their God, who had delivered them out of the hands of their enemies on every side, neither showed they kindness to the house of Jeroboam, namely Gideon, according to all the goodness which he had shed unto Israel, or showed unto Israel. Now, the lesson this morning, as I said, is Gideon's epitaph, whom God appointed a judge in Israel. Now, I'm 76 years old. I've been pastoring this assembly now for about 20 years.

And I know where I come from. And I know how I got here. And I can say without hesitation, it's all of God. and all of grace. And I don't know how much longer the Lord will allow me to minister here, but my prayer is that I might finish my course, honor my God, and serve the King of glory with all the respect due to his name. That's what I want. And I have no doubt that this was in the minds and hearts of many of the pastors that are my age right now. I won't have to call him and ask him.

I know that's what's on their heart. And I believe it was in the mind and heart of Gideon also. This man knew where he came from. He remembered God's calling. It probably seemed like yesterday to him. It does to me. And he remembers all the hard times he went through. He remembers all the victories that the Lord gave to him. He remembers the Lord's presence with him. accomplishing all that he did. And I believe it was in the mind and heart of Gideon, but that's not how this epitaph reads.

And there's an endless source of just fascinating subjects all through these chapters. But I settled on these four things this morning, four things I want us to see out of this epitaph that God wrote concerning Gideon. I want us to see, first of all, Gideon's authority, because he makes mention of it right at the start. I want us to see Gideon's creative sense of worship. He got a bit creative. You don't want to do that. And then I want us to think about his death and what happened after he died. So first of all, I want us to see how Gideon got his authority. In the middle of this chapter, his men came to him. God had done great things through Gideon.

And his men came to him, and they said, we want you to rule over us. We want you to be our king. We want you to rule. And he said, no, I'm not going to rule. They said they not only want him to rule, but his son and his son's son. We want the house of Gideon to reign over us for years and years and years to come. Over us and our children and our children's children. And he said, no. And what he told them was this. He said, I won't reign over you, nor my son. The Lord shall reign over you. He's going to rule.

Now when the Lord came to Gideon, he greeted him, saying, the Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valor. That's what God saw when he looked at Gideon. That's not how Gideon saw himself. He immediately began to question the Lord, being with him, and immediately questioned himself, being worthy to go and do what the Lord had called him to do. But what the Lord sees is what the Lord ordains, and what the Lord sees is how things really are, whether you see it or not. Gideon was called to do the Lord's bidding.

He was sent of God to do God's will, and after the confession of his limitations and weaknesses, God said, Gideon, surely I go with you. Surely you don't think I'm sending you out here to do this on your own or because of something I saw in you. Surely I go with you. Or as Paul so eloquently put it toward us, that God will work in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure. And what God is willing to do is what God sees.

The men wanted him to rule over them. But he was already in charge, wasn't he? They didn't do anything unless Gideon told them to do it. They knew this was God's man, and they listened to him. But they misunderstood the rule. And a lot of men today misunderstand the rule of God. There's a difference between ruling over men and having the rule over men. God's kingdom, or great kingdoms, have generals and colonels and captains and lieutenants. They have a chain of command. But they don't rule the government, the kingdom. The king rules.

They just have a designated authority. tells the churches in the book of Hebrews, he said, obey them that have the rule over you. How did they get it? God gave it to them. It's a designated rule. And then Peter says this about this rule. He said, take the oversight thereof. He's talking to pastors and elders. You take the oversight because God's given you that, but not as lords over God's heritage. You're not the ruler. You have a designated rule, and you rule as being examples to the flock. That's how you're going to rule. God rules over everything that is, especially over his people, and they know it.

And then the second thing I want us to see is something Gideon no doubt meant well when he did it, but it had a different outcome. I don't know what possessed Gideon to request all these earrings and spoil. I've read untold speculations on it, but they're all speculations.

There's nothing in the word of God telling you why he did it. It just says he did it. And it tells you the result of it. It was a snare. I don't know why he did it. He gathered all these things up. He didn't ask for all these other things. He just asked for the earrings. But they gave him the earrings and the chains around the camel's necks and all the royal apparel worn by those kings of Midian. Gave him all kinds of stuff. And he made an ephod out of them. And I have no doubt that he had a good intention. in doing this. It was not an evil intention. And men do this. Faithful men do this. That's why God left this account here as a warning to us. Because faithful men are subject to do these things.

I belong to a church that had a library. And you walk in there, and here's a room. And you walk in that room, and there's a library. Got all these old books by Gill. And I mean, it just goes on and on. And you can buy these books for whatever it costs the church to buy them.

They didn't make a profit on them. But what happens, these old writers came out of everything in the sun. They came out of Methodism, and they come out of all kinds of religions. And most of them had quirks. And men would read these books, and what do you think they got out of them? The quirks. And so the pastor had generated a lot of problems for no reason.

You didn't have to do that. John Gill's not pastor in this church. I am. If I can read John Gill and find something valuable out of it, I'm going to give it to you, and I'm going to commend him for saying it. But I'm not just going to turn you loose with John Gill and say, here, you figure this thing out. That's not what God sent me here to do. And I'm going to make a problem for myself if I do it.

I've known pastors who built schools, didn't want to send their kids to a public school because of this, that, and the other. So they made a Christian school, made a school inside the church. Well, those poor kids. sitting there in that environment, and all of a sudden you turn them loose into the public, man, they just get obliterated. I went to all the churches that I went to when I was a young man.

All of them had an American flag. It would be in a holder down here on this side of the stand. And then so far over here would be a Christian flag. A Christian flag? I thought our God was called Jehovah Nissi, the Lord our banner. He's the Lord our banner. I don't need a flag. Christ is my flag. He's my banner. I don't need a flag. And you can go on and on with the crosses and the candlelight and all the visual aids and all this kind of stuff.

And maybe that's why Gideon did this. Maybe he wanted to set this up as a visual aid. to his worship. I don't know why he did it. It doesn't say, but it become a snare and immediately everybody in Israel went whoring after this ephod. Now an ephod, if you can imagine a blanket with a hole cut in the middle of it and real fancy on the outside, it was part of the high priest dress. And you can imagine just sticking your head through that hole and this thing draping all around you. Well, that was part of the high priest garment. And why he made an ephod is just totally beyond me. but it become a snare.

And we want to be careful about this, starting schools and this and that. When it comes to worship and following after our God and guidelines for our walk and salvation, we need to pay attention to what God says. He's already made provision and means for all these things. We don't need to get creative. But I'm going to tell you, you talk to anybody that goes to any church up and down this land, and you're going to hear them talk about bus ministries and this kind of ministry and that kind of ministry, and they start getting creative. I think we need a garden going around the church, a place people can go out and walk through that, kind of get there in a frame of worship.

Well, that's what they did up in those mountains that Israel had to go up and destroy. That was an ungodly thing. We don't want to do that. And then these were Ishmaelites that had these earrings. You know the story of Ishmael. God had promised a promised seed through Abraham. Going to raise up his seed, make it like the sands of the sea and the stars of the sky.

But now he's over 100 years old, and he ain't got no child. And he and his wife got to talking and said, well, maybe the Lord meant for us to have this child to another woman. So you just take my handmaid. Man's work. He's going to figure it out. That wasn't what God said.

He said Isaac was going to be the seed of promise. And he waited on purpose until she got past the time of childbearing, him and her both. Now this is a child of promise. And that picture is the believer. He's a child of promise in God's own time. And when it's absolutely past your doing, that's when that child's going to be born again.

And whether or not that's why he got these earrings, I don't know. I don't know. Might have entered into his thinking. But this much I know, the people went whoring after it. When you start getting creative like this, I took this church down in Ball, Louisiana years ago. And it had a little table up front like ours. And it had this hand-woven cloth on it that somebody's grandmother had done and an old family Bible. And they said, well, that's just an old Bible.

It don't really mean anything. Yeah, try to get rid of it. Try to move it. It took me forever to figure out a way to get rid of it without causing a big division in the church. Just don't get creative in these things. Just leave them alone. All right. Here's the third thing. Let's talk a little bit about the death of God's servant.

Verse 32, it says, and Gideon, the son of Joash, died in a good old age. Is there a good old age to die? What would that be? What would be the good old age to die? Well, there is. If a man or a woman dies in faith in Christ, that's a good old age, whatever it is. That's a good age to die.

Hebrews 11. which also includes Gideon, it includes Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all these men, Gideon and Barak, and on and on it goes. It's a kind of a roll call of faith. And when he gets done mentioning all these names, he said, these all died in faith. So it was a good old age, wasn't it? These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off and were persuaded of them, and embraced them and confessed themselves to be strangers and pilgrims on the earth. That's a good old age to die. Die in faith. And then lastly, let me just say a few words concerning Israel as a natural picture of religion in our day. It's the professing church, if you will. This is everybody that says I'm a Christian. That's the Israel that I'm talking about.

They rested under this man's ministry for 40 years after he put down the Midianite rule. And there's no rest except in the coming Redeemer. Their rest, real rest, is in the sovereign grace of God, isn't it? We rest whether Midian's reigning or whether he's not. We rest in the sovereign God of all grace. But the rest came through the means of an under-shepherd of God. He watched over them. He communicated to them the things of God and the will of God and went with them into battle. He served as an example to the flock. He was a judge in Israel.

But as soon as he died, verse 33, it says, the children of Israel turned again and went a-whoring after Balaam, a false god. and made Baal-berith, which is a feminine type of Baal, is what it is. Now the point here is not so much what they went after as it is what they left. They turned again. God turned them with Gideon. He turned that whole outfit around. And God showed mercy on them, and they had rest. And as soon as Gideon died, they turned again. They turned from the Lord, salvations of the Lord.

And if you leave him, it's not going to end well. I can tell you that. I don't care where you're going or what you're doing. You leave him, and you're in trouble. Now, let me clearly apply this, and I'll end the lesson. How is it that men turn from the Lord? They turn from his word. That's the first thing. They turn from his word. They won't endure sound doctrine. They turn from the word of God, I think, becomes the motto. We voted, and here's what the majority believes is right. Turn to the Word of God. If you don't, you're turning from God.

And the second thing is to ignore His means of grace. Just ignore Him. That's all you got to do. Just ignore Him. God tells us where to go, what to hear, how to worship. He tells us all these things as plain as words can be made. You want to turn from God? Ignore His means of grace.

Just ignore Him. Leave off prayer. Leave off reading. Leave off hearing the gospel. Ignore his means of grace. And here's the third thing. Absent yourselves from worship. Go ahead. Keep doing it. I tell you, every time you do it, it's easier to do it again. Pretty soon, you won't even think about it. You won't even think. It means nothing to you. And they turn to their own reasoning and provision. Let's discuss it.

Every time God's judge died in the book of Judges, a new generation of God's elect were born and turned from the Lord to some form of idolatry. Every time. I've had the privilege of ministering to many of your children. Some of them have made professions of faith and were baptized, and some are still coming and listening. But I know this, after I'm gone, after this pulpit is empty, and where there's no longer any constraining grace from here, men are going to go their own ways. If the Lord don't do something for you, you're going to go your own way. It's just so.

Paul talked to the Ephesian church. There's not a church that he addresses an epistle to that was stronger than the church at Ephesus. You read the first chapter of Ephesians. I mean, I don't know how many pastors have set their doctrine in order by just teaching Ephesians chapter 1. But here's what he said to them. He said, this much I know. As soon as I'm gone. Men are going to come in, they're going to creep in to this assembly and lead men astray. That's exactly what's going to happen. And it's what happens every time. And oh, what a judgmental place where God removes his pastor and leaves that group to themselves.

And I've heard all the excuses for living in a place where God's men doesn't reside It just don't wash, not in the word of God. The strongest argument I've heard is that, how shall my children and grandchildren hear if I move somewhere else? Well, here's the answer, if you'll hear it. God saves men and women through the preaching of the gospel.

You want to give your children and grandchildren some hope? Show them your interest in the gospel. you show them that gospel preaching is necessary. You leave that example to them. But to tell them how important the gospel is and then just stay absent from it yourself, what kind of a testimony are you leaving those children? Your children, their children, all children are subject to the means and ways of God's grace.

And everybody in this world is, including our own. And this much I can tell you, God has a people, and he's going to save them all. But he's not going to save anybody by any other means than what he's ordained. That's just how it's going to be. And you can go on and on with the men that sit around and think up all these reasons why they were saved and how they were saved. You better go look at the Word of God again and see what God says about it. May the Lord use this lesson to teach us some things about serving Him and being served by Him. Thank you.

Gideon's Epitaph

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Gideon's Epitaph

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