If you'll open your Bibles now
to Judges chapter 6, and I'll speak a few minutes
on the things that actually attracted
me to this scripture in the first place. I never really got around
to it this morning. I got about as far as introducing
the subject, and the Lord gave me some liberty to expand it
a bit. We'll pick up from there. Judges
chapter 6. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for the
blood of your Son that goes deeper than the stain that's gone. We feel so heavily our guilt,
and well we should, Lord, because we truly are guilty. And yet
the blood of Christ has cleansed us from all our sins. We pray that as we look at this
portion of scripture, we'll gain some benefit from it. Your word
is able to make us wise into salvation, and that's what we're
looking for, Lord. To know your way of salvation. It is written that there is a
highway of holiness. And Lord, that's the path we
want to walk on. It is the way. It is the narrow way. It is Christ
who is the way. So open our eyes and open our
ears. And open our hearts. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. We might call this the manifold
grace of God. Manifold, we don't use that very
often, but we all know what the manifold in a car is, or most
of us would. And that's where one becomes
many. Where you take all your exhaust
manifolds, you got all those exhaust ports going into that
manifold, and then it all joins into one pipe. And the grace
of God is in one sense a singular thing, and yet there are many
facets to it, like a manifold. many different ways in which
it's expressed. We may speak of the grace of God, but we could
just as well speak of all the graces of God. And God's grace
is shown in many ways, and quite often the ways in which he shows
it does not appear to be grace at first sight of it. Again, and I've been here in
the last couple of months, I've often quoted that songwriter
Derek Webb. And he has one song in which he talks about the fact
that he sees things upside down. And he said, what looks like
truth or what is the truth looks like a knife. It looks like you're
killing me, but you're saving my life. And often when God begins
his works of grace, it does not look pleasant. It does not look
like God has intentions of good. For before God can build up Christ
before us, he must tear down all the altars we have put there.
That is, all the idols that we have put there. Before he can
establish his altar, he's got to destroy the false altars we've
put there. Before he can win our hearts for him, he must destroy
our hearts for all the false gods and the false gospels. And
particularly, he must disabuse us of our overweening affection
for ourselves. We sing, oh, how I love Jesus,
and every believer does. But I'll tell you who we really
love, who we love first. First person we ever loved was
ourselves. And we still do. And so God must cure us of these
things. And you know, a doctor, when
he does, a surgeon, when he does his work, I mean, he grabs a
knife. The cancer within must be cut out, and the first thing
he does in healing a person is it looks like he's killing him.
He cuts him wide open. And likewise, the grace of God,
as it begins to work, often looks more like death than life, often
looks more like wrath than grace. The first revelation of the grace
of God to these Jews in the days of Gideon was none other than
the Midianites, and that's what we looked at this morning. Those
Midianites, God sent them to the Israelites because they had
gone a-whoring after other gods. God did not do this as an act
of wrath. He did not do this for the purpose
of destroying the Israelites. He sent these Midianite raiders,
in our days we probably call them terrorists, sent them in
there to trouble Israel. in order to save Israel. In another place in the Scriptures,
God describes all that He's going to do for Israel. And He says,
Yet for these things will I be inquired of the house of Israel. I'm going to do all these things.
Before I do them, they're going to ask me for them. And likewise,
here as He's coming to deliver Israel from her enemies, He's
going to see to it that they ask for it. And so he sends these
Midianites in there to trouble them. And as we read in verse
6 of chapter 6, Midian so impoverished the Israelites that they cried
out to the Lord for help. I don't imagine that anybody
came out of their house or out of their places of hiding. It
says they were hiding in the clefts of the rock and the caves
and all that, but I don't imagine any of them ever came out there
and saw a Midianite band of raiders come up over the rise and say,
oh boy, here comes the grace of God. But that's exactly what
it was. You see, God could have left
the Israelites alone. God could have left them worshiping
the Baals and the Ashtoreths. He could have left them in their
idolatry, and in due time, just like he had destroyed the Canaanites
before them, he would have destroyed them. These were the gods that
the Canaanites had worshiped, and God destroyed them for worshiping
those gods. And he could have left Israel
alone to worship them and later come and destroy the Israelites
too. But God in his grace will not let his people go so far
that his justice will demand their destruction. He will get
them. He will get them in grace. And
God, if you belong to him, God will not let you stray so far
that you fall into hell. He will not allow you to perish
in your sin. He will send trouble. He may even send some practical
everyday trouble to get your attention. But if you belong
to him, if you've been chosen from eternity, if you have been
redeemed by the blood of Christ, then sometime in your life, God's
going to trouble you and your soul. He's going to send spiritual
Midianites. and impoverish you until you
call on his name. Blessed Midianites. Can you imagine
that, blessed Midianites? I don't think any Jew thought
that until maybe they looked back on it and realized, Father,
Midianites never intended to be a blessing. They were a blessing
from God. But when they began to call on
the name of the Lord, verse 7, when the Israelites cried to
the Lord because of Midian, He sent them a prophet. Now, the
first time that one of the works of God's grace may look like
grace to us is when he sends us somebody to tell us the truth.
Of course, sometimes that doesn't always look like grace either,
because truth can be just as rough as Midianites. Notice what
this prophet says. Verse 8, this is what the Lord,
Jehovah, the God of Israel says. I brought you up out of Egypt,
out of the land of slavery. I snatched you from the power
of Egypt and from the hand of all your oppressors. I drove
them from before you and gave you their land. I said to you,
I am Jehovah your God. Do not worship the gods or the
Amorites in whose land you live. But you have not listened to
me." Now, when we call on God for deliverance, it would be
best if we would not so much look for something as listen
for something. He sent a prophet. Now prophets
don't do things, they say things. And if you are in trouble, and
I'm talking about if you're in spirit trouble and you have called
out, called on the name of the Lord, the Lord's going to send
you a message. He's going to send you something
to listen to. That's why the Lord said, if
any man hears my voice and believes in him who sent me, I'll raise
him up in the last day. It's hearing. Faith comes by
hearing and hearing by the message of Christ, the Word of God. God's deliverance begins with
a sound, not a sight. In fact, the sight of our deliverance
isn't going to come for quite some time. You and I don't live
on what we see. We don't set our affections on
things which can be seen. We set our hearts and our hopes
on that which is heard. The gospel is not called good
works, it's called good news. Do you know that that's exactly
why we meet like this? You didn't come here to see me
do anything. We've not gathered in order that
I might work some miracle for you. That I might heal somebody. I kind of wish I could, but I
can't. I don't expect to speak in tongues. I may trip all over
my own tongue, but last night we were talking. I tried to say
a sentence two or three times, and it just... I said, you're
speaking in tongues, and I said, it feels like I'm trying to talk
with two of them, and they got tangled up. I can't speak in tongues. I cannot tell you what's going
to happen ten minutes from now, let alone what's going to happen
ten years from now. I cannot do anything for you to look at
that's going to help you out in any way. But I can tell you
something. I can say something. He who calls for deliverance
needs to open his ears, because deliverance first comes with
a sound, not a sight. And we must listen as we call
for deliverance, because it's generally speaking our lack of
listening in the first place that got us in trouble. What
does it say? The last of the Lord's words to this prophet
was, But you have not listened to me. Now, here's something interesting
to know. We know the names of many prophets, don't we? I mean,
they're in the Bible. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Malachi, Micah,
Amos, all those. David was a prophet. Moses was
a prophet. But here's a man that God sent
to speak. We don't have a clue who he is. We don't know where
he came from. We assume that he was another Jew. But it doesn't
matter who the prophet is. It only matters who he represents. And he came, and it doesn't matter
whether he was a well-known prophet in that day. This may be the
only message he ever delivered, or he may have had a lifelong
preaching ministry. I don't know. It doesn't matter. It only matters this, that he
came with the Word of God. And any person with the Word
of God is a prophet. And he should be listened to.
They had not listened to God. God had spoken clearly to them,
spoken clearly to them through Moses, but they would not hear
Moses. They would not hear Joshua. They would not hear the elders
that outlived Joshua. And when all those men died,
those folks just went off whatever way they wanted. They had the
scriptures. They had the first five books
of Moses. They could read it. Someone could have declared it.
And I imagine there were men who did. Nobody listened. So God sent them trouble. To
make them call, and then God sent them a prophet. To see. If they would listen. And after
the prophet came. And this is what we're looking
at here is a pattern that is repeated over and over and over
again in the scriptures, and it's kind of a basic pattern
that appears in the experience of every person called God. God sends a Midianites, God sends
him a prophet, and then God himself appears. It says here in verse
11, the angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in
Ophrah that belonged to Joash, the Abiezrite, where his son
Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the
Midianites. When the angel of the Lord appeared
to Gideon, he said, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior.
Now the angel of the Lord is none other than the Lord himself. In fact, if you look down here
in verse 14, it says, the Lord Jehovah turned to him. Begins
by calling him the angel of Jehovah and then just plain calls him
Jehovah. This is none other than our Lord Jesus Christ in what
theologians call a pre-incarnate theophany. I just love Bible
school because they teach you all those big words. They made
up words to describe all this. A theophany simply means an appearance
of God. That's what the word means. And
the only God, if I can put it this way, the only way that God
has ever appeared to men is in the person of his Son. God the
Son. He is the Word of God. Now, God dwells in a life to
which no man can approach. In God's absolute Godness, if
we want to call it that way, you and I can neither see Him,
nor know Him, nor hear Him. He's too far out there. But God
has not called us to try to stretch ourselves out and come to Him
to find out what He's like. To do as religion does, and the
way Paul describes it, they grope around Trying to find some truth. That's not what God has done.
Instead of God calling on us to try to expand ourselves to
be able to comprehend Him and know Him, instead He has revealed
Himself. He's come to us in a way that
we can know Him. In a way that we can relate to
Him. God in the Old Testament appeared
a good many times. Not as an angel with wings, men
would have recognized that right away. The word angel simply means
messenger. And in calling him the angel
of the Lord, it corresponds to the New Testament description
as word of God, the message of God, the messenger of God. And he came just as he did in
2000 years ago, looking like a human being. He came to Abraham
that way before he destroyed Sodom. He appeared to Jacob and
wrestled with him all night long. Like a man. Isn't it gracious
of our God to condescend to our condition that He might speak
with us and we might hear Him? He does not speak in a language
we cannot understand. He speaks with the words we use.
He speaks with an authority no one else has, but he uses words
we can understand. Is it not interesting, as I pointed
out, that the guys who sit in the ivory towers of seminaries
and Bible schools love to invent words that nobody but them and
people trained by them understand what they mean. Theophany. Intralapsarianism. And God used none of those words.
He used the words of everyday language to talk to everyday
people in such a way that they would understand what he meant.
Not all of them believed what he had to say. You know, when
our Lord Jesus Christ was rejected, it was not rejected because they
misunderstood him. They rejected him because he was crystal clear.
And they hated what he said. And this angel of the Lord came
down and sat under the oak in Ophrah. Here's an interesting
thing, too. God, in coming down here to Gideon,
accommodated himself to the form of worship common to that area. There was a tabernacle. That
had been made under Moses, and they were supposed to be worshiping
God there. That was the only place that they were supposed
to offer sacrifices. But they had set up their own
altars in these areas It always refers to it being around an
oak, and I'm not exactly sure why, except maybe this. Oaks
are old. Oaks, you know, they're a slow-growing
tree. I understand, on average, they say that they live about
300 years. And if something lives 300 years, it may as well be
an eternity with regard to us, because it was here before we
got here, and it'll be here when we're gone. And so they saw those big
old oak trees as having kind of a an eternal aspect about
it. I assume this is why they would
be there. It seemed to have dignity and like a rock, you know, but
a living rock. And so they would they would
worship there among the oaks. Now, this is the way the pagans
worship, too. They worship their gods in these oak groves. But God was pleased. Oh, how
gracious this is. God was pleased to accommodate
their faulty forms of worship, that he might speak to them.
And do you know what a relief that is to me? You say, why so? Because I'm one of these guys
that constantly worries whether or not we're doing things right.
Do we get this right? I think, is this the way the
early church did it? Like, that makes a difference. They were
a big mess, too. I remember hearing a preacher one time, he was saying
that someone said to him, oh, we'd be like the early church.
He said, well, which early church do you want to be like, Corinth?
with all its immorality and theological problems? Or would you like to
be like Galatia with all its legalism? Or would you like to
be like Laodicea with its lukewarm attitude? Which one would you
like to be like? Oh, God's people have always
been a mess. They've always done things wrong. I'm not saying
that it's okay to do them wrong, but it's just so. And if God
would condescend to meet in these pagan oak groves with this man
Gideon, in order that he might save his people. And friends,
as we worship God and we try to do the best we can, we want
to worship him in the way he wants to be worshipped. We can
be certain that our God will condescend even to us and will
meet with us and speak. The angel of the Lord came and
sat down under the oak in Ofra that belonged to Joash, the Abiezrite. Is it not also interesting when
the Lord came He did not come with such a glory that Gideon
could not bear to look at him. You know what it sounds like
to me? Now, it doesn't say that the
Lord descended in the clouds on this oak. Evidently, he walked
there. I don't know where he entered the world or how. It
doesn't matter. But when he got there, he just
sat down under a tree, just like any man would. after a walk. And Gideon was there threshing
wheat in a wine press to keep it from the Midianites. Things
had gotten so bad that they didn't dare thresh their grain out in
the open. The Midianites would come and
steal it or burn it or whatever. He was hiding away, trying to
get grain. And then the Lord said this,
And you know, when the Lord speaks, it's almost always contrary to
the way things appear. He says to Gideon, the Lord is
with you, mighty warrior. Mighty warrior, he's hiding while
he threshes wheat. He has no sword at his side. He has no armor, no horse, no
chariot, has no army, has no battle plan, has no designs. He's hiding. And the Lord says to him, The
Lord is with you, mighty warrior. Verse 13, But sir, Gideon replied,
Gideon didn't know who it was. And you know, often when the
Lord begins to work in a man's heart, man doesn't realize who
it is. And that's okay. The Lord will
reveal himself in due time. Do you remember the man who was
born blind and the Lord healed him? And eventually the Lord
came to him and says, Do you believe in the Son of God? He
said, well, if I knew who he was, it's me. Okay. I believe. And so the Lord began to work
with him and he said, Sir, if the Lord is with us, why has
all this happened to us? Gideon, I don't know Gideon's
spiritual condition. I'm assuming that Gideon was
one of the remnant. of Israel. He was one of the
few who did believe. He wasn't well instructed, but
he did believe God. And the Midianites were trouble
to him, and the pagan idolatry all around him was a trouble
to him. And he looked around, and I'm sure that he was kind
of in despair for Israel's sake. The Lord's left us, and he had
every right to do so. And so, with these Midianites
causing trouble, and he's up there threshing grain and hiding,
Trying to keep a little grain to live on. He says, why has
all of this happened to us? If the Lord is with us, why does
this happen? And here's the answer. Though the Lord didn't give it
directly this way, but here's the answer. All these things
were happening to Israel because the Lord was with them. Like
I said, the Lord could have left them alone. The Lord could have
just left Israel. He's just going to say, all right,
that's enough. I put up with them all the way across the wilderness.
I drove all their enemies out before them. I gave them Moses.
I gave them Joshua. I gave them riches. I gave them
land. I gave them crops. I gave them all this. And look
what I get. I'm out of here. And if God was like us, that's
just what he would have done. In fact, if God was like us,
I don't think the Israelites would have made it across the
Red Sea. Because they were whining and bellyaching before they got
there. Can't get but a few miles out of Egypt, and they're already
complaining. Tawheedah said, that's enough, I've had it. All
the patience of God. He, the scriptures say, He bore
their ill manners. And He bears our ill manners. And all these things that come
upon the Israelites because the Lord was with them. And He wasn't
going to let them just continue in their stubborn, hard-hearted
ways. And then Gideon goes on this
way, where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about
when they said, did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt? But
now the Lord has abandoned us and put us into the hands, hand
of Midian. Do you know why they went into
idolatry in the first place? What we read is, is that everyone
that had seen the works of the Lord had died. There was no one
left in Israel who had had personal experience with the mighty works
of God. You see, idolatry cannot be removed
by law. You know that full well. It says,
I am the Lord your God. You'll have no other gods before
me and you'll make unto yourself no graven image. Fine, there's
a law. But that law chiseled in stone could not keep the hearts
of the people from idolatry. The only thing that kept them
from idolatry was God's mighty works done among them. And that scarcely did it. But
as soon as Joshua died, and all those elders that outlived him
a while, these were the people that had come out of Egypt. When
that generation that actually experienced coming out of Egypt
and being planted in Canaan, when that generation died, right
away, everybody's into idolatry. And you know something? It's
true with every individual. The only thing that takes us
out of idolatry and makes us worshipers of the one true God
is personal experience with the mighty works of God, his works
of grace. Here's one more reason that we
understand that this concept called covenant theology just
isn't so. You cannot, you cannot worship
God on somebody else's experiences. Not even if it's your moms and
dads. Not if it's the preachers. Not if it's every Puritan whose
books you can read. Not even if it's the experience
of the Apostle Paul himself. You can't live on that. You'll
be an idolater until God does something before your very eyes
in your very heart. Then you'll follow him. And he's got to keep doing it,
too. We believe in that doctrine called the perseverance of the
saints, but it might be better called the perseverance of God.
He does mighty works in the hearts of his people, and he keeps right
on doing it. And I'll tell you, too, how we see these mighty
works and how it preserves us from going off into idolatry.
If I can put it this way, we see these mighty works of God
by hearing them. As week by week, we need and
hear the Word of God preached. Here's the mighty works of God.
It's Christ. He is the power of God. He is
the mighty works of God. Who Christ is, what He's done,
His blood, His righteousness, His perfect life, and His substitutionary
sacrifice. This is the mighty work of God
in saving His people. And if we go along without seeing
that with the eyes of faith, We'll be falling down before
idols just like any pagan would. Gideon said, where are all his
wonders that our fathers told us about when they said, did
not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt? Now, Gideon shows he doesn't
understand the purpose of the Midianites because he says, did
not the Lord bring, excuse me, but now the Lord has abandoned
us and put us into the hands of Midian. Though the Lord wasn't
abandoning them by putting them in the hand of Midian, He was
rescuing them. Midian was His hand. Midian was
God's hand. He sent them. The Lord turned and said to him,
go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you? Now I won't deal a great a great
amount with God's, how God called Gideon into all this, but I just
want to make a few points. First of all, God revealed who
he was and he revealed it through sacrifice. Gideon wanted the Lord to stay. He says in verse 17, if I've
now found favor in your eyes, give me a sign that it really
is you talking to me. Evidently, Gideon's caught on
now. This is the Lord. The Lord's commissioning him
to a work. And you know something? If you were out hiding from the
Midianites, fresh and green in a secret place, just so you hope
they wouldn't get taken from you, and a man comes and says
to you, you're going to save Israel from the Midianites. I imagine you want to say, well,
you're going to have to prove to me you're something more than
just a man. So Gideon went and he got an offering. And the Lord said to him, I'll
wait until you return. And Gideon went in and he prepared
the young goat, it says, got flour together and everything,
make an appropriate sacrifice. When he gets back, verse 20,
the angel of God said to him, take the meat and the unleavened
bread, place them on this rock and pour out the broth. And Gideon
did so. With the tip of the staff that was in his hand, the angel
of the Lord touched the meat. and the unleavened bread, fire
flared from the rock, consuming the meat and the bread, and the
angel of the Lord disappeared. This happened several times in
the Old Testament when the Lord appears to someone and they don't
know who He is for sure, they wanted to verify it. And it's
always by means of a sacrifice which He burns and He accepts. Do you remember that great contest
on Mount Carmel? Elijah understood how to set
up a contest of gods. He told the Baal prophets, he
says, you make up a sacrifice for your God, I'll make up one
for mine. And you call on your God and you do everything that
your God says to do, and you see if your God can burn that
sacrifice. And I'll call on my God, and
we'll see what happens. And the prophets of Baal danced
around and acted like a bunch of idiots all day long, and nothing
happened. Elijah prayed a prayer that probably
took about 20 seconds, and the fire of heaven fell on the sacrifice. Then burned up the sacrifice,
and the wood, and the water, and the stones. He's making a pretty serious
point right there, God was. I'm God, he said. I'm God. Same thing happens later when
God appears to Samson's parents and makes a promise of a Deliverer
to come. In that time, God, when the offering,
when the sacrifice was offered, God went up in the flame. God
in human flesh. And you know how we know it's
God speaking to us? Because he speaks to us in Christ
crucified. He speaks to us by sacrifice. We observed the Lord's table
this morning. And you know, sometimes maybe
we get so theological, we miss some of the blessings and the
things God's instructed us to do. We're so worried that somebody
thinks that they're going to be saved by taking the bread
and the wine. We want to make sure everybody knows, well, now
this bread and wine won't save you and all that. But you know
something? God's no fool. Our Lord Jesus Christ is no fool.
And we set up that ceremony for us. There's a reason. And I can
say this with regard to me, and probably it's true of you, not
always but usually, the observance of the Lord's table is to me
a very powerful revelation of God speaking through the sacrifice
of His Son. And through that, and I know
it's just a ceremony, I know that. And yet that ceremony is
used of God to so powerfully seal the truth of the gospel
to our hearts. God always speaks by sacrifice,
even if it's only a symbolic one. Well, when he realized it was
the angel of the Lord, in verse 22 he says, All-Sovereign Lord,
I've seen the angel of the Lord face to face. But the Lord said
to him, Peace, do not be afraid, you are not going to die. So
Gideon built an altar to the Lord there and called it, The
Lord is Peace, Jehovah Shalom. To this day it stands in Ophrah
of the Abiezrites. We're troubled. It's Christ that brings us peace.
Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our
Lord Jesus Christ. All around us is in trouble,
and yet He is our peace. In our hearts we know that if
God were to look upon us as we are and deal with us according
to our deeds, there's big trouble. And yet Christ comes and says,
peace, don't be afraid, you're not going to die. He is Jehovah,
our peace, Jehovah Shalom. Well, what did Gideon do? Well, the first thing he did
was to go to his father's house. And his father is one of those
that become an idolater. And he tore down Baal's altar,
and he cut down the Asherah pole that was beside it. And then he built the proper
kind of altar, the kind of altar God had said to build. And I
love this. You know, these fellas, when
God did something for them, they got real in-your-face about God
and His truth. And old Gideon took that pole,
that Asherah pole, that symbol of the god Asherah, and he chopped
it down, and he chopped it into wood, and he put it on that altar,
and he burned a sacrifice to the Lord with the Asherah pole.
He said, there you go. He knocked down Baal's altar.
He said, there'll be no altar of Baal here. He cut down the
Asherah pole and that which had been used to worship a false
god, he uses to worship a true one. I like that. He takes that which was an insult
to God and makes it a sweet smelling safer unto God. And when the people found out
about it, they got mad. Isn't that something? The very thing
that's causing them trouble when it's torn down, they get all
upset about it. They said, who did that? And they said, that's
Gideon. Actually, that was Gideon, son of Joash. And so they demanded to Joash,
verse 30, bring out your son. He must die because he's broken
down Baal's altar and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. Is
that not essentially what they said to the Lord Jesus Christ?
You bring him out. He must die because he has torn
down what we love. He has come down and cut down
the sheer uphold of our righteousness. He's thrown over the altar that
we raised up to ourselves. He must die. But Joash replied to the hostile
crowd, you know, the Lord will make a man bold. Here was a fellow
that was hiding from the Midianites, and now he's standing before
his own people who are ready to kill him. And
I'll tell you, if you want to get an idea of what the Jews
were like, just look over at those Arab terrorists now. I
mean, those tribal areas. Don't get in your mind the idea
that the Jews back in this day were like Jews were even in the
Lord's day or in modern days. These were vicious tribal people.
And they'd kill you at the drop of a hat if you disagreed with
them. And he's standing before them.
And I like this. Verse 31, Are you going to plead
Baal's cause? Are you trying to save him? God
helped the man who trusts a God that needs saving. My friend,
the God of Heaven doesn't need us to save Him. We need Him to
save us. We don't have to come to the
defense of our God. We need Him to come to our defense.
He says, whoever fights for Him shall be put to death by morning.
If Baal really is a God, he can defend himself when someone breaks
down his altar. And that's true. I don't fear
blaspheming Baal. Why? He can't do anything about
it. I don't fear blaspheming the false Christs of modern religion,
because those false Christs don't have the power to defend themselves.
They can't do anything. And so that day, verse 32, they
called Gideon Jerob Baal, saying, Let Baal contend with him, because
he broke down Baal's altar. And then the Lord used Gideon
to drive the Midianites out. Gideon's a picture of Christ
in this. And you know the story even from your childhood days.
Gideon called the men to come to his aid, and thousands upon
thousands gathered to fight the Midianites. The Lord said, too
many. Why? Well, if this many go up and
fight the Midianites, they'll win, and they'll say, we saved
ourselves. So you tell everybody that's
scared, go home. That thinned them out a lot.
I think they were down to about 10,000. And so Gideon was all
ready to go, and the Lord said, no, that's still too many. Still
too many. And he set up a test. He says,
you all, you let them get a drink of water, and you watch for the
ones. There's going to be some that
are going to get down on their knees and lap water out of a creek like a dog.
And there are some that are just going to kind of get down on
one knee and they're going to bring water up to their mouth.
Now, I've heard people try to make some kind of statement about
What that's supposed to mean, I don't know that there is any
meaning of it. All I know is there was only 300 of them that
knelt down on one knee and drank water out of the mouth. And that
was the 300 that God sent after Midian. And he did not give them
swords. He did not give them heavy armor.
He says, each one of you take a bugle and a pot. And you break the pots. And you
say, on the bugle. I believe I've got that right. Huh? Torch, yes. I should have left my notes out. But they weren't fighting tools.
And 300 men, without appropriate equipment,
drove the Midianites out. And everybody knew who really
drove them out. It was God. God will send many knights to
trouble you. And he'll send a deliverer. And when it's done, you'll know
who drove them out. May God grant such grace to us.
Heavenly Father, thank you so much, both for trouble
and deliverance from it. We don't seek trouble, Lord,
but we know that you use it for our good. Deliver us. As it's written,
lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Protect us from idolatry, Lord.
May we always listen to what you have to say. Bless this word now in the coming
week and bring us back together next week to once again hear
from you and hear about you. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
Alright, you are dispensed.