Next up to bat in our Hebrews 11 “Hall of Faith” series is a guy named Gideon. He gets a quick mention in Hebrews 11:32 when the writer of Hebrews basically says, “I’ve run out of time to talk to you about the heroes of the faith,” so he listed a few more people who demonstrated incredible faith in God. The first in the list is Gideon.
Judges 6 and 7 tell the story of Gideon, a judge and liberator of the Hebrew people when they were being oppressed by a group of people called the Midianites. When you read his story on the heels of the story we dealt with last week, the one where Moses helped liberate the Hebrews from their slavery in Egypt, you see that God’s people have a history of being under attack.
The position the Hebrews were in this time was the result of God disciplining them. He gave them into the hands of the Midianites because they had chosen evil and false pagan worship over the commands and worship of God. For seven years, they lived in fear of the Midianites. They became preppers. Literally. They prepped shelters for themselves in mountain clefts and caves, places where they could run and hide when the Midianites invaded. This went on for seven years.
When the Midianites invaded, they would destroy the Israelite crops. They killed their livestock. They ravaged their land. They impoverished Israel to the point where they had nothing. That’s when they cried out to God for help…when they had nothing left. That is what it took for God to get the Israelite’s attention. That is the extreme to which they had to descend before they willingly looked to God for help.
God reminded them of His track record with them. He recalled to them how He had brought them out of Egypt, how He had rescued them from slavery, how He gave them a land where they could settle. He rehashed with them that He was the Lord their God and how He had told them not to worship pagan gods, but they didn’t listen to Him.
The angel of the LORD came down to visit our hero for the day. This heavenly messenger appeared to Gideon and said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” I’m thinking Gideon looked around to see who the angel of the LORD was talking to. He didn’t feel very mighty. He was subject to the same conditions as everyone else. He was living in poverty. He was under the Midianite oppression. He didn’t look much like a mighty warrior. He certainly didn’t feel very much like a mighty warrior.
Listen, God sees more than we see. God saw what He was about to make of Gideon, and God was going to give Gideon an opportunity to see it for himself. Let me just add that you will never see what God sees, you will never realize that reality without activating your faith. People who exercise faith will not focus on what they see in the natural, but they will accept what God says will be.
Gideon didn’t realize at first that he wasn’t talking to an ordinary angel. He was literally talking to God, Himself. Judges 6:13: 13 “Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.”
I’ll say this about God. When I read the Bible, I don’t see Him going from zero to sixty when people step out of line. I see Him being patient. He is slow to anger and abounding in love, Psalm 103:8. I see Him sending prophets to help them get back on track. I see Him redirecting His people’s attention. I see Him reiterating the terms of the Covenant. I see Him warning them A LOT. I see Him assisting, supporting, and coaching His people all throughout the Old and New Testament and when their proud, stony hearts turn from Him and dig in their heels, I see Him doing what is necessary to bring His people back.
God said to Gideon, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?”
Listen, if you are sent by God, the condition or quality of your strength isn’t important. If you have the strength to “go,” go, and God will give you the strength to conquer.
Gideon was going to need some convincing. He argued that he was from a weak family and called himself the least of the family. That wasn’t a faith-response. It was a flesh-response. A faith-response says, “God, because you say it, I will do it with the confidence that Your word will come to pass.” A flesh-response says, “I see no way this is possible.” Any excuse you offer God about why you can’t do what He is calling you to do is evidence you aren’t living with an activated faith. Even though Gideon didn’t have an activated faith when God called him, God worked with him to lead him to a place of full dependance upon God. He wants to do the same for us this morning.
God came back with, “I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites, leaving none alive.” Gideon was hesitant to believe any of it, and he asked God for a sign that it was really God speaking to him.
Gideon brought an offering to the Lord, and the Lord consumed it with fire. That was a pretty significant sign. God asked him to bring a second offering to him and in the process to tear down his father’s pagan altar to the false god, Baal, and to cut down something called an Asherah pole that was used in pagan goddess worship. He instructed him to build a proper kind of altar to the Lord and to offer the second offering to Him.
Activating our faith starts by setting our own houses in order. Before God can use us mightily, He must first be magnified in our own hearts and homes. Our private worship will precede any public power from God. If there is something we are holding on to, some sin we are clinging to, we need to tear down our idols by confessing our sin to the Lord. When we deal with what is wrong in our own personal lives, we can then be used of God to bring deliverance to other people. God had to tear some things down, to remove some things in Gideon’s life, before He could build up Gideon’s faith and before Gideon could truly become the mighty warrior God was making him into.
Gideon did what God asked him to do, but he did it at night, under the cover of darkness. He wasn’t sure what other people would think about him tearing down the pagan symbols. He wanted to obey God, but he wanted to do so on the down low. Any of us ever guilty of that? We want to obey God, but we also don’t want to draw any attention to Him that could cause our friends to question our actions. We want to follow Jesus whole-heartedly and we want to be accepted by our friends as well.
Listen, God is calling us to live out loud, unashamed of who He is and unashamed of what He is calling us to do.
I guess Gideon had good reason to be afraid of their opinion because when they found the broken altar in the morning and found out who had smashed it, they called for his death. They called for the death of the very person that God was raising up to deliver them. That’s messed up! Gideon’s dad stood up for him and told the people that if Baal was really God, he could stand up for himself. The people backed down.
Verse 34 tells us that the Spirit of the Lord came on Gideon. He blew a trumpet and summoned different groups to join him. I want you to notice that the Spirit of the Lord came on Gideon after he had obeyed the Lord and gotten rid of the symbols of pagan worship. I have often said that God’s blessing follows obedience, and here we see that God’s anointing follows obedience. Because Gideon did what God commanded, the Holy Spirit fell on Him and caused the Israelites to be favorable toward him.
Gideon asked for two more signs that God would be with him and would enable him to succeed. Sometimes we need some reassurance, don’t we? God came through with two more signs.
Well, so many men showed up as a result of that trumpet call and that request for troops that God said, “You have too many men.” When have you ever heard an army commander say, “There are too many of you. We need fewer people to fight so that we can win this war?” Never, right? But God said, “Listen, what I am going to do through you is for My glory. No person, no group, no army is going to get the credit for this victory because the reason for this whole mess in the first place is the result of relying on self instead of relying on God. The Midianites aren’t going to see what you are made of, they are going to see what I am made of.”
God told Gideon to start eliminating men by simply saying, if you are afraid, you can leave now. 22,000 men left and 10,000 remained. That was still a sizeable army, so God said, we need to make another cut in the ranks. God told Gideon to take the men to the water for a water break and to separate those who lapped the water with their tongues from those who knelt down to drink. God told Gideon to let all of the kneelers go. He only kept those who lapped the water like dogs. That meant only 300 fighters remained. Judges 8 tells us the Midianites had 135,000 in their army. 300 to 135,000. How is that a fair fight? It wasn’t about the number of fighting men Israel had. It was about the God who was fighting for them that would make the victory possible.
We see a real shift in Gideon here. His faith was fully activated. He went from making excuses to asking for signs and following God quietly under the cloak of darkness to blowing trumpets and fully obeying commands that defied all human logic. There was no longer any hesitation, no longer any fear of man. His faith was fully engaged in who God is and in what God could do. He knew he couldn’t defeat the Midianites with 300 men, but He fully believed God could and would.
God sent him to the Midianite camp as a spy. There were lots of them. Judges 7 says they were as thick as locusts and that their camels couldn’t even be counted. This was a vast people group. He had 300 people to whoop tens of thousands. As Gideon was spying on their camp, he overheard a man telling a friend his dream. He dreamed a loaf of bread came tumbling into their camp and struck his tent with such force that the tent overturned and collapsed. Are you getting this? He had a dream that a loaf of bread overturned a tent and it collapsed. How many of you would consider a loaf of bread a weapon? That is laughable. That is the stuff of cartoons, right?
The person who heard the dream said to his friend, “That can be nothing other than the sword of Gideon. God has given the Midianites and the whole camp into his hands.” I’m guessing Gideon had to put his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. What in the world? How did he draw that conclusion? While God was building Gideon into the mighty warrior He told him he was, He was also somehow convincing people in the Midianite camp that Gideon was someone to be feared.
Gideon had to be feeling pretty good right about now. God was continuing to give Gideon experiences that built his faith. The signs had built his faith. His father standing up for him in front of the people had built his faith. The men who actually enlisted for the battle, just because Gideon blew a trumpet and issued an invitation-that built his faith. And now, God built his faith again by exposing how the enemy perceived Gideon. Not only did God see Gideon as a mighty warrior, but so did the enemy. It no longer mattered how Gideon viewed himself. God and his enemy were convinced that he would gain the victory, and that was more than enough for Gideon.
He went back to his 300 men and woke them up saying, “Get up! The LORD has given the Midianite camp into your hands.” He divided them into groups of 100. He gave them trumpets and jars with torches. Not bows and arrows. Not some other kind of ancient weapons, but trumpets and torches.
I love what he tells them in Judges 7:17: 17 “Watch me,” he told them. “Follow my lead. When I get to the edge of the camp, do exactly as I do. 18 When I and all who are with me blow our trumpets, then from all around the camp blow yours and shout, ‘For the Lord and for Gideon.’”
Well, they reached the edge of the camp and blew their trumpets and broke the jars that were in their hands. They had a torch in one hand and a trumpet in the other. (I’m surprised they weren’t palming loaves of bread!) Well, the blowing of 300 trumpets freaked the Midianite campers out and they turned on each other with their swords. Y’all, God confused the enemy so that they couldn’t even tell they were killing their own people. 120,000 Midianites killed each other and 15,000 of them fled while the 300 Israelite warriors pursued them. The Midianite army was essentially fleeing from 300 trumpets and torches. How humiliating would that have been?
I think Gideon’s story is a great depiction of a growing faith. When we pick up his story, he hadn’t even picked up on the fact that he was actually speaking to God. He made excuses about why he wasn’t the guy for the job and asked for signs from God which revealed that his faith was weak, but he then started taking steps to obey what was being asked. As he got his heart and house in order by removing the tributes to the false gods and as he worshiped the one true God, God not only anointed him with power, but God exposed his enemy and gave him advanced knowledge about how things were going to go down. That is what happens when you activate your faith. When you act in faith on what God reveals, God will continue to reveal Himself and His plans to you.
There isn’t a victory without the activation of faith! If you want victory, you need to amp up your faith. Our faith grows as we obey what we know about God and His commands. James 2:17 says, “Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” I will say it this way: A living faith is a growing faith. Develop a living faith through action!
When God came to Gideon, he was living in fear, but because he activated his faith, like Moses, he became yet another deliverer of God’s people.
This morning, in faith you can resist fear. You can listen to the voice of God who is calling you out of hiding and out of oppression.
In faith you can accept what God says about your identity. God had called Abraham the “Father of Many Nations” when he had no children. He called Moses the “Deliverer of Israel” while Moses was still living on the backside of a desert, trying to lay low from a manslaughter charge. Jesus called Peter, the guy who was arguably the least reliable disciple, He called him a reliable, steady, and unmoved rock because he had confessed Christ as Lord.
God has some stuff to say about you this morning. You are His child. He calls you friend. In Christ, you are justified, forgiven, and free. You are no longer condemned. You are more than a conqueror. He calls you His workmanship. You have been created for good works. You are a royal priest. You are chosen to declare the Good News of the Gospel. You are blood bought. You are the righteousness of God in Christ. You are heaven bound. You are a fully equipped warrior with special armor designed to give you victory against every enemy you face. Start activating your faith so that it begins to reflect who you really are in Christ.
People of faith will renounce, reject, and refuse to put confidence in the false gods of this age. It is time to tear some stuff down, Church. Whatever you are relying on, whatever you are running to, whoever you are counting on for peace, joy, prosperity, fulfillment or success, if it isn’t the Almighty God, Creator of the Universe, the One who sent His only Son to redeem us from sin, you are bowing to one of the many gods of this age, and those altars, those high places, need to be torn down. To activate your faith, you have to get your heart and house in order. If God asks you to put a substance down so that you can see some kind of victory in your life, are you willing to do it? If He asks you to stop a behavior that is offensive to Him and isn’t good for you, are you willing to do it? If He asks you to start something, whether a spiritual conversation or a next step in ministry here at the church, is activating your faith in those areas something you are willing to begin?
People of faith will grow in faith as they take steps of obedience. God only expects you to do what has been revealed to you to do, but until you do it, you won’t get the next step given to you.
People of faith will be empowered by and propelled forward by the Spirit of God. If you lack power, if you don’t sense God is equipping you, if you aren’t experiencing a supernatural strengthening in your inner man, if you have no desire to charge some hill and rout some enemy, you need to evaluate how active your faith has been.
People of faith will see God rout their enemies with God’s help.
I Corinthians 1:27 says, “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” God is still doing so today. God is still choosing fear-filled, flawed, fleshly people and turning them into giants of faith. Mighty Warrior, the Lord is with you. Gideon eventually believed it. Will you?
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