Perhaps two of the most important questions you could ask are these: What in the world is God doing in my life? What in the world is God doing in my life, and the second one is: How in the world does He call me to respond to it? What in the world is God doing; how in the world does He call me to respond to it? There's a way that you're always asking those questions and always answering them in some way. Maybe a way to get at the same issue would be this...If you had to take a pencil and a piece of paper and write a paragraph describing the love of God, what would you write?
How Is God Loving You?
If you had to capture how God is loving you, right now, what would you write? I want to direct you this morning to a passage that I think has the potential to challenge and reframe the way we think about the love of God. I would like you to turn to Judges, chapter 6, page 205 in your church Bibles. This is a story that's not unfamiliar to most of us. I'll begin by reading the first six verses of Judges 6: The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord gave them into the hands of Midian seven years.
And the hand of Midian overpowered Israel, and because of Midian, the people of Israel made for themselves the dens that are in the mountains and in the caves and in the strongholds. For whenever the Israelites planted crops, the Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the east would come up against them. They would camp against them and devour the produce of land as far as Gaza, and leave no sustenance in Israel, no sheep or ox or donkey. They would come up with their livestock and their tents, and they would come like locusts in number, both they and their camels could not be counted, so they laid waste to the land as they came in.
And Israel was brought very low because of Midian, and the people of Israel cried out for help to the Lord. You find Israel, in this moment, in a sorry-sorry state. It's hard to imagine that God's people would be in this kind of condition, literally living in such fear that they had abandoned their towns and their villages, and they were living like animals in the rocks and in the caves of the mountains...literally, in such fear that it was worthless to plant crops because the produce would be immediately stolen by these private nations.
Imagine this agrarian people with no livestock anymore. You read these words, and you would be tempted to ask the question, "Where is the love of God? Where is His covenant faithfulness? Where is His goodness? Where is His power? Where is His presence? God, where are you?" Look, if you would, at verse one, "The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; (fasten your seatbelts) and the Lord gave them into the hands of Midian." You will never understand this moment. You will never understand the things that happened next that we're going to look at unless you understand that this moment is not God turning His back on His children.
This moment is God turning His face toward His children! This is the response of a God of love. Now, if God were going to turn His back on His covenant promise, He would say, "You want idols, have at it. If you want to set your own rules, have at it." But God would work to turn the hearts of His people toward Him once again. And He is quite willing to use the difficulties of life to get our attention, to call us again to find our hope and rest and life in Him, and Him alone, to forsake the idols that we so easily serve, to quit finding joy in writing our own rules.
God would call us back again. You don't understand the love of God unless you understand God is a jealous God. I would argue that there's a way in which true love is always properly jealous isn't it? If you're married and your husband or wife comes to you and says, "I love you, but there are several other men or several other women that I also love." If, for a moment, you would be satisfied with that, if, for a moment, that would be okay for you, you do not love that person. Because if you love that person, you want them for you and you alone - That's God!
"You belong to Me; I want you for Me." Perhaps the opposition that some of us feel, perhaps the difficulties that some of us are in, are not, in fact, the trials of the enemy, but the discipline of a loving heavenly Father. God would bring those things into our lives in order to reclaim our hearts, because in His love, He's more concerned that our hearts would run after Him than He is the ease of our situation. Maybe there are many of you, in this room this morning, that God is calling back, calling back to a heart that has its greatest allegiance in Him, that finds its greatest pleasure in Him, that no longer finds joy in living outside of His boundaries, that loves His will.
Lord, Help Me
And He brings you to the point that you cry out, "Lord, help me!" And that cry is the beginning of Him getting your attention; that cry is the beginning of Him turning your heart; that cry is the result of you being loved. This is not God turning His back. This is God being faithful to His covenant. How do you define the love of God? Well, God hears that cry, look at verse seven: When the people of Israel cried out to the Lord on account of the Midianites, the Lord sent a prophet to the people of Israel, and he said to them, "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, 'I led you up from Egypt, and brought you out of the house of bondage.
And I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians and from the hand of all who oppressed you, and drove them out before you and gave you their land,' and I said to you, 'I am the Lord your God; ye shall not fear the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell.' But you have not obeyed my voice." Now people are crying out for deliverance; pay attention to your Bibles here; and God sends a prophet! A prophet! A prophet? That's sort of like me being in a terrible accident-I'm trapped in my car. I know I'm injured; I'm able to reach my cell phone.
I call 911, and the dispatcher sends a reporter! And you say, "A reporter!? A reporter!? I don't need a reporter right now, I need a rescuer! Where's the EMT?" The fact that God sends a prophet tells you He's after something more than situational relief. The reason that He sends a prophet is a clear message God is saying, "I want you. I want your heart; the change that I want to create, I want to create not just outside of you, but inside of you; so I've a message that I want you to hear; I'm first going to send a prophet."
There are essentially three things that the prophet says as the messenger of God. Here's the first one, "Every good thing you have enjoyed has come from My hand. Don't you get it? I brought you up out of Egypt; I delivered you from bondage; I delivered the nations into your hands; I have provided for you; I was willing to make you My people. It's all been for Me. All the good things in your story, all the wonderful things you experienced, all of them have come from My hand, it's been Me all along."
The second thing he says is, "Don't you understand because I redeemed you, I own you, you are Mine?" If you're God's child, you must never view your life in any situation or any location or any relationship as belonging to you. You've been bought with a price. What is the price for us? - the blood of His Son. And so, none of it belongs to me anymore. I must not look at life as belonging to me, and occasionally in an act of worship, I give pieces of what belongs to me back to God. No, no, no, no, no!
It all belongs to Him! And then God says something very significant. He says this, "I haven't turned; you have. It's not that I've turned My back on you, and so everything is falling apart. I never turned My back on you; you turned your back on Me." I would say this to you this morning as your pastor, don't waste your spiritual and emotional energy worrying about the faithfulness of God. God has been faithful; God is faithful; He will ever be faithful to His promises. He cannot deny himself! Expend your spiritual energy out of concern for your own faithfulness...because for all of us, if there's a faithfulness problem inside of us, that's where it is.
And God says, "Don't you understand what has happened here? It's not that I failed in My promises to you, not that I've gotten tired of you, not that I've turned My back - you've walked away from Me." It is so easy to be unfaithful. Oh no, your idols and my idols are not like the idols of the Old Testament, but don't fall into thinking that idolatry was just the problem in the Old Testament. Idolatry is a struggle for us today, to put people or places or things or experiences in the place of the Redeemer...to look to creation for what I can only find in the Creator.
To live with a heart that's not ruled by God anymore, but ruled by comfort or pleasure or ease or position or possessions or the love of another human being. I would say to you this morning, "Open your heart. Where is this same God of love calling you back?" Maybe that friend has become too important; maybe that job has become too important; maybe your house has become too important; maybe being right has become too important - where is the God of love calling you back? Where has He troubled your life to get your attention so that you would give your heart to Him once again?
Beautiful Grace
That's love. That's grace. This is beautiful grace. It's grace that God first sent a prophet. Now, what happens next in this passage is specifically designed by God to help His people to understand that hope and rest can only be found in Him. Maybe this next section should be entitled, "And you call this a deliverer?" Let me read verse 11, Now the angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak that was in Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite while his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the winepress to hide it from the Midianites.
And the angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, "The Lord is with you, O mighty man of valor." And Gideon said to him, "Please sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all His wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted with us, 'Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?' But now the Lord has forsaken us and has given us into the hand of Midian." The Lord turned to him and said, "Go in this might of yours and save Israel from the hand of Midian. Do I not send you?"
And he said unto him, "Please Lord, how can I save Israel. Behold, my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father's house." And the Lord said to him, "But I will be with you, you shall strike the Midianites as one man." You couldn't possibly find a more unlikely deliverer than Gideon. Look where we find this man. The first thing we see right away is this guy has a great big, fear problem. He's threshing wheat in a winepress! Now, if you know anything about the culture of the Old Testament, the grain of wheat would be trampled or beaten, and then in someplace where there was a breeze, the grains of wheat would be tossed up; the breeze would blow; the chaff would be separated, and the pure grains of wheat would fall down.
Often a big cloth would be taken, and a person would beat the wheat with the cloth until the chaff would be separated, and somebody would get on one end of the cloth and somebody on the other end, and they would do this until the chaff was blown away. You needed to do this outside. You needed to do this in a place where there is a wind. This dear man is doing this in a winepress. There's a good possibility that what's actually being described there is there's a cave that's been turned into a winepress.
This is probably an Old Testament definition of futility. And he's doing it because he's afraid of the very people that God is sending him to. Why? Why would God choose such a man? Well, Gideon not only has a fear problem, he's got a faith problem; he's got a theology problem. He says to God, "Okay, I hear you saying that the Lord is with us, that you're with us, but where are all your wonderful deeds? I look around and it doesn't appear to me like God is with us. It looks to me like God has completely forsaken us.
If I look at the evidence, I don't see the hand of God." And if I could make this theological point, what Gideon is doing here is very dangerous. There will be moments in your life where God's work will confuse you. There are moments in your life where you won't clearly understand what He's doing; it's very dangerous for you to look at the evidence and say, "Perhaps God isn't all that I thought He would be." It's very dangerous! What are we called to stand on? We are called to stand on the sure Word of God, the sure promise of God, and even in moments where I don't understand, even in moments where I can't see Him near, and even in moments where, emotionally, it doesn't feel like He's close, I hang onto His promises; I hang onto His Word.
The third thing...Gideon has a family problem. He says "Lord, I'm the weakest son of the weakest tribe of all of Israel." What Gideon is essentially saying is, "You must have a wrong address. You can't actually be thinking of me. It can't be me." There's a bit of irony when God addresses him as a mighty man of valor. So far, we've seen no valor. And then God says this, "And the Lord said to him, (five very significant words), 'I will be with you.'" He says, "You don't understand Gideon; your ability, your calling, is not based on your courage; it is not based on your understanding; it's not based on your family identity; it is based on this one thing: 'I am with you,'"
A Covenant Keeping God
A covenant keeping God has invaded your life, and you have hope, not because of what's inside of you. You have hope because what I have become to you as your Lord." We do it all the time, in the midst of life, we are always assigning identity to ourselves. You do it again and again. What's the identity that you have assigned to yourself? Who do you tell yourself, in the midst of the difficulties of life, that you are? This is a man who forgot who he was and forgot that life and rest and ability are found in those five words, "I will be with you."
"I'm with you, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who created it all, the Sovereign One who rules of it all; the Lord Almighty is with you; now you go!" Well, if that section would be called, "You call this a deliver?" Perhaps the next section should be called, "Do you call this an army?" Turn to chapter 7, verse two, And the Lord said to Gideon, "The people with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel boast over me, saying, 'My own hand has saved me.' "Thou therefore, proclaim in the ears of the people, saying, 'Whoever is fearful and trembling, let him return home and hurry away from Mount Gilead.'"
Then, 22,000 of the people returned, and 10,000 remained. And the Lord said to Gideon, "The people are still too many; take them down to the water and I will test them for you there. And anyone of whom I say to you, 'This one shall go with you,' shall go with you; and anyone of whom I say to you, 'This one shall not go with you,' shall not go." So he brought the people down to the water. And the Lord said to Gideon, "Everyone who laps the water with his tongue, as a dog laps, you shall set by himself, likewise everyone who kneels down to drink."
And the number of those who lapped, putting their hands to their mouths, was 300 men; but all the rest of the people knelt down to drink water. And the Lord said to Gideon, "With the 300 men who lapped I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands; let all the others go, every man to his home." It almost seems irrational when you read the words the Lord said to Gideon, "The people with you are too many." Too many? We've just heard that the Midianites would come down on Israel like locusts, that they had more camels and horses with them than you could number; how could it possibly be that there would be too many people?
This is only 32,000, not a whole huge army in comparison to what they were facing. And the reason that there are too many is this, "The people with you are too many for me to give the Midianites in their hands lest Israel boast over me saying, 'My own hand has served me.'" Hear what He's saying about the pride of the human heart. After being laid low, after living in caves, after having nothing to eat, one victory, and we would say, "I can do this thing. I don't need God!" How amazing is that? How quickly we forget our dependency!
How quickly we forget how little we control, how weak we actually are, how foolish we can be, how quickly, only one victory and we would turn and say, "We did it, we don't need you." And so God says, "I won't put my people in that situation because I'm after their hearts, I'm after dependency, I'm after faith, I'm after a willingness to follow, I'm after worship, and so I'm going to put this army in a situation that there would be no way possible that they could ever attribute this victory to them."
That's grace! Now, I think that if I had been Gideon, at that moment when 22,000 left, I would've already been breathless. But God's not done. Gideon literally ends up with 300 men. Yes, you read it accurately. Not the kind of army that you would ever envision would take on the power of the Midianites. Well, if you call that an army, check out this battle plan. Verse 15, And as soon as Gideon heard the telling of the dream and its interpretations, he worshipped. And he returned to the camp of Israel and said, "Arise, the Lord has given the host of Midian into your hands."
And he divided the 300 men into three companies, and put trumpets in the hands of all of them, and empty jars with torches inside of the jars. And he said to them, "Look at me, and do likewise. When I come to the outskirts of the camp, do as I do. When I blow the trumpet, I and all that are with me, then blow the trumpet also on every side of all the camp, and shout, 'For the Lord and for Gideon.'" Now, imagine these 300 guys hearing this battle plan. We'll allow all of you to get trumpets-that's exactly what I'm thinking of carrying into battle.
Trumpets and Clay Jars
Get me a trumpet. And all of you get jars, clay jars and put a torch in them, and that's all the weapons you need. And when I tell you...shout, "For the Lord and for Gideon." It's, in ways, the craziness, the irrationality of this battle plan that is its point-you have got to know that trumpets and jars and torches have no power whatsoever to defeat Midian. If Midian is going to be defeated, it's going to be the hand of Almighty God, because He is going to have to do something with those trumpets and something with those jars and something with those torches and something with those voices that is miraculous, or there's no hope.
There's power for you! So, at night, they sneak, three groups of 100 and surround Midian. I always think of what was in the mind of those 300 guys. Holding my trumpet, holding my jar, oh my! I think these men prayed and at the call, they blow their trumpets, they smash their jars, and they say, "For the Lord and for Gideon!" And the Midianites are so confused at this sudden light and sudden noise, they think they're being invaded, although Israel has no weapons and hasn't moved a step. They start slaying one another because they don't know who's the enemy and who's a Midianite; these guys are killing one another, and in fear, they begin to run.
And now Israel pursues them, and they continue to pursue until the Midianites are finally destroyed. And chapter 8, verse 28 says, "That peace reigned in Israel for 40 years." You see, God chose Gideon precisely because he was weak. "My grace is sufficient. My strength is made perfect in weakness." Listen! We love the story of the hero; we love the story of a strong person that figured it out, that did it all, that made his own way. The reality is...we are all deeply dependent. We were created to be dependent on God.
Listen! Your weakness is not in the way of what God would do; it's your delusions of strength that are, because when you convince yourself that you're strong and you're able and you're wise and you're righteous, you don't seek the grace that can only be found in Him because you don't think you need it. Gideon would've never followed if he didn't know his weakness, if he hadn't encountered his weakness, and come to understand God's strength. That's why the army is as small as it is. That's why the battle is as weird as it is because God is saying at the end of this, "I want you to realize that hope is only ever found in me.
I'm not just calling you away from the Midianites; I'm calling you away from yourself because the very self-reliance that, by grace, I'm seeking to attack at this moment is what made you comfortable with your idolatry and comfortable with writing your own rules. You thought you were able to rule your own lives, and I'm after that selfreliance. I'm calling you back." You see, you and I, this morning, don't face the army of Midian. We face an even more dangerous and seductive enemy-it's called sin-the roots of sin of idolatry.
Sin is always about your heart being ruled by something other than your Redeemer, and we have no independent ability to defeat that enemy, so God sent the One who is the ultimate fulfillment of the, "I will be with you" promise - Jesus, His name is Emmanuel, God with us. And in strength, He lived in a way that, in weakness, we cannot live. In obedience, He faced the death that we would've run from. In power, He walked away from that tomb so that, in Him, 'we would have everything we need for life and for godliness.' Our Hope, this morning, is exactly where it was for Gideon, exactly where it was for that army, exactly where it was for the people of Israel; hope is found in those five covenant words: "I will be with you."
In moments when I feel weak, in moments when I'm confused, in moments when I'm am struggling with my own sin, in moments when I am not up to the task; I don't run, I don't quit; I walk forward in faith because Emmanuel has come, and He is with me. Let's Pray: Lord, thank you for the confronting beauty of this passage. Thank you that its challenge for us are in ways we think about your love and your plan in our lives. Thank you that it's a mirror into which we can look and see ourselves that calls us away from our self-reliance, away from our idolatry, away from our independence...defined hope in You and You alone. May our rest be found in those five words, "I will be with you." In Jesus' name, Amen.
