back to sermons
June 22, 2008
Moralism or God’s Epic Plan? Or,
The Peculiar Case of the
Midnight Trumpets
a sermon on Judges 6.1-6, 11-16; 7.2-7, 15-23
by David C.
Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama Don’t tell me God
doesn’t have a sense of humor or that the Bible isn’t funny. Today’s scripture
reading contains one of the funniest lines ever written, deadpan sarcasm at its
finest. Gideon is threshing wheat in a wine press. That in itself would be funny
if it were not so pathetic. Threshing wheat meant beating it to break the grain
from the straw. Then the grain was separated from the chaff using wind. You rake
the wheat, toss it in the air, the chaff blows away, and the grain falls back
down onto a sheet. Simple. But not for Gideon. The Midianites were oppressing
his people, the Israelites. The Midianites raided grain and livestock, stealing
what they could and destroying the rest. So Gideon didn’t dare thresh his wheat
in the open. He hid in a winepress to do it. So here’s Gideon, a nobody. He
admits he is the least important person in the least important family in the
smallest tribe in Israel. He’s hiding to do his work because he is afraid.
Suddenly the angel of the Lord appears before him. And how does the angel greet
him? “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” I can think of two things wrong
with that greeting. He was neither mighty nor a warrior, but Gideon passed over
the part about himself and latched on to something he thought was wrong. “If the
Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?” We already know the answer to
this question. The Lord doesn’t give Gideon an answer, however; he gives him a
job. Why had all those things happened? It was part of the rocky early start to
God’s love affair with Israel. After Moses brought Israel to the promised land
and Joshua settled them in it, but before they had kings, God’s people were
ruled by judges. Don’t think black robe and bench in a court of law. These
judges were heroes God raised up in time of need. There were male and female
judges. They provided leadership when it was needed without holding the kind of
absolute power kings had among the peoples surrounding Israel. The Book of
Judges in the Old Testament tells their stories. If you read it you’ll notice a
pattern. God gives Israel peace and rest. Then Israel sins by worshiping other
gods. So God gives them over to their enemies. The Israelites remember God and
cry out to him. God raises up a judge to deliver them. Then Israel again enjoys
rest and peace. Gideon was not the last of the judges, but he was the last
Moralism or God’s Epic Plan? 2
to give Israel peace. After him it’s all downhill until David becomes king. The
slide begins with Gideon. Gideon is the classic hero who succeeds despite
himself. Cowardly and indecisive, he’s just the kind of hero God is looking for.
Threshing his wheat in a winepress is just a start. To answer his question:
Trouble had come to Israel because God’s people were worshipping false gods and
idols. Gideon’s first task as deliverer is to do something about it. The Lord
tells him tear down his family’s altar to the Canaanite god Baal. The bull was a
symbol of Baal, and the Lord tells Gideon to use a bull to tear it down, then to
cut down the sacred Asherah pole beside it (Asherah was Baal’s wife in Canaanite
mythology), then Gideon was to build an altar to the Lord and sacrifice the bull
on it using the wood from the pole. This was a bold theological challenge: Who
is the God of Israel? Who will Israel worship? It reminds us of Elijah on Mt.
Carmel when he challenged the priests of Baal to a duel. Except Gideon did it at
night because he was afraid. … Give him credit, though. He did it. Before long
the Midianites are back in full force. Gideon, possessed by the Spirit of the
Lord, sounds the alarm and summons the tribes of Israel to rally to him. Again,
it’s a bold action. Before he can act, however, Gideon needs reassurance. He
asks God for a sign. Gideon puts out a wool fleece and asks God to make the
fleece wet with dew in the morning but the ground around it dry. He gets his
sign. Just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, he asks God to reverse it the next
day, dry fleece, wet ground. Again God gives him the sign. So Gideon leads the
army out and camps near the enemy. His forces are outnumbered, so he must have
been surprised when the Lord told him, “The troops with you are too many.” God
tells Gideon to send home any who are afraid. Of the 32,000 he started with,
Gideon now has only 10,000. “Still too many,” God tells him. If such a large
army rescues Israel, they will believe they did it themselves. God wants them to
know he did it. We begin to see why Gideon was chosen to lead them. Gideon has
all the men go to a stream to drink. Nearly all of them cup their hands and
bring water up to their mouths. Three hundred of them stick their heads down to
the stream and lap the water like animals. Why would anyone drink water that
way? These are the ones God wants. The plan of attack doesn’t call for swords,
spears, or bows. Each man gets a trumpet, a torch, and a clay jar. They hide the
torches in the jars, sneak up on the Midianite camp, and then … Gideon has
another panic attack. The Lord saw this one coming and told him, “Attack the
camp, but if you are afraid to attack, go down and spy on it and see what you
can learn.” Naturally Gideon chooses to go down and spy. While on the prowl, he
overhears two Midianite soldiers talking. One of them had a dream. The other
interprets it to mean Gideon will defeat them. Fortified by yet another sign
from
Moralism or God’s Epic Plan? 3
God, Gideon goes back and gets his men ready. At his signal, they blow their
trumpets, break the jars to reveal the torches, and give a loud war cry. The
Midianites awake in confusion, and chaos ensues. In a panic, they kill one
another and flee in terror. Israel has been saved. Of course this is not the end
of the story, even Gideon’s story. His story ends with a plus and a minus. On
the plus side, the Israelites want to make Gideon their king, but he refuses. On
the minus side, he takes some of the gold captured as booty and makes a
monument. Before long the people are worshiping it. So that’s Gideon’s story,
the story of an unlikely hero. Did he obey God? Yes, hesitantly, but he obeyed.
Was he brave? Brave enough, although he needed constant reassurance. Like so
many others in the Bible, Gideon is an ambiguous hero. He succeeded by the grace
of God in spite of himself. What does his story mean to us—if anything? I ask
that honestly. Does it mean anything to you? Or is it just a story for children?
A dramatic and entertaining way to let little ones know that God can do great
things through small people … or that we should be brave and always obey God?
This is one of those Bible stories you hear as a child in Sunday school, and in
your mind you leave it there, in your childhood, like a fairy tale. It doesn’t
mean anything, really; it just reminds you of flannel board figures and butter
cookies. I want to use the story of Gideon to explain two different ways of
reading the Bible, and I want to challenge you to engage not just this story but
all the rest on an adult level. This story is not for children. I mean, we can
certainly teach it to children, but its target audience is adults. The problem
is, we get hung up in one way of reading scripture, and we associate that with
children, and we never move past it. The two ways of reading the Bible are
moralism and epic story. Moralism is when you take a story from the Bible, such
as Gideon’s story, and you tell it to make a moral point. Gideon trusted God, we
ought to trust God. Gideon was brave, we ought to be brave. Gideon was afraid,
but he overcame it, sometimes we are afraid. That sort of thing. The people in
the Bible become role models. You want to imitate the good ones and learn from
the mistakes of the bad ones. The goal is to pay attention to the values taught
in these stories and live by them. That’s moralism. And it is OK as far as it
goes. In fact, the Bible itself encourages this sort of thing. Paul, for
example, holds up Abraham as a role model for trusting God. The problem comes
when this is the only way we read scripture. If we are moralists exclusively, we
assume the goal of Christianity is to make us good people. Our problem is we
don’t know how to live. We need some role models, good and bad. Once we have
those, it’s up to us to do what’s right.
Moralism or God’s Epic Plan? 4
If we are moralists exclusively, there’s not much in the Bible for adults—at
least not in the stories of people like Gideon. We already know how to live, and
though we do not always do what is right, the reason is not ignorance. We know
right and wrong; and we choose the wrong sometimes. So we don’t need these
stories. Children do. We are set in our ways. They are not, so they can benefit
from hearing about Gideon. That’s what we would think if we only read the Bible
as moralists. If we are moralists exclusively, we miss the point of the Bible.
As I say, moralism is OK to a point. We all need examples of bravery and
compassion, whether we are children or adults. But the real meaning of the Bible
is found in the epic story it tells, the story of God’s love affair with his
creation, especially that part of creation made in his own image. This epic
story begins with creation, reaches its climax with Jesus, and continues until
time as we know it meets eternity. Each little story has a place in the larger
whole. You might read the story of Gideon in the Book of Judges and think this
has nothing to do with Jesus. You would be wrong. The story of Gideon is one
small part of God’s love affair with his people. In it we see God’s
characteristic faithfulness. God will never let his people go. He will go after
them when they go astray, disciplining them if necessary, and he will save them
when they are in danger and cry out to him. Moralism says the goal of
Christianity is to make us good people. The epic story of the Bible shows that
the purpose of Christianity is to make us God’s people. And that is who we are,
if we are in Christ. Suddenly the story of Gideon becomes relevant because it is
about God and his people, and we are his people. He will seek us when we stray.
He will deliver us when we repent and turn to him. He will not tolerate
idolatry. We also see in the Gideon story how God is full of surprises. Expect
God to do the unexpected. Expect God to use unlikely heroes. A God who finds a
mighty warrior hiding in a winepress would put a king in a manger. He would
entrust his most important work to fishermen, tax collectors, and sinners. He
might just use the likes of you and me to do his work in our day. And what does
Gideon have to do with Jesus? More than you might think. For starters, Gideon’s
story is part of the larger history that leads up to Jesus. The same God who
raised up Gideon to deliver his people from Midianite raiders sent a Savior to
save the world. The human race, like Israel in the days of Gideon, has turned
its back on the true God and chased after lesser things. This is and has always
been the fundamental human problem. Gideon treated symptoms. He tore down the
altar to Baal and led Israel’s army in the name of the Lord. Jesus healed the
disease. He came to reconcile us to God and give us new hearts.
Moralism or God’s Epic Plan? 5
So Gideon is one link in the long chain of the history of God’s people, and this
history reached its decisive turning point on Calvary. Gideon’s small
deliverance points ahead to the great deliverance Jesus gives us. Yet there is
still more. Gideon’s flaws as a leader and the rocky period of the judges show
us how desperately we needed Jesus. Gideon tore down the altar of Baal, but in
the end he sets up an idol of his own. Gideon defeated the Midianites, and
Israel got 40 years of peace. But that’s not enough. We need more than a
military victory, no matter how decisive. Our deepest needs as human beings
cannot be satisfied by a judge or a warrior. Or even a king. First God called
Abraham and created a people for himself. But this was not enough. God knew all
along the kind of Savior we needed. Then God sent Moses and Joshua to lead his
people. And he freed them from slavery and gave them the promised land. But this
was not enough. From time to time as the need arose, God raised up judges. But
of course, this was not enough. In time Israel demanded a king, and God gave
them one. David and Solomon were the best they had, and even these two were far
from ideal and far from capable of doing what needed to be done. Along with the
kings God sent prophets. Knowing they would not be enough, he had them point
toward a coming Messiah, one who would establish God’s kingdom and give God’s
people permanent peace—a new covenant and new hearts is how Jeremiah described
it—even if he had to raise the dead to do it. And at just the right time, Jesus
came. He did what no one else could do. He gave his life on the cross, so that
our sin might be forgiven; and he rose from the dead, so that we might have new
life, both now and in eternity. And now, as we wait for the fullness of his
kingdom, we are his people. And we find ourselves in a situation not entirely
unlike Israel in the days of the judges. We are constantly tempted, as they
were, to forget God and be just like everyone else around us. We live in a world
that does not know our God. It can be indifferent and even hostile. Yet we have
two advantages Gideon’s people didn’t have. One is: God has poured out his Holy
Spirit on us. The Spirit of God lives in us. And that makes a big difference.
Things began to happen when the Spirit took possession of Gideon [Judg. 6.34].
He sounded the alarm and called out the Israelites. In the Old Testament, that’s
how it happened. The Spirit would come to a person or group for a short time to
accomplish some specific purpose. Yet God promised a time when the Spirit would
be poured out on all God’s people, and that happened at Pentecost. So the Spirit
lives in us, and we ought to give ourselves to God and let him do great things
through us. The other advantage we have is: We know that God loves the whole
world. For Gideon this was not exactly clear. He knew God loved Israel. But what
about the Midianites? Did God love them too? Surprisingly, he does. You have to
go farther along in the story. The prophets begin to make clear what had only
been hinted at when God called
Moralism or God’s Epic Plan? 6
Abraham. God told Abraham, “In you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed.” Jonah and Isaiah especially preached that God’s love reaches the whole
world. And the epic history of God’s people hits its decisive turning point
with: “God so love the world …” You know the rest. Is the story of Gideon for
children? It is … but it’s for adults too. Yes, we can read it as a lesson about
being brave or obedient. But it has a lot more to say to us than just that.
Because it is much more than a little story with a moral. It is part of the
history of God’s passionate love affair with creation. It is part of the history
of how God created for himself a special people. This history leads up to Jesus.
And if you belong to him, you are part of God’s people. So this is really a
story about God and you. All of them are—all the stories of the Bible. Remember
this: The point is not to make us good people. The point is to make us God’s
people. That’s what the Bible is for. That’s why Jesus came. That’s what it’s
all about. Try to be a good person, certainly—God’s people are supposed to be
holy. But never forget the big picture. The God who rescued Israel from idolatry
and the Midianites in Gideon’s day is the same God who raised Jesus from the
dead and the same God who calls us today to go out and share the good news. He
is the God we worship and the God who gives us eternal life. He is the One true
and living God, and by his grace, we are his people. By his grace, may we be
faithful. Amen. rev_mauldin@yahoo.com
back to sermons