Clough Judges Lesson 9

Judges 7 and 8

Tonight we finish the so-called Gideon cycle; we will cover both Judges 7 and 8. I’d like to go through this historical series that we began in Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, the Samuel-King sequence, Esther, Ezra Nehemiah, the Gospels, and Acts. The reason for doing this is to gain a control over some of the problems that oftentimes come up in Christian circles. For example, a lot of devotional literature is actually written today out of a vacuum of historical knowledge and many of the principles that are taught in Christian circles for the devotional life and other areas are completely wrong but the trouble is that the people who write them haven’t taken the time and the effort to study the history. It takes years and years of study to gain this perspective. But every once in a while you encounter a section in one of the historical books that can be used for a devotional type approach and can show you some of the principles of spirituality in a very concrete way. In Judges 6 we found at least seven principles that deal with the work of the Lord.

I will review those seven principles because Judges 6 actually can be cut out of the book and used as a separate unit to drum home the principles of how God works in the believer’s life. And thus you can gain quite a bit of information from this one chapter without having to worry about the overall argument of the book. This is not always true but at least we can gain these seven principles just from knowing the story.

In Judges 6:14 we had the principle, that Gideon had to know God’s will, God said, “Go in this thy might, and thou shalt save Israel from the hand of the Midianites.” Go in your strength, He said, “this” and the “this” in which he was to go was expressed by the promise, “I have certainly sent you,” translated in your text according to the original and that is, “Have I not sent you?” In other words when God wants to make a double assertion absolute certain He approaches this by a question and that’s why it’s given in the question format, but it’s a promise. So the first principle of Christian operation is you must know God’s will.

The second principle in Judges 6:16, Gideon said well how am I going to do it. And the Lord repeated the promise, “I will be with thee,” so God repeated the promise and the second principle of doing God’s will is you must know God’s provision. Please notice the order of these two principles; you first know God’s will then you come to the promises of God. It’s not the other way around. And this is an area of devotional literature and an area of devotional writing and preaching and teaching where we have gotten off base because we haven’t paid careful attention to the text of God’s Word. Promises in God’s Word are given for a purpose and they are not given just for psychological peace. The promises of the Word of God are not aspirin to be used in any and every situation. The promises of God are given to the believer to accomplish the purpose of God in that believer’s life. And if you do not know God’s will for your life the promises, as far as you are concerned, are absolutely irrelevant…they have absolutely no bearing whatever because they are originally given to us that we might accomplish God’s will. So obviously the antecedent to knowing the promises is knowing His will. So principle one: knowing God’s will; principle two, knowing God’s provision or His promises.

Principle three in Judges 6:17, Gideon wanted to make sure that God was in it and this is a principle that’s never mentioned in devotional literature. In fact it’s usually mentioned in a negative sense; some of the devotional writing you read if the person would do the kind of thing that Gideon did here, “If now I have found grace in Thy sight, then me a sign that You talk with me,” if you raised these questions you would be immediately cut out as some sort of a spiritual troublemaker because you asked for signs, you haven’t got faith, etc. And yet God’s Word commends this attitude. Why? Because it is a legitimate question, that’s why. It is legitimate to want to know that this is really God’s will for your life and it is legitimate to want to know whether God has really given these promises. This is a legitimate question that the believer has the right to ask and has the right to keep on asking God in prayer and asking Him to show you, to take the time necessary, however long it takes, to make certain what God’s will is. So the third principle is we must have assurance that God is in it, both in the will and in the promises.

Provision four was found in Judges 6:18 where Gideon suggested the present or the sacrifice to the angel of the Lord. And this fourth principle means that as a believer I must operate in this bottom circle, the sphere of the known will of God, and that sphere will be variable depending on my faith and growth. If I’m a new believer it will be a very small sphere; if I’m an enlarged believer it will be a very great sphere, but nevertheless every believer has a sphere of some radius. You cannot trust the Lord outside of that circle. It’s flatly impossible, period, there’s no way under the sun you can trust God outside of that circle. So therefore you can only trust God up to the circumference, moving out from the center you can trust God that far in any direction because at this present moment that bottom circle represents your present growth, your present grasp, your present assurance of truth, and out to the limits of that area you know. This is why it’s so necessary to deal with the third principle, that you must have the assurance that God’s will is God’s will and that those promises are God’s promises because if this assurance isn’t there you can’t walk by faith. You can drift from one Christian deeper life conference to another, you can go from one devotional to another, you can go from one emotional situation to another, but you still have never solved the problem, and the problem is that which lasts, and that which lasts is the abiding assurance that this is true, absolutely true.

So when we talk about this problem questions have to be answered; questions have to be asked and answered. This goes for our children; if you detect that they don’t really trust this you don’t just pat them on the head and say oh believe dear soul. This doesn’t solve anything. In fact what it does is repress their questions so deep that you’ll never find out what they believe, to the point they’ll never come and ask you any question because they’re afraid of getting ridiculed with the result that someday, 5, 10, 15 years from now you’re going to wake up some morning and find yourself in a very nasty situation where you children don’t believe and could give a damn. And you’ll wonder how it all came about. The reason it came about; the reason it came about was that over a series of years, incident after incident, you suppressed their questions and gave them the brush off and didn’t confront their legitimate questions with the result that they just simply buried it and like a cancer it doesn’t go away, it just sits there and grows, that’s all, it grows bigger and bigger and you pretend you don’t have it and suppress it, it doesn’t make any difference, it’ll keep on growing. So questions have to be asked and answered and dealt with, and they can’t be dealt with 20 years from now, they have to be dealt with in the present if we are to walk by faith. Remember this is part of the Christian life, to walk by faith and you can’t walk by faith if you’re not sure of the ground you’re standing on. Of course this goes back to a contention that I’ve long had, that the main problem in so-called fundamental Christian is not a lack of obedience; the fundamental problem in Christian is due to a lack of assurance; it has nothing to do with obedience in my opinion. From what I have seen the problem is a very weak attitude and a very deep-down lack of confidence in the Word, I don’t really believe it’s true so I’m not going to open my mouth about Jesus Christ because after all, I might be embarrassed, and who am I, I’m only on in a hundred people, there are 99 other people who disagree me. In other words, truth is determined by a majority vote and I’m outvoted so therefore my position is not true, this kind of thing. It takes guts to hold to your position when outnumbered 1,000 to 1 or in this particular case we see Gideon outnumbered by a massive amount. So this is where faith comes in and where you have to have that quiet, abiding assurance.

I’ll never forget one of the men that made the deepest impression in my life is Dr. Henry Morris. I have come to know him over the years, we correspond quite regularly, I guess ten or eleven years now. And one of the things that has always impressed me about Henry Morris, he’s the man who wrote the book The Genesis Flood in 1951 that just about exploded evangelicalism. Henry Morris when you know him personally is one of the most quiet, gentle people that you’ve ever known; a very soft personality and yet underneath that man is a rock. He has taken ridicule that you can’t believe. For many years he was the head of one of the great engineering departments in a great university of out nation and he was on that campus ridiculed from the biology department, from the theology department, from the psychology department, from the history department and from the English department. He was sniped at behind his back by loudmouthed professors who evidently gained great pleasure in destroying other people.

You’ll always notice this, whether it’s in the realm of politics, on your job, in the classroom, that most people can’t stand great people and they take out their resentment toward great people by maligning them. This is why in the history courses you have people, the nitwits that teach history and they always want to malign George Washington and some of the great men of our country because they can’t stand them. The only way a small person can survive in the world is pull everybody down to their level. So when you hear somebody ridiculing someone you can usually lay 9 to 1 odds that it’s a small kind of person who can’t stand a great person and that’s the only they have of defending themselves, pull everybody down to their low level.

And the thing to remember about Morris is that he has been ridiculed not only by the non-Christian, he has been ridiculed tremendously by fellow evangelicals and that really hurts, when other believers begin to put the knife in. Yet over the years Henry Morris has maintained an adequate stand for the Lord, a tremendous stand for the Lord and God is blessing him in his ministry. I just throw this out as an illustration; Morris, in 1958-60 literally took on the world, literally, took on the world for his views. Never before in the 20^th century has a man who was the head of a department of a university taken a stand that this man did. Never! And we had thousands of well-educated Christians who were spiritual yellow-bellies, hiding in their department afraid to come out and take a stand and it was one man who had the guts to lay it on the line, who took the stand, and had the guts to take all the criticism and the maligning that went on behind his back.

As a result of Morris’ stand for the Lord it split evangelical Christianity right down the middle over the issue of evolution and creation. And out of it every major creationist activity today that we see, whether it’s the Bible Science Association or the Creation Society, whether it’s the text books that come out, basically it can be traced back to that great stand made in 1951. Why? One man had the guts to say this is God’s will and I know this is God’s will and I don’t give a damn whether 30,000,000 people don’t like it, I am staying here, period, over and out. And Morris, when he lectures he never raises his voice, he is probably one of the most unemotional lecturers that you could ever imagine and yet everywhere he goes there’s almost a riot. He never raises his voice but the power of the content of what he has to say so agitates people that there’s almost a literal fight as a result of what that man says.

The reason I point this out is that Morris is a man that has studied for 40 years before he took that position; 40 years of careful preparation, 40 years of reading thousands and thousands and thousands of reports, studying details, studying the text of God’s Word, and by the way, during that time leading many students to Jesus Christ in his classroom, not by some gimmick but quietly personally sharing Christ with them. As an outgrowth of his ministry he has a number of children on the mission field today. But I say this not as hero worship but simply to show you a principle, a man who in one critical position has literally rocked Christianity for the last decade; one man in one position. Think of what it would have been had all of the trained Christians in high places had the guts to take the stand; then there would have been waves made and we wouldn’t be where we are today. But the Lord only had one man and so He used him.

So when we come to Gideon we find one man, the greatest tribe in the nation Israel was Ephraim. We’re going to see how Ephraim reacts to Gideon’s ministry later on in the chapter. Ephraim was used to being the kingpin in God’s operation; Ephraim had the largest group, the task force, the largest army and so on, but God, when He called a man called Gideon, a man who gathered around him a quite inconsequential group of believers, a small tribe that are not part of the main stream of Israel, and he pulls off one of the most fantastic things in the history of God’s Word. I showed you in Isaiah 10 how this was a byword for the rest of the history of Israel, what happened in these passages, this battle, 300 men against 150,000. Probably unheard of in the history of military warfare, what this man pulls off. But notice, when you see this man constantly testing God, don’t ridicule God for asking God questions; don’t ridicule Gideon for making sure it was God’s will, he had to, but once he was sure nothing stopped him. Nothing stopped him, including 150,000 men. So this shows you why it’s important to take time to train yourself to make sure of your ground and then open your mouth.

Let’s look at Judges 7:1, he is called by the name Jerubbaal, and this name Jerubbaal is very interesting in the Hebrew because Jerubbaal is a combination; this is a yodh and it comes over as “y” or “j”, this is resh, “r” and this is “b” and this is kind of a hard “e” and an “l” here, Jerbbaal, now this has a dot it in the Hebrew and that means that is doubled, in other words when we transliterate we have to put two b’s, this is how the Hebrew has combined letters together. Now there’s a reason why that dot is important, because there’s two words in this name; this word is ba’al, or we would translate it as Baal, there’s two a’s, actually they’re not a’s but it’s the closest thing if you want to be strict about it phonetically. So he has this last part of his name, Baal; the first part of his name also has a “b” in it; the two b’s coalesce and so you have this doubling here, and it is rb, now this is rib, there’s an “i” understood here, and that rib should be familiar to you because this is nothing but a lawsuit. And this is a verb form with the yodh prefix so what we have here is “let Baal present his case.” In other words this name is a challenge; this name, we’d probably have the best thing that would correspond in Christian circles would Mr. Apologetic, Jerubbaal, “let Baal contend,” in other words, it’s your hat in the ring and saying okay, unbeliever, let you present your case. We might today, replace Baal with Chance, and we might say today if a Christian had this kind of a name: let Chance show forth its evidences, you say Chance is the god of the universe, that everything came forth by Chance, and you cast down the gauntlet and say yes; all right, then prove it, show the evidences that Chance is the god of the universe. Or we might paraphrase it by saying that Chance of naturalism, you’re a naturalist, prove it, show the evidences, bring it into court and we’ll reason together.

So this is a challenge, it’s a challenge to the forces of Baal to come to court to reason, bring your evidences and we’ll discuss it. And it’s a challenge, by the way, that is offensive, not defensive. Something you want to learn about apologetics, the Christian must take the offense, not the defense. You always work on the non-Christian position; you never defend the Christian position. This is always a principle of operation. You don’t win football games with defense and it’s the same thing in Christianity, you can have a beautiful defense, you can have the best defense you can possibly get and you’ll never win a battle. Why? Because you haven’t undermined the opponent. So Jerubbaal takes the offense, it is a challenge thrown down to the forces of Baalism, Baal, if you think you’re god show your hand, where are your evidences; have you spoken in history, have you given prophecies that have come true, where are your prophecies Baal? So this is what it is, it is a challenge for the non-Christian to vindicate himself. [Judges 7:1, “Jerubbaal, who is Gideon, and all the people that were with him, rose up early, and pitched beside the well of Harod: so that the host of the Midianites were on the north side of them, by the hill of Moreh, in the valley.

Judges 7:2, “And the LORD said unto Gideon, The people that are with thee are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me. [3] Now therefore go to, proclaim in the ears of the people, saying, Whosoever is fearful and afraid, let him return and depart early from mount Gilead. And there returned of the people twenty and two thousand; and there remained ten thousand.” So obviously you can get an idea of his position at the moment. He’s facing a force of 150,000 people, probably more than that actually, 165,000 when he counted, a rough, rough estimate; he has 32,000, he’s outnumbered five to one; and after he gives this invitation to leave, notice, the only invitation in God’s Word to leave, then he eliminates 22,000 and is left with 10,000.

So in Judges 7:2-3 we have the paring off of the forces, the elimination of 22,000 men, now check your statistics, now he’s behind 1 to 15. So what principle is he using here? This principle is a principle that out of a manual for holy war, which shows you, the liberals always say the book of Deuteronomy was written late; this text in Judges 7 presupposes the existence of the book of Deuteronomy. Let me show you why. Deuteronomy 20 is actually the manual for holy war, that was given to the army of Israel and it contains certain tactics and certain principles of operation and they had to follow this. I might add that the orthodox rabbis during the Six Day war of 1967 used this first section of Deuteronomy 20; the rabbis went through the Israeli Air Force and the armed column and they repeated the words of the first part of Deuteronomy 20. Deuteronomy 20:1, “When you go out to battle against thine enemies, and you see horses, and chariots, and a people more than you, be not afraid of them; for the LORD thy God is with thee, who brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. [2] And it shall be, when you come near unto the battle, that the priest shall approach and shall speak to the people, [3] And shall say unto them, Hear, O Israel, ye approach this day unto battle against your enemies; let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, neither be terrified because of them.” And then the promise is given, [4] “For the LORD your God is He who goes with you,” it’s a participle, meaning the motion picture tense, continuous action, He is the One who moment by moment is going with you, “to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.” In other words, the point is this is holy war, this is God’s war and because it is God’s war, God will see that you get the victory.

Now they were to take a certain precaution at the beginning of the battle. In Deuteronomy 20:5, “And the officers shall speak unto the people saying, What man is there who has built a new house and has not dedicated it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man dedicate it. [6] And what man is he that has planted a vineyard and has not eaten of it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man eat of it. [7] And what man is there who has betrothed a wife, and has not taken her? Let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man take here. [8] And the officers shall speak further unto the people, and they shall say, What man is there fearful and fainthearted?” almost exactly the words we have before us tonight, “let him go and return unto his house, lest his brethren’s heart faint as well as his heart.” In other words, panic is something that is caught in a group situation. So these controls were used.

Now the Lord Jesus Christ also gave a manual of holy war to His disciples; He gave it in several places; I’m going briefly to Luke 9 because in Luke 9 the Lord Jesus Christ modifies the manual slightly. In Israel, it’s interesting, no man was to fight for the blessings of God unless he had first enjoyed the blessings; notice that. These men were to defend their homeland but if they had something in that homeland that they had not enjoyed, the legitimate content of living life in Israel, if there was some area of that life that they had not enjoyed they were not asked to fight for it; they were asked to fight for it after they had enjoyed it. And then there was this other thing about fear, but the Lord Jesus Christ in Luke 9:57 takes it further, “And it came to pass that, as they went on the way, a certain man said unto him, Lord, I will follow thee wherever You are going.” And here is one of the men who is obviously a believer and he wishes to follow Jesus Christ. The following here in the Gospels is not just believing, the following in the Gospels is a believer who has not only believed but who wants to enter into an advanced ministry with Christ personally. So this is a believer and he feels that he has attained a certain growth level that will enable him to go along and have a ministry with Christ. And Jesus discourages him.

He said, Luke 9:58, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has not anywhere to lay His head.” Now Jesus looks forward to a time when the kingdom of God does not exist on earth, during the interim they mysteries of the kingdom are now in operation. The kingdom has been removed from history and no longer does He say to His disciples if you have a house go to your house, if you have a wife go to your wife, He says those things don’t count any more because we’re not fighting for a kingdom that exists, we’re fighting now for one that will one day exist in the future, it is not fighting for the present, it is fighting toward a future. And so He says I do not have the kingdom and I now have nowhere to lay my head. [59] And He said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, permit me first to go and buy my father.” In other words, it was a legitimate request, and the Lord said unto him, [60] Let the dead bury their dead; but you go and preach the kingdom of God. [61] And another said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, who are at my home at my house. [61] And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

He is simply saying here that at this point these earthly attachments do not count in my priority, I do not [can’t understand words] and so He modifies the manual of arms given in Deuteronomy 20. But it’s this kind of manual of arms or the manual of military discipline that is used by Gideon in Judges 7, when actually under the command of the Lord he is to apply this technique. And he is to give an invitation and the invitation is to leave and we’ll stick around with those who are convinced our cause if from the Lord. See, those who are afraid actually had problems in the area of faith, they couldn’t trust the Lord, that this was God’s cause or they couldn’t trust that God was big enough for the job, and He cannot work with people who do not trust that the Christian life is a walk by faith, and so the invitation was to get out. This is always the way the Lord works; get out, get rid of people who are believers, this is not an invitation to go to hell, this is simply an invitation to get out of the ministry, to get out of it until you’re adequately trained, get out of it until you have the opportunity of walking by faith, until you know your ground and are certain of it. Then and only then are you prepared for the ministry. By the way this explains 90% of the problem in Christian circles. We have people involved in ministerial work who have no business being there in the first place. Verse 3 when Gideon gives his invitation he has an amazing response, 22,000 that are going the other way.

In Judges 7:4, “And the LORD said unto Gideon, The people are yet too many, so he has a second phase out, “bring them down unto the water, and I will try them for thee there,” and the word “try” is the word which was used by the ancient metallurgists to assign metal by heat, and He says bring them down to the water and I’m going to put them into a situation where the true nature of their heart at this moment will come out. So “I will try them for thee there, and it shall be, that of whom I say unto thee, This shall go with thee, the same shall go with thee; and of whomsoever I say unto thee, This shall not go with thee, the same shall not go.” Jesus Christ here, in His preincarnate form, is going to hand pick His army. Isn’t this amazing, when He finally gets 300 men they are men that have personally been chosen by Jesus Christ. That’s amazing, can’t you just see Gideon operating the way a lot of Christian organizations do, oh the fields are white unto harvest, we need more workers, etc. And God says no you don’t, you need less workers, get them out of there, they’re bottling up the whole operation, get them out, don’t need more workers.

Now there’s a legitimate need for Christian workers, I don’t mean to undermine that but oftentimes in the Christian axiom you’ve got ten people doing the work that one well-trained person could do. We see this time and time and time again. And what happens is that these people are so busy doing, doing, doing that they don’t have time to train so they waste 30 or 40 years of their life constantly doing; they get called into the Lord’s work to run a mimeograph machine in Timbuktu, and they’re so busy running that mimeograph machine for 35 years they never advance doctrinally, with the result that in 30 years they are wonderfully running a mimeograph machine. In other words, there’s no progress, there’s no depth, there’s no increase because there are people who are too busy doing, doing, doing to spend time to lay the ground for a tremendous ministry.

There’s something else that I haven’t mentioned yet about this whole form of this chapter and I want to put it in at this point, and that is, if you take the verse tabulation, if you went through here and counted the verses, you count the verses that have to do with preparation and then count the number of verses that have to do with the battle, and if you add these things up you get 48 verses that have to do with God preparing Gideon, God preparing the army or God preparing somebody, but 48 verses deal with preparation and only 9 deal with the actual battle. It’s an amazing ratio; in other words, there’s a lot more time, a LOT more time that’s devoted to the preparation, over five times as much time is devoted to preparation as actual Christian work. This is amazing. And if you look at the Apostle’s ministry and you look at the ministry of our Lord, isn’t it amazing that Jesus Christ was unheard of for 30 years? And then in 3 short years He turned the world upside down—3 years and 30 years of preparation; ratio, ten to one. Think of Paul, 14 to 20 years in the desert working out his theology before he began to minister; 14 to 15, maybe 20 years when you total it all up of school and preparation before he began to minister. And please be reminded of the fact that they believed in an imminent rapture, they believed that Christ could come but still Paul took 20 years [can’t understand words]. So here you have this crucial, crucial role of preparation before the battle is enjoined.

In Judges 7 in the following verses the Lord brings him down to this water and he is going to have a little test. The test is given in Judges 7:5, “So he brought down the people unto the water: and the LORD said unto Gideon, Every one that laps of the water with his tongue, as a dog laps, him shalt thou set by himself; likewise every one that bows down upon his knees to drink. [6] And the number of them that lapped, putting their hand to their mouth, were three hundred men: but all the rest of the people bowed down upon their knees to drink water. [7] And the LORD said unto Gideon, By the three hundred men that lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into thine hand: and let all the other people go every man unto his place.” Can’t you imagine what Gideon thought? Oh brother! We can gather inferences to how he thought because he’s going to say Lord, I’m going to set this test out again, before you remember he dealt with the fleece and he had two tests there, when the fleece was wet and the fleece was dry, that was before the Lord pulled this little deal. Well after this goes on Gideon says I just want to check my ground a little bit Lord, so how about another test.

So you can see Gideon is in kind of shock, and of course I think all of us would be, you’re looking out on a group of people half the size of Lubbock and you have 300 people behind you, you know, numbers do play kind of a concept when you [can’t understand words]. So here are these 300 people and this business of lapping as a dog laps can be understood from the Arab custom. The men who would fall down would be men who would get down on their hands and knees and lap in the water, they’d just scoop it up and so on, would be Bedouin, the Arab Bedouin we know from cultural customs, they scoot down and they put their hand in the water and they literally throw it into their mouth and people have tried to do this and they can’t but we see the Arab Bedouins still doing it to this day, this is how they drink and they can drink very rapidly and at the same time they can always look, their eyes are not on the water. So the men that are lapping here, their number one priority is God’s war, not their personal necessity, it’s that God just simply permits a test, let’s see who has the proper priorities and those men who are more concerned about their immediate necessities, they’re [can’t understand words] and the people that don’t, they’re [can’t understand words].

Judges 7:8, as a result there’s going to be a transference of certain supplies here. In verse 8, “So the people took provisions,” it should be retranslated, “So they took victuals of the people, [in their hand, and their trumpets: and he sent all the rest of Israel every man unto his tent, and retained those three hundred men: and the host of Midian was beneath him in the valley.]” Now

Im taking the liberty to amend the section of the text, which isn’t always a good procedure to do but it appears a lot more logical here that the 300 men are the ones that are taking their provisions from the others. In other words, every one of these 300 men is going to have a torch. Now in a normal army this is not the case, maybe one in twenty men might have a torch, so what they’re doing is gathering all the torches together, this is going to be one of the deceptions they’re going to use, so when they come off the hills and the Midianites look up they’re going to see 300 torches and they’re going to use the normal military ratio that for every torch there are so many hundred men there and this is one of the things that is going to scare them. But this way he’s going to make every one of these 300 men armed with a torch and a great pot of water. It’s very interesting, you can figure it out for yourself; people only have two hands, so guess where their swords are? They don’t have their swords and they’re going to be an amazing battle here, they never got any physical contact with the enemy in this battle, they don’t even touch them. Let’s see how it goes.

Judges 7:9, “And it came to pass the same night, that the LORD said unto him, Arise,” okay Gideon, get up, and Gideon is probably sleeping and he says no Gideon, now’s not the time to sleep, I want you to get up and get “down unto the host; for I have delivered it into thine hand.” And “have delivered” is a prophetic perfect in the Hebrew, it means I have in the past delivered it into your hands, it’s already there, in your hand.

Judges 7:10, “But if thou fear to go down, go thou with Phurah thy servant down to the host: [11] And thou shalt hear what they say,” now God is going to give an empirical evidence to Gideon that the prophetic perfect in verse 9 is valid. See, the prophetic perfect looks like this, the action is complete, in the past, that’s what the perfect means, it’s back here, and we’re sitting over here in time and we’re looking back at this completed action, so “God has given,” this is a past tense, and this is how God’s promises come to the believer in the Old Testament, always a prophetic perfect here, I’ve already done it.

It’s like every one of us has a past tense promise, it is “I have already glorified you,” and that’s in Romans 8:29 and you could say no He hasn’t; oh yes He has because in Romans 8 it says that He has foreknown you, He has called you, He has justified you, and, past tense, He has glorified you. And this means that every person that is a believer in Jesus Christ has in his possession a promise just like this, namely that in God’s mind you, right this moment, are essentially in your finished state, and you just have the rest of your life to get into that state, but as far as God’s concerned, in His mentality it’s already finished, it’s all finished. This is what predestination is. Often times we don’t believe this so we have people that say they’re going to lose their salvation or something else because they don’t believe God’s finished His work. And they’re constantly struggling to do this and do that and get out of this jam and so forth, because they do not believe that God has finished His work on their behalf.

Now he is going to be witness to a dream and this dream is going to show him that this army is already afraid of what’s happening. You get this intimated in the New Testament as far as we’re concerned, about the fear that the demons have in Jesus Christ. In the Gospels when Jesus Christ confronts these demons the demons say oh why are you confronting me now, oh Son of God, wait. In other words, the demons know that Christ has obtained the victory and they are desperately trying to postpone the application of the victory, but during the Gospels Christ hadn’t even got to the cross yet—He hadn’t even got to the cross yet but the demons know, they know that Christ had already obtained, in the counsels of God He had already obtained the victory over them and so the demons fear and tremble. And so if you could see the demonic forces that are operating against you in your life you would see the same thing that Gideon is seeing here. So when we go with Gideon and his servant down to listen in on the enemy camp, just visualize yourself as a believer listening to the demonic agencies that are in control of the world system, Ephesians 2:1-3 and other passages. These demonic agencies have the same panic, the same fear over God’s accomplished work that this army has. So let’s go down with them in verses 11-12.

Judges 7:11, “And thou shalt hear what they say; and afterward shall thine hands be strengthened to go down unto the host. Then went he down with Phurah his servant unto the outside of the armed men that were in the host.” Now this is a very significant little note, “the outside of the armed men” means that the Midianite camp had the elite corps on its periphery. In other words, when they camped they had their crack troops form a wall around them. They’re in a vulnerable position, by the way, because they’re in this lowland area near the Jordan River. And so they don’t have a physical wall, and so what they’re going to do is have their top troops stationed around the camp and the people they’re not sure of they stuck in the middle. Well, Gideon goes right to these men and the men he is about to hear are the men who are the most effective fighters in the Midianite force and here’s what he hears. [12, “And the Midianites and the Amalekites and all the children of the east lay along in the valley like grasshoppers for multitude; and their camels were without number, as the sand by the sea side for multitude.]

Judges 7:13, “And when Gideon was come, behold, there was a man that told a dream unto his fellow, and said, Behold, I dreamed a dream, and, lo, a cake of barley bread tumbled into the host of Midian, and came unto a tent, and smote it that it fell, and overturned it, that the tent lay along.” The reason why barley bread is used because remember from the background we gave in chapter 6, what had the Israelites been reduced to by the Midianite raids? For seven years they would raid the crops just at harvest time, and these people were gradually driven up into the hills, their food supply dwindled and at this time this was all they had to eat so the barley bread is a picture of Israel. And this barley bread that comes into the tent, of course, is the attack that Gideon is going to make.

Judges 7:14, “And his fellow answered and said, This is nothing else save the sword of Gideon the son of Joash, a man of Israel: for into his hand hath God delivered Midian, and all the host.” It’s amazing because the man who is saying this is a man who is on the outside perimeter, a man who would represent one of their top troops and he’s already convinced that they’d lost the war. It’s amazing what God has already done to prepare the hearts of these men. And notice that their intelligence is pretty good, they not only know Gideon but they know his lineage. So the Midianite intelligence knows exactly what’s out there; in fact, their intelligence in one way is better than Gideon’s because they already recognize that they’ve lost the war; Gideon doesn’t yet. He will after this but at this point you might say the Midianite intelligence, putting all things together realizes they’re up against something here. We don’t know all the details, it’s tantalizing to speculate on how they came to this conclusion, whether it was certain spooky things that happened to them in the recent raids or something but they’re getting a tremendous uneasiness about this whole thing and what makes them very uneasy is when Gideon begins to amass these forces in the hills.

Judges 7:15, “And it was so, when Gideon heard the telling of the dream, and the interpretation thereof, that he worshipped,” right there he gave thanks to the Lord, Gideon is not a man who doesn’t believe, he is a man who is going to face some of the most critical battles any believer has ever faced in history and he wants the assurance so that he can walk by faith; he’s got to have that assurance and as soon as he gets the assurance he says thank You Lord, thank You for that evidence because now I can walk by faith. And he “returned into the host of Israel, and said, Arise; for the LORD hath delivered into your hand the host of Midian.

Judges 7:16, “And he divided the three hundred men into three companies, and he put a trumpet in every man’s hand, with empty pitchers, and lamps within the pitchers,” or torches. [17] And he said unto them, Look on me, and do likewise: and, behold, when I come to the outside of the camp, it shall be that, as I do, so shall ye do. [18] When I blow with a trumpet, I and all that are with me, then blow ye the trumpets also on every side of all the camp, and say, The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon,” literally start yelling, “of the LORD and of Gideon,” they recognized this is not just Gideon’s war, they recognized it’s of the LORD as well as of Gideon.

Judges 7:19, “So Gideon, and the hundred men that were with him, came unto the outside of the camp in the beginning of the middle watch,” that’s very clever strategy, and we are to presuppose that God gave them this strategy by the way that He woke him up and He got him down at exactly the right time. The ancient armies had a three watch system; the first watch was from six to ten in the evening; the next one was from ten to two, and the next one was from two to six. So you have a four hour watch, so he’s going to hit right here and he’s going to wait until the men from the first watch are going back to their tents so there’s movement within the camp; these men are just filing back to their tents to sack out for the rest of the night. The second watch has just taken its position and the third watch is sound asleep, and he’s going to hit them right after the second watch comes on duty. “…and they had but newly set the watch,” in other words, they waited outside until the watch had been shifted, “and they blew the trumpets, and brake the pitchers that were in their hands,” we don’t know how big these were but they had the torch inside this thing, and of course they didn’t have electric lights to turn on and off, they had to have some shield over the light, so they simply carried this in these pots and jugs. There was no problem, by the way, with the trumpet; this was suspended from their neck on a cord. So when they got to the area they’d probably just hit it on a rock or something so all of a sudden, smash, and there are the lights.

Judges 7:20, “And the three companies blew the trumpets, and break the pitchers, and held the lamps in their left hands, and the trumpets in their right hands to blow withal: and they cried,” they began to scream, “The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon.” And then they did an amazing thing, they do not run to the camp. They don’t run to the camp because verse 21 says they just stand there, that’s all they do, is they break the pitchers, hold their torches up, blow the trumpets up and stand, literally stand in their position, and this is a beautiful illustration of the promise that Moses gave Israel in Exodus 14, “Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.” They’re going to watch how the Lord works. In verse 21 they are standing in their tracks, “And they stood every man in his place round about the camp,” but the result is that “all the army ran, and cried, and fled. [22] And the three hundred blew the trumpets, and the LORD set every man’s sword against his fellow, even throughout all the host: and the host fled to Bethshittah in Zererath, and to the border of Abelmeholah, unto Tabbath.” We don’t know what these various places are, they’ve never been found archeologically. But you see there’s mass panic in the camp. Now we are not to defer from this that this was the main battle but it was a battle in which there was a shock. We don’t know how many casualties they lost at this point, later on we’re going to find out but at this point it’s not stated that the whole army decimated itself here, it’s just stated that they had a situation of mass panic. They were completely surrounded and they just scattered at this point. You can imagine however, of course, with a camel, remember they have 150,000 men and they’ve got these animals all stuck in there so you can imagine the third watch probably gets up and they hear these men running around and 150,000 you don’t know your own people because they all have different kind of clothes, there’s no uniforms and so how do they know that who’s running outside of the tent is an enemy so they start chopping each other up with a sword and you can imagine the camels start moving around adding to the mess and so you have a general confused chaos going on.

Judges 7:23, “And the men of Israel gathered themselves together out of Naphtali, and out of Asher, and out of all Manasseh, and pursued after the Midianites.” But notice this, beautiful thing; the Lord completely dislodges this main force without them even touching them. And by the time the Lord gets through they’re running so all the believers have to do is run after them. It’s an amazing battle here.

Judges 7:24, “And Gideon sent messengers throughout all mount Ephraim, saying, come down against the Midianites, and take before them the waters unto Bethbarah and Jordan.” Now what he’s doing here, you have to understand a little geography; here’s the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, here’s the Jordan River. The Midianites have come over here in a lowland valley; Gideon has surrounded them, scattered them, and now they’re cutting off and they’re trying to get back across the Jordan but to get back across the Jordan the terrain is such that they’re going to have to come south. And Ephraim is this tribe in the south position, and so he calls to Ephraim to send your armies down here and take this water; in other words form a perimeter around here so when they come across you cut them down. And this is where the main force is lost; the Midianites actually lose most of their casualties in the second encounter, not the first one. But nevertheless, Gideon is the one that dislodges them. [“Then all the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together, and took the waters unto Bethbarah and Jordan.”] And at this particular point we can tell that it was here where they lost the most men by the next verse.

Judges 7:25, “And they took two princes of the Midianites,” this is Ephraim now, not Gideon, see the main force is heading southeast and Ephraim has set a block at the water her to stop them and as they come toward them in panic they’re going to get picked off, “And they took two princes of the Midianites, Oreb and Zeeb; and they slew Oreb upon the rock Oreb, and Zeeb they slew at the winepress of Zeeb,” this is an anachronism, in other words, these things came to be known by their names after the event, “and pursued Midian, and brought the heads of Oreb and Zeeb to Gideon on the other side Jordan,” a nice little way of making sure their enemies are dead. But to show you that most of the casualties occurred at this point, turn to Isaiah 10:24, this will be the basis later on for Gideon getting himself out of a little diplomatic problem with Ephraim. “Therefore, thus saith the Lord God of hosts, O my people that dwell in Zion, be not afraid of the Assyrian; he shall smite thee with a rod, and shall lift up his staff against thee, after the manner of Egypt. [25] For yet a very little while, and the indignation shall cease, and mine anger in their destruction. [26] And the LORD of hosts shall stir up a scourge for him according to the slaughter of Midian at the rock of Oreb;” so this gives you the geographical location for the major slaughter, it was at this rock. Turn back and we’ll carry this on, the problem with Ephraim.

Judges 8:1-3 represent a problem in Old Testament history, the same kind of problem I’ve briefed you on before so by now you should be used to it. When you read Old Testament history the text is not always chronological; it is logical, and so verses 1-3 actually happened later, after Gideon caught up with them over near the [can’t understand word] these princes from Ephraim come walking in with a few heads and start to chew on Gideon. This is after the events later on in the chapter, so let’s notice this, that verses 1-3 are out of chronological order, so you won’t be a victim of some liberal that comes up to you and says see, it doesn’t fit. Well of course it doesn’t fit, it was never written in a western chronological scheme, it was written as oriental literature always is written, according to a logical, not a chronological scheme.

Judges 8:1, “And the men of Ephraim said unto him, Why hast thou served us thus, that thou called us not, when thou went to fight with the Midianites? And they did chide with him sharply. [2] And he said unto them, What have I done now in comparison of you? Is not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abiezer?” In other words, he’s saying look, all I did was dislodge them, you people were the ones that conducted the main force and the main slaughter. So he very diplomatically gets out of it. Now he had a problem, the Ephraimites were wrong because Gideon had followed God’s direction but they’re jealous. One reason they’re jealous, of course, there’s a lot of gold, the Midianites had gobs of gold and of course Ephraim probably had a few carnal desires in this war, they wanted to get some of the booty. But nevertheless verses 2-3 represent diplomacy in very tense situation. Verse 3 says at the end, [“God hath delivered into your hands the princes of Midian, Oreb and Zeeb: and what was I able to do in comparison of you?] Then their anger was abated toward him, when he had said that.”

Judges 8:4 resumes the position of verse 24, after verse 24 you should skip to verse 4 and this continues the narrative. “And Gideon came to Jordan, and passed over, he, and the three hundred men that were with him, faint, yet pursuing them.” Now they are faint, it means that they are out of food. Why are they out of food? Because the three hundred were what? They men who were equipped for a surprise attack, not for a long expedition over a long series of adverse terrain. So these people had no food supply, they were cut off and this leads to a very great problem, beginning in verse 5.

Judges 8:5, “And he said unto the men of Succoth, Give, I pray you, loaves of bread unto the people that follow me; for they be faint, and I am pursuing after Zebah and Zalmunna, kings of Midian.” Now Succoth are fellow Jews, remember in the book of Joshua at the end, we have the tribes divided and we have a place over here called Transjordania and we have some tribes over there, we have the half tribe of Manasseh, Reuben and Gad. These three tribes are over on the right side or the east side of Jordan. The main of Israel is over here; remember how at the end of Joshua you got an uneasy feeling that all as not going to be well. Remember when Joshua was written? Joshua was written while this was going on. So what you have here is that altar incident, at the end of the book of Joshua, was a tip off that this river coming down, the Jordan River, was going to be a geographical knife that would just cut in half the nation Israel, and here we begin to see evidences for it. Later on in the history of Israel you’ll see that these Transjordanian tribes could care less. They could absolutely care less about the rest of the nation. So here you begin to see it; two cities are selected. Now obviously they got food from other cities, these are just two out of the many cities over here but it shows you a trend in their thinking; they could care less about the Lord and their brethren.

Judges 8:6, “And the princes of Succoth said, Are the hands of Zebah and Zalmunna now in thine hand, that we should give bread unto thine army?” In other words, Gideon is chasing after these two kings of the Midianites; he wants to make his defeat total. This is a great military principle, the principle of pursuit, in that he as much as you can without over extending your lines of supply to chase down an enemy that’s on the run, get him, kill him while you’ve got him on the run, and this is the principle Gideon was trying to apply, particularly he was trying to get these two men, who are going as fast as he can but he needs food. So he stops off at some fellow Israelite’s house and says he wants some food. And they say well Gideon, we can’t really give you that food and we really can’t support your operation. Do you know why? You can guess, they’ve already compromised with the Midianites. See, for seven years the Midianites have had total geographical control and these cities have probably made a deal with them and so they don’t want to upset the diplomatic thing, see, they’ve made treaties. So they’re going to sit tight and besides, they’re going to watch and wait and see who wins first. Just like a lot of nations in the world are waiting to see who knocks who off, waiting to see if China knocks Russia off or if Russia knocks the United States off, it’s a very smooth way of playing diplomacy, you just sit around and you don’t lose anything, you don’t get overly allied with any one country. This is what these two cities are doing, but they’re going to have a surprise when Gideon gets through.

Judges 8:7, “And Gideon said, Therefore when the LORD hath delivered Zebah and Zalmunna into mine hand, then I will tear your flesh with the thorns of the wilderness and with briers.” In other words, Gideon has this, what sounds like a tremendous vengeful attitude, but notice whose battle is it? It’s not Gideon’s in the first place, it’s Jehovah’s. So when they look down, oh, Gideon, with 300 men, really are you serious Gideon, you mean you’re going to face down these two kings with 300 men? Who are they maligning? They’re maligning the Lord, that’s who they’re maligning and they’re going to get it, just like a lot of believers are going to get it who have maligned other believers who are out on the front lines working for the Lord, and they don’t even have the decency to pray for them. I often wonder if some of us who don’t pray for missionaries and other Christian workers who are involved in so many pressure situations, if God doesn’t look upon us as He looks upon the people of Succoth here. Missionaries ask for bread, prayer requests that we get on these letters, do you ever read them or do you just chuck them in the garbage can? If you chuck them in the garbage can you’re basically doing the same thing the people of Succoth, the heck with you, you’re not doing anything out there that’s worthwhile so why should I support you. The princes of Succoth said are the hands of Zebah now in your hand, you haven’t secured the victory and you’re not going to Gideon.

And then Judges 8:8 he went to another place, “And he went up thence to Penuel, and spoke unto them likewise: and the men of Penuel answered him as the men of Succoth had answered him.” They answered the same thing, and Gideon said all right, when I come back here I’m going to tear down this tower. “And he spoke also unto the men of Penuel, saying, When I come again in peace, I will break down this tower.” The tower was a place at Penuel where they… it is what would be analogous in our generation to their own human viewpoint schemes, in other words, they had this tower in which they were safe. Gideon says you’re not going to be safe when I get through; I’m going to tear your tower down when I come back.

Judges 8:10, “Now Zebah and Zalmunna were in Karkor,” we don’t know where verse 10 is, but notice the casualty with, “and their hosts with them, about fifteen thousand men, all that were left of all the hosts of the children of the east: for there fell an hundred and twenty thousand men that drew sword.” So you get an idea that Ephraim really worked them over when they were coming across Jordan. Plus the fact with the initial encounter of Gideon there were a few casualties too. So they’re over near [can’t understand word] licking their wounds and they’re down to 15,000. This is less than Gideon had to begin with.

Judges 8:11, “And Gideon went up by the way of them that dwelt in tents on the east of Nobah and Jogbehah, and smote the host; for the host was secure.” Gideon is going to try another encirclement; he’s going to go way over to the east. Here’s the Jordan, here’s the north end of the Dead Sea, here’s the Sea of Galilee and they apparently over here though we can’t be sure where they are archeologically but evidently they’ve moved east, we can trace Penuel and Succoth, you can that on the map, so they’re heading in an eastward direction, so they’re over here somewhere. But over in here they have some trails that are used by the Arab caravans that go from Edom up north into the Mesopotamian area. So what evidently Gideon is doing is he’s coming around here and coming up the back end of them. This way he can disguise his movement. So Gideon went up by the road, the word “way” means a highway, “it’s the highway of them that dwell in tents,” and we would translate that better as “the Bedouin highway,” in other words, it’s a well beaten path but it’s out of the way of citizens. See, the Bedouins don’t like to hang around cities. So Gideon is going to march his soldiers along that area to keep them out of sight. And he “smote the host; for the host was secure.” Now that at first glance sounds like a contradiction in terms but what verse 11 says is he comes in there and it’s a total surprise because they have 15,000 men scattered all over the place, no guards, nothing, and so he picks them off. It could have been over a process of time, not just one attack.

Judges 8:12, “And when Zebah and Zalmunna fled, he pursued after them,” notice the tenacity of this man, he gets in his mind the will of God and he doesn’t care what happens, he constantly goes and goes and goes, regardless of the opposition, he keeps on, “and took the two kings of Midian, Zebah and Zalmunna, and discomfited all the host. [13] And Gideon the son of Joash returned from battle before the sun was up,” that’s a mistranslation; I don’t want to go into it.

Judges 8:14, “And caught a young man of the men of Succoth, and enquired of him: and he described unto him the princes of Succoth, and the elders thereof, even threescore and seventeen men.” Now verse 14 is an important apologetic notice because verse 14 doesn’t say “describe,” it means to write alphabetically and this is a very important notice because it shows you that the cuneiform pictographic writing was out by this time. But here you have a young man apparently picked at random who knew how to write alphabetically. The liberal always says that they couldn’t write alphabetical, all they had was pictographical writing; that doesn’t fit the text, right in verse 14 you have a young kid, he’s just picked out and he knows how to write, he knows how to write the alphabet. “…the princes of Succoth,” and he describes them, there are seventy elders, by the way, notice the seventy, just like Israel, seventy elders and seven princes.

Judges 8:15, “And he came unto the men of Succoth, and said, Behold Zebah and Zalmunna, with whom ye did upbraid me, saying, Are the hands of Zebah and Zalmunna now in thine hand, that we should give bread unto thy men that are weary? [16] And he took the elders of the city, and thorns of the wilderness and briers, and with them he taught the men of Succoth.” Now that word “teach” is a real lulu; it’s the Hebrew word yadah, Hebrew verbs have a number of roots, and this happens to be in the hiphil root, and the hiphil of a Hebrew verb means cause, cause to know, in other words what is the lesson? They were Jews now, but he’s got these two men, he’s bringing them back captive, and he says you didn’t know the Lord was with my two hundred, you’re going to know now, so he drags them around and he evidently gets the briars and you can imagine a bunch of cactus lying out there and he drags these people over the cactus, and he says do you know now that the Lord is with me? And he goes from city to city and he repays them for their wonderful hospitality to him when he was in trouble.

Judges 8:17, “And he beat down the tower of Penuel, and slew the men of the city.” So can you say that Gideon was very vengeful…not at all, not at all! This is an expression of the justice of God, God had expected His believers to operate as a team and they did not, so sin unto death.

Judges 8:18, “Then said he unto Zebah and Zalmunna, What manner of men were they whom ye slew at Tabor?” He has another little debt to pay here because evidently before this he had lost two of his brothers and he evidently put two and two together that these kings were the ones that killed his brothers, and so he says, “What manner of men were they,” he doesn’t say where they are, he says what were they like. And they answered,” Zebah and Zalmunna,” and there’s two parts to this answer, it’s hard to read between the lines what they’re saying here, but “As thou art, so were they; each one resembled the children of a king.” Now there are two ways of looking at their reply. One is it’s just a proud Arab boast, in other words what they’re saying here is oh, they look like a king Gideon, just like you do, and we killed them. In other words, this is the pride down to the grave of an Arab; he doesn’t care whether they’re going to be killed but he’s just insulting Gideon, he says we killed them implying that we can kill you too. Another way of looking it, and this ties in with the nature of Gideon, a lot of extra-Biblical tradition says that Gideon had a fantastic appearance, and it’s built apparently on this verse, that the children, his brothers, people of his own family had this same physique and this same appearance, and they said Gideon, I look just like you, majestic, children of the king. So it may be that this refers also to the stature and the physical appearance of God, that he had personally a very amazing countenance. Also, if you compare it to the way this language is used later it means a large man, tremendously large.

Judges 8:19, “And he said, They were my brethren,” you killed, “even the sons of my mother: as the LORD liveth, if ye had saved them alive, I would not slay you. [20] And he said unto Jether his firstborn, Up, and slay them. But the youth drew not his sword: for he feared, because he was yet a youth. [21] Then Zebah and Zalmunna said, Rise thou,” in other words, to Gideon, don’t let that little kid kill us. The reason for this is very real, namely that a kid that didn’t now how to use a sword would torture him, he wouldn’t have the strength to kill them and so he’d kind of hack around a little bit and if they’re going to get killed they’re going to get killed by a sword right in the gut but they’re not going to have some kid chop their legs off and do it gradually. So what they’re asking is look, if we’re going to die, you just come here and take your sword and ram it through, but don’t let that little kid hack us up, “… and fall upon us: for as the man is, so is his strength. And Gideon arose, and slew Zebah and Zalmunna, and took away the ornaments that were on their camels’ necks.”

Judges 8:22, “Then the men of Israel said unto Gideon,” and here we have a shift and this goes back to the main argument of the book, “the men of Israel said unto Gideon, Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son also: for thou hast delivered us from the hand of Midian. [23] And Gideon said unto them, I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD shall rule over you.”

Here we have a hint of the way things are going to go throughout this whole time period and epic in history. Remember I said what was the argument of the book of Judges; the argument of the book of Judges is that the aristocracy as it was constituted was unable to lead a carnal population, and as you have a large carnal population the only way that can be effectively led is by the loss of freedom, through centralized power. And here you see it, with these people who are in a place of incomplete obedience; basically half the people don’t come out serve, only Ephraim in the northern tribe. So you have a deep carnality in the population.

I want you to notice political freedom is inversely related to the spirituality of a population. Always has been so, always will be so. This is why the United States had at one time the enviable position of being a government that everybody wanted to imitate. In 1917 the first western revolution, when Kerensky assumed power, Kerensky had a committee of Russians who were going to write a constitution for Russia that would be patterned after the United State’s constitution. Kerensky was overthrown, as you know, later on in the October revolution by the communists. Don’t ever buy this business that the communists overthrew the Czar. They did not; the communists overthrew a democratic republican government in Russia. It was in the spring of 1917 when the Czar was overthrown and you already had a democracy functioning so the communist bully-boys actually overthrew, not the Czar, for which they try to claim credit, that was the blood of very patriotic Russians who did that. But later on, when Lenin got in power in October, in the fall, that’s when the communists took over. But notice the Russians lost their freedom and do you know why? Because the Russian people had not basis for having a democracy; it would have fallen anyway. They didn’t have the background for it.

What was the Russian’s religion at this point? It was Russian Orthodoxy, it was a totalitarian type of religion and the people had no basis for freedom, they couldn’t have sustained that kind of government, and this will always be the case, that’s why we’re losing our freedom. We’re losing our freedom every month in this country. We have lost our economic freedom in this country thanks to the present administration. But this is not to blame them, it is the fact that we have a group of people that just don’t give a damn and so if you have a leader and you have a large group of people with this attitude, what can you do? We have had the government try to establish some sort of economic responsibility on the part of labor and management and both labor and management could care less; we want our raise now, never realizing that if you get your raise today it’s going to contribute to inflation that’s going to take it away from you tomorrow, but nobody ever thinks of that. We want our raise, why can’t we have a raise and all the rest of it. So what is happening? Everybody has to suffer so now nobody gets a raise. This is a beautiful illustration right in 1971 of why materialism lust, in our case, has contributed to the American loss of freedom. And don’t blame it on the communists; the communists may be in joy because of it but basically from God’s viewpoint the communists are not the ones that are making Americans lose their freedom. Do you know who it is? Americans, that’s who.

It’s the same thing here, these people are going to, in verse 22, say Gideon, we will surrender our political freedom to you. We will give it up because we can’t stand it any longer, we don’t have the spiritual strength to be free people. See, you have to be a strong person spiritually to be free and these people aren’t, and so Gideon refuses at this point, as a remarkable depth of character of this man. He absolute refuses, he knows the doctrine that God is king over God’s kingdom, Israel, and God will rule.

But in verse 24 we have a hint that all is snot well with Gideon. He is able under the crisis situation to reject that tremendous temptation for absolute power, but he has a very fatal temptation, and with the last section of Judges 8 we’re going to deal with what I am going to arbitrarily label as the transference error, and I label that because I want a label on it for you to pick this out and begin to apply it to Christian work. You will see this transference error repeated, and it’s being repeated before our eyes by many Christians. So let’s look and see what this error was.

Judges 8:24, “And Gideon said unto them, I would desire a request of you, that ye would give me every man the earrings of his prey. (For they had golden earrings, because they were Ishmaelites.)” This is, of course, these Ishmaelites had these golden earrings. And if you know anything about the Arabs today you know that jewelry is the big thing; they could be starving but as long as they’ve got their jewelry it’s great. And so they have the gold that they’re using and he’s going to take the gold and in verse 26 we find out this weighs about fifty pounds. You can imagine how many earrings, figure out how many ounces of gold in each earring, fraction of ounces, and then add it up and figure out from fifty pounds, how many earrings they had. Be sure to divide by two. [25, “And they answered, We will willingly give them. And they spread a garment, and did cast therein every man the earrings of his prey. [26] And the weight of the golden earrings that he requested was a thousand and seven hundred shekels of gold; beside ornaments, and collars, and purple raiment that was on the kings of Midian, and beside the chains that were about their camels’ necks.”

Judges 8:27, “And Gideon made an ephod thereof, and put it in his city, even in Ophrah: and all Israel went thither a whoring after it: which thing became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house.” Now we have to understand what an ephod is and why this became a snare. An ephod is used in two senses in the Old Testament. It is used in one sense…it looks something like this, it was a vest that the high priest wore and on this he had a breastplate and in the breastplate, we still don’t know how this operated, but he had the Urim and the Thummim, and this was a yes/no device of obtaining God’s will. In other words you could ask the Urim and the Thummim questions and it would give you a yes/no answer. And this was an acceptable mode of discerning God’s will. This is not throwing dice or any other thing; this was an authorized system of knowing God’s will. This knowing of will came to be associated with this linen ephod which was always the thing for the high priest; the high priest would wear this thing. So keep the link in mind, the ephod—the will of God. Now let’s take a few verses and we’ll be done.

1 Samuel 23:9, “David knew that Saul secretly practiced mischief against him and he said to Abiathar, the priest,” notice who he’s talking to, “Bring here the ephod. [10] Then said David, O LORD God of Israel, thy servant has certainly heard that Saul seeks to come to Keilah, to destroy the city for my sake. [11] Will the men of Keilah deliver me up into his hand? Will Saul come down, as they servant has heard? O LORD God of Israel, I beseech thee, tell thy servant. And the LORD said, He will come down.” He gave him a yes answer. Notice the ephod is used to discern the will of God.

Now why do you suppose that Gideon made one? Well, a legitimate desire because what has been the whole thing of his ministry up to this point? Has he been concerned to know the will of God for sure? Hasn’t this been an obsession, a driving obsession for this man? I must know the will of God and I must know it surely. And so what he did, he decided that he would have the means for deciding the Lord’s will for the rest of his life. Now the problem is that this is a transference error that Christians often make. Gideon made it and as I say it’s happening today. You have what I would call the normal channels of God’s work. The normal channels here are the high priests. He had an ephod. Do you know where it is? It’s in Shiloh, there’s already one available, Gideon doesn’t have to make another one. But Gideon concludes something that a lot of Christians are concluding, because God rejects normal channels because at a certain time in history the normal channels are clogged with carnality, God breaks out and uses some sort of an abnormal channel. What do Christians do? They begin to turn this into a normal channel.

So God normally would bless through the high priest, but Gideon reasons this way: he didn’t bless through the high priest when it came to relieving us from the Midianites, He blessed through me, and so we have an external abnormal channel of God’s blessing. So Gideon, then, tries to perpetuate this abnormal channel of God’s blessing and normalize it and as a result, the condemnation of the Word of God upon the whole thing. This is a whoring, fornicating is what it is, in other words, this is spiritual adultery because what is happening is that you are normalizing something that God’s Word does not normalize. And that’s something… he had the Word of God, he had the first five books of the Bible just like we have, and the first five books of the Bible say if you want to know the will of God you go to the high priest, not anywhere else.

Gideon says well my experience disproves the Word of God, God doesn’t work that way, God didn’t work that way in my life so I’m going to have my own ephod. And I’m going to discern the will of God over here. And you’ve got the same thing in Christianity today. God blesses me through tongues, God blesses me through a deeper life group where we all hold hands and get together and get these Holy Spirit. And we go to these prayer meetings, the deeper life meetings where we have certain people dropping out their dirty linen, confessing their sins one to another, which is anti-Biblical. That is not what James 5 means; I was told we have a group running around with a lot of the Christian college students and this group meets and all the girls and the boys sit together and they discuss all the things they did one, being open one to another. That’s not being open one to another. This is desensitizing, sensitivity training kind of thing that’s really desensitizing. Do you know what it’s doing? It’s getting you subtly to normalize your carnality. See, if I drop my dirty linen in front of you and say would you accept me just as I am, with all my dirty linen and all the things that I’ve done, could you accept me, etc. This is the pitch of the sensitivity boys. And what is happening? No, I am not going to accept you the way you are; we can’t accept one another until we get in phase three, that’s where you have perfect acceptance. Sensitivity training is trying to bring eternity into time and trying to see people as though they are already redeemed. And we haven’t [can’t understand words], God does work through this, as occasionally He does work through all sorts of weirdo examples in the tongues movement and so on. Occasionally this is true.

But what do we have? Believers by the hundreds doing what Gideon’s doing, why God use the existing local church and the teaching of the Word to bless any more; He uses the outside group to bless, so we don’t care about the local church, we’re going to run down the ministry of the Word, run down the ministry of the pastor-teacher and we’re going to have our own little group that meets together in our living room and in the dorm and all the rest of it, because God doesn’t work through the local church, He blesses elsewhere. Yes He does, and they’re doing exactly what Gideon’s doing. And do you know what it is, it’s spiritual adultery. And this is addressed to believers. They went fornicating after it. If you want a good term this kind of business of going around and maligning the local church is fornicating. Believers by the hundreds in Lubbock are fornicating after normalized channels that are not normal and not authorized in the Word of God. God operates always through the local church and the teaching of the Word and He doesn’t operate by these other means. If He operates [can’t understand words] that’s His business, but you don’t dare normalize and draw theological conclusions from all these weird groups. So my advice to you is that if you hear of these groups, stay away from them and avoid the people in them. They are apostate and it’s fornicating after things that are satanic.

[Judges 8:28, “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. [29] And Jerubbaal the son of Joash went and dwelt in his own house. [30] And Gideon had threescore and ten sons of his body begotten: for he had many wives. [31] And his concubine that was in Shechem, she also bare him a son, whose name he called Abimelech. [32] And Gideon the son of Joash died in a good old age, and was buried in the sepulcher of Joash his father, in Ophrah of the Abiezrites. [33] And it came to pass, as soon as Gideon was dead, that the children of Israel turned again, and went a whoring after Baalim, and made Baalberith their god. [34] And the children of Israel remembered not the LORD their God, who had delivered them out of the hands of all their enemies on every side: [35] Neither showed they kindness to the house of Jerubbaal, namely, Gideon, according to all the goodness which he had showed unto Israel.”]