Gideon and the
will of God – Judges 6:12-14
Open your Bibles to Judges 6; we continue with Gideon. One of the things about Gideon, there are
probably two major chapters in the Bible that people go to whenever the subject
of the will of God comes up. Judges 6
is one of those; Jonah is another.
Before we get too much further into out study of Gideon we have to stop
and look at what the Scripture teaches about knowing the will of God. For some of you there may be some correction
or fine tuning in your understanding of the will of God; for others of you this
is going to be a much needed and necessary review.
Judges 6 is the first chapter of three in what is called the
Gideon cycle; the story of Gideon and then Judges 9 is what happens to his son,
Abimelech. This is the crux event in
the history of the Judges period, so to speak, for everything that leads up to
this turns with Judges; from this point on the judges are, shall we say, more
confused and more apostate than the judges who went before. And Gideon exemplifies many of the problems
in Israel at the time because he reveals in this interchange with the angel of
the Lord who comes to him that he is basically ignorant of doctrine; he doesn’t
understand God’s plan and purposes for Israel; he doesn’t understand the five
cycles of discipline that God had promised Israel if they were disobedient so
he is unable to look around and discern what is going on culturally and
historically in his own time.
Unfortunately that is true of so many believers even today because we
are ignorant of Biblical principles, because we are ignorant of God’s plan and
purposes in human history and that history is the outworking of the plan of
God, because we don’t understand the various trends and cycles that are going
on in the ca that we do not have the discernment to properly evaluate even our
own times.
So it is important to pay attention to doctrine just so we have
the wisdom in our souls to discern what is taking place and why. That is one reason this study in Judges is
so important because it is a picture for us of how a nation, how the nation
Israel in the Old Testament went from being a nation of spiritual maturity
under the leadership of Joshua when they went into the land, obeyed the Lord
consistently, there were a few instances of disobedience but for the most part
they were trusting God and they defeated the Canaanites who possessed the land
under the generalship of Joshua and of course Jesus Christ as the angel of the
Lord was the commander in chief of the Jewish army as they went into the
land. But there we see a picture of
Israel as a mature nation, at least a nation that is trusting God consistently.
By the time we get to the end of the judges period, Joshua and
that generation dies off in the first couple of chapters, by the time we get to
the end of the book we see the last judge is Samson and Samson’s life, Samson’s
value system, Samson as a leader of the nation has a major problem with his
relationship to women, he is basically portrayed as nothing more than someone
who is out to fulfill all of his own lusts; he is consumed with
self-gratification, a gratification of his own desires and he is basically a
sexual predator. We see that the
picture of the nation Israel at the end of this period is that they are no
different from the Canaanite culture that surrounds them. So it is a portrayal of how a nation moves
from spiritual maturity to apostasy and a picture of how a country, a culture,
a people become apostate and how they become pagan.
There are many, many lessons for us as a nation and as believers
as we look at this because one of the things that we see again and again is
that the symptoms of a nation that is becoming paganized, the symptoms we see
in the history of Israel are no different from the things we see around us and
even in our own lives; it’s amazing, if we’re objective, and remember true
objectivity only comes from studying the Word, if we’re objective we’re going
to see that we have assimilated in our own thinking many ideas from our culture,
from education, from family members, from favorite professors in college or
teachers in high school or elementary school, but we have just sort of absorbed
these ideas in our own thinking and part of the responsibility of believers in
spiritual growth is, according to Romans 12:1-2, to renovate our thinking. And we only do that by taking in the Word of
God, and we hold up the mirror of the Word of God in order to give us that
objectivity to see what kinds of things are going on in the thinking of our
soul and realizing that well, we’ve got some things in there that no matter how
much we like them, no matter how comfortable they make us feel, we have to pull
those things out and we have to replace them with the divine viewpoint of God.
One of the sad things we run into sometimes is that people who are
in spiritual apostasy are what I call spiritual vampires. A vampire lives off of the bloodsucking that
he gets, the nourishment that he sucks out of a victim. You always run into some Christians who show
up at churches and that’s how they live; they operate on approbation lust, they
always want attention, they are always out there trying to get with people and
get attention and they live off of that; they feed off of that. The other thing, if you remember your
vampire movies, you hold up a mirror to a vampire and he doesn’t see
anything. And these kinds of people
accumulate a tremendous amount of knowledge; they’re on a knowledge trip and
that’s the problem of Gnosticism in 1 John, but they also tend to hold up the
Word of God and they don’t see anything.
They see how it applies to everybody else around them, but even when…
and I’ve done this in counseling, you get in their face with the Word of God
and say this is you, they absolutely deny it.
There’s no objectivity whatsoever and it’s amazing, no matter what you
do, how you talk to them, no matter how much you try to show them that they are
in 100% violation of the Word of God, they’re in such arrogance and such
self-absorption from their whole approach to life as approbation lust that they
can’t even see that they are the ones that are in trouble; they just think it’s
everybody else. So if you have a
tendency to sit there and think boy, I wish so and so were listening to this,
then maybe you’re the one who needs to be paying attention to the Word.
So Gideon, we see, has some of these same problems, not to the
extent that perhaps some of you might have them, but he does have some of these
problems. Let’s review where we are
with the episode here.
“Then
the sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD,” the Lord
doesn’t go into detail here, that was analyzed in chapter 2-3 as to what that
evil was. They were succumbing to the
apostasy, the false religions, the idolatry of the Canaanite culture around
them. They were consumed with
agricultural prosperity, as an agricultural society and so they wanted to be
prosperous, be successful, so that meant fertility in the agricultural realm
and the Canaanites had a fertility religion that was based on the phallic cult
which was prominent throughout the ancient world, and so the Jews in Israel
succumbed to that and in each of these cycles they become more and more
dominated by Canaanite religion.
So
“evil in the sight of the Lord” doesn’t mean that they sinned. This is a technical term to the fact that
they succumbed to the false religious system of the Canaanites surrounding them
and what we have seen is that this was viewed as slavery, that they became
enslaved to this system. The word ‘abad in the Hebrew is used which
indicates to serve or to work, and is the same word that is used to indicate
slavery. The principle is that once you
become a slave spiritually, and that happens every time we operate on the sin
nature, once we become a slave spiritually then we will become a slave in our
soul and it will not be long before a nation of soul slaves become economic,
political, or military slaves.
That’s
what happened to Israel. What they were
doing is they were trying to solve the problems in their culture, in their
lives, through human viewpoint means; whatever appeared to be successful for
the Canaanites and believe me, when you get into passages in 1 Corinthians and
other passages in the New Testament which inform us that what underlies all
idolatry is demonism, that there is in Satan’s world a certain amount of
success that he brings to those who operate on his systems of thinking. Satan is no fool; Satan does not promote
systems of thought, systems of problem solving, that don’t work. Nobody would do them, so the problem with
Satan’s systems is not that they are 100% wrong or 50% wrong but they’re about
2% or 3% wrong but it is that crucial 2-3% of error that distorts everything
else. But there’s always a certain
amount of truth in any good counterfeit, and a certain amount of validity and
that’s why human problem solving approaches seem to work.
The
problem is that Scripture says that any time we attempt to solve our problems
apart from exclusive and total dependence upon God and His Word, any time we
attempt to make life work through whatever system it may be, whether it’s
through reliance on the details of life, whether it’s through success, whether
it’s through trying to make a name for ourselves, whether it’s trying to have a
good family, there is a form of family idolatry in our nation today that puts
such a strong emphasis on the importance of the family that it’s almost to the
exclusion of everything else. Any
detail of life can be so emphasized that it becomes an idol in and of itself.
The
Scripture says that anytime we’re operating apart from dependence upon God the
Holy Spirit then we are operating on the sin nature and the sin nature produces
both good deeds and it produces sinful, what we call evil deeds, or immoral deeds. And one of the greatest distractions is good
things that seem to work and people to get enamored with all sorts of systems
that appear to solve their problems and appear to work and one of the ones that
we see in our society today is psychology.
Psychology is one of three evils that the world system has developed
around us that has integrated itself into the church over the last hundred
years.
The
first is Darwinian evolution; it’s no chance that all three of these systems
had their origin in mid-19th century rationalistic and idealistic
thought. They all started within
basically ten years of one another. You
had Darwin and the birth of modern scientific Darwinian evolution; you have
Freud and the birth of modern psychology and you have the birth, also of
Augusta Compton and some others, the birth of modern sociology, and these three
systems have attacked the church, and of course evolution attacks the whole
foundation of the first 11 chapters of Genesis and its historicity, and we
don’t have time to go into all of that but if you take out the historical
validity of the first eleven chapters of Genesis you destroy everything else in
the Bible because every other doctrine in the Bible has its roots in what takes
place in the first eleven chapters of Genesis because every other doctrine in
the Bible has its roots in what takes place in
the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
And without that historical foundation everything else is false. God always works in history and grounds his
work in the objective realm of history and so we have to accept that.
The
second thing is in psychology and a lot of people have problems with that
because we have become a therapeutic society.
Many, many historians recognize that and I think because the emphasis on
psychology in American culture has produced what Christopher Lasch calls the
narcissistic society and we our self absorbed.
One psychologist, by the name of Paul Vitz, who’s professor of
psychology at NYU stated in his book, Psychology
is Religion, that: “psychology as a religion exists I great strength
throughout the United States. It is
deeply antichristian yet is extensively supported by schools, universities and
social programs, financed by taxes collected from Christians.” See, his point is psychology, the very term
says the study of the soul, and psychology comes along and claims that on the
basis of pure empirical data they have authority to determine how the soul
functions and how it can solve problems.
The problem is the Bible claims to have exclusive domain over defining
what the soul is, what the problems are, i.e. sin, and what the solutions are
which began with Jesus Christ on the cross who died as a substitute for our
sins that we might have eternal life.
And so all problems ultimately flow from sin and unless you deal with
the solution to sin there is nothing…all you do otherwise is just sort of deal
with symptoms and you never deal with the underlying solution.
Another
writer has stated that “psychology sits at the very center of contemporary
society as an international colossus whose ranks number in the hundreds of
thousands. It’s experimental animals
are obliging, even grateful human race.
We live in a civilization of such as never before; man is preoccupied
with self. We’ve become narcissistic.
As a Protestant ethic is weakened in Western society the confused
citizen has turned to the only alternative he knows, the psychological expert
who claims there is a new scientific standard of behavior to replace fading
traditions. Mouthing the holy name of
science, the psychological expert claims to know all. This new truth is fed to us continuously from birth to the
grave.” That’s a quote from Martin
Gross, The Psychological Society.
Well,
that’s one attempt to try to solve problems by taking empirical data and making
a system out of it for solving problems.
The
third way in which our society is attacked is sociology and that happens in the
church growth movement—let’s go out and basically analyze a certain culture,
certain segments of society, why they’re not going to church and on the basis
of sociological principles then we’re going to build a church that will fit
those needs that this society has determined they want in a local church and
that’s basically…to me the analogy is of a school board saying okay, let’s poll
all the kindergarteners and nursery school kids and find out what they want in
a curriculum, then we’ll devise our curriculum based upon what they want. You don’t let the children run the
household. Parents and educators should
know what kids need to learn and you don’t let the, especially a carnal
apostate society dictate what the church ought to look like and what they ought
to be involved in. But that’s what
happens in an apostate culture, is our value system completely shifts, we call
right wrong and wrong right, and we’ve lost faith and confidence in the Word of
God and because we are spiritually ignorant and Biblically ignorant then we
continuously make bad decisions and the result is that our lives are
destroyed.
Now
in Israel at this time they are overwhelmed by a foreign power as part of the
fourth cycle of discipline as outlined in Leviticus 26. Judges 6:2 says “The power of Midian prevailed
against Israel. Because of Midian the sons of Israel made for themselves the
dens which were in the mountains and the caves and the strongholds.” So they had to run and hide up in the
mountains.
[3]
“For it was when Israel had sown, that the Midianites would come up with the
Amalekites,” and once again we see the Arab alliance. These are the same people groups we see today involved with the
Palestinians in the Middle East, the Jordanians, the Syrians and all of the
various Arab groups. We don’t know them
today by their ancient names but they are still the same groups. “… the Midianites would come up with the
Amalekites and the sons of the east and go against them.” Although this battle destroys the Midianite
culture and Saul will wipe out the Amalekites in 1 Samuel.
This
gives us the genealogy to show the relationship, where the Arabs come
from. Joktan, the son of Peleg, was the
father of 13 Arab tribes; his son, Nahor, is the father of the Chaldeans, he
also gives birth to Terah who is the father of Abraham. Abraham is the father of Ishmael, through
Hagar, the Egyptian woman, who is the progenitor of the Bedouin Arabs. Then he gives birth to Isaac, who is the line
of the promised seed, and then Abraham had six other sons from Keturah, and one
of those was Midian, and the Midianites descend from Abraham through Keturah,
but they are not Jews just because they are related to Abraham, and we saw in
our study that a Jew is related to Abraham through Isaac and Jacob. It’s not just because you’re the seed of
Abraham, but the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Now
the Midianites are coming from this area to the east of the Dead Sea. This is the area of Midian, here’s Moab, the
Midianites operated north of Moab, they come across the Jordan into the central
highlands north of Jerusalem and towards Bethlehem. We know that Gideon is from the tribe of Benjamin, which is in
the area just to the west of Jericho and north of Jerusalem and it is to that
area that they would come, crossing the fords of the Jordan, coming in and
basically splitting the nation in two, following good and ancient military
tactics.
Judges
6:4, “So they would camp against them” that is the Midianites, “and destroy the
produce of the earth as far as Gaza,” so they would go all the way across to
the Mediterranean; they would “leave no sustenance in Israel as well as no
sheep, ox, or donkey.” So there’s
famine in the land, there is economic collapse, the people have lost all that
they have and still they are not sure why this is happening. It took them three years to figure out what
the Midianites were dong according to Josephus.
Judges
6:5, “For they would come up,” that is the Midianites, “would come up with
their livestock and their tents, they would come in like locusts for number,
both they and their camels, were innumerable; and they came into the land to
devastate it.” See the Jews did not
have camels, the Midianites developed the use of camels as a form of cavalry
and what we see is that the Jews always seemed to lack the latest technology
for conducting military warfare. We’ve
seen that the Philistines kept them from having any blacksmiths in the land so
they didn’t have iron for weapons, so they’re always, as it were, outgunned because
they just don’t have the right kind of material for weapons and they don’t have
camels, the camel moves very rapidly so they would be down on the Jews before
they knew what was going on. And this
seems to always be typical, Christians never seem, believers never seem to be
able to quite use the latest technology as effectively as the world uses
it. So we always seem to look around
and say why is it that the world always seems to be three or four steps ahead
of us. But that seems to be the way it
is.
Judges
6:6, “So Israel was brought very low,” that means that they were just about
decimated, “because of Midian, and the sons of Israel cried to the LORD.” They finally recognize their sin and cry out to the Lord in
confession. And then the Lord sends a
deliverer to them. Look at verse 7,
“Now it came about when the sons of Israel cried to the LORD on account of Midian, [8]
that the LORD sent a prophet to the sons
of Israel,” the prophet reminds them of what God had done for them in the
historical past; he reminds them of the objectivity of God’s work in history,
and he says, “Thus says the LORD,
the God of Israel, It was I who brought you up from Egypt and brought you out
from the house of slavery.” And [9] “I
delivered you from the hands of the Egyptians” and the word that is translated
there for “deliver” is a hiphil imperfect of the verb which means to remove,
pull or tear out and it shows how God is the One who tore them out from the
hands of the Egyptians.
I
also want you to notice this phrase, “the hands of the Egyptians,” “the hands
of your oppressors,” it’s used of the fact that God gave them over into the
hands of the Midianites. This concept
of the hand is an idiom for power and control, it is not that they were
literally in the physical hand and that’s important because that same idiom is
used by Jesus in John 8 when He is talking about the fact that we are in the
hands of the Father and no one can take us out and He holds us in His
hand. It is a picture of the power of
someone and in John 8 it is a picture of the omnipotence of God and the
omnipotence of the Lord Jesus Christ in keeping us saved. We do not keep ourselves saved by continuing
to believe in Jesus, we do not keep ourselves saved by continuing to be
obedient, we trust in Christ who died on the cross as a substitute for our
sins. Once we express faith alone in
Christ alone we are saved for all eternity and at that point God is the One who
keeps us in His hand and nothing can take us out of His hand. There is no thought, no action, there is
nothing that you or I can do that can ever cause the loss of our
salvation. We are saved, not because of
what we do so we cannot lose our salvation because of what we do. Salvation is based exclusively on the grace
of God. So God reminds them of what He
has done to redeem them in the past just as in the Church Age we go to the
cross to be reminded of all that God did for us in delivering us from the
bondage of sin when Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins.
Judges
6:10, God reminds them, He said, “I am the LORD your God; you shall not fear the gods of the Amorites in whose land
you live. But you have not obeyed Me.”
In other words, you don’t have to respect the problem solving techniques
of the pagans around you; they really won’t solve your problems. It might appear that way to you; you might
look and watch somebody else and they seem to make their life work without
having to go to Bible class 2 or 3 times a week, without having to take in the
Word of God, without having to apply it in their lives, but we don’t see what’s
going on in the soul, we don’t see whatever misery there might be in their
lives, whatever unhappiness there might be, we can’t necessarily see the
frantic search for happiness that is dominating their soul but we are to focus
on the Lord, so the idea of “fearing the gods of the Amorites” is the idea of
respect. Fear is an idiom for respect,
“you shall not respect the gods of the Amorites in whose land you live. But you have not obeyed Me.” This is where we ended last time.
Judges
6:11, “Then the angel of the LORD
came and sat under the oak that was in Ophrah,” now what we see here is this
personage that we have seen again and again in the Scripture referred to as
“the angel of the Lord.” Now the “angel
of the Lord” is not just another angel; this is not an angel in the
classification of the cherubim or seraphim.
It is not another archangel; the angel of the Lord is not like Gabriel
or Michael. The angel of the Lord is a
class unto himself and one of the key passages for understanding the identity
of the Lord is in this passage.
If
you look down to Judges 6:22 you see the significance and identification of the
angel of the Lord. There we read, “When
Gideon saw that he was the angel of the LORD,” in other words he realizes as a
result of what happens in verse 21, that the angel of the Lord puts out his
staff, see at this point the angel of the Lord has appeared as a man, so when
he first addressed Gideon, Gideon is not sure who he is, his identification, he
looks like any other human being. He
has taken on an appearance of all of the physical attributes of a human
being. He has a physical body, so to
speak. The angel of the Lord has
transformed his immaterial presence into a material presence so that he looks
and operates like any other human being.
Well, he holds out his staff in verse 21 and touches the meat and
unleavened bread that he puts on the rock there and it’s consumed by fire and
the angel vanishes, and at that point Gideon recognizes that this is a unique
personage. And he says in verse 22,
“When Gideon saw that he was the angel of the LORD, he said, Alas, O Lord God! For now I have seen the
angel of the LORD face to face. [23]
And the LORD said to him, Peace to you, do not fear, you shall not die.” It is at that point that we realize that the
angel of the Lord is in fact deity. He
is worshiped in this passage by Gideon as deity. That means the angel of the Lord is God.
Look
at Zechariah 1:12-13, what we see in the background of this verse is that there
is a personage there, the angel of the Lord in the previous several
verses. “Then the angel of the LORD,” and we’ve just identified
the angel of the Lord in Gideon as the Lord, He is worshiped as the Lord, He is
called the Lord, and then here we see the angel of the Lord addressing another
person as “O Lord of hosts,” that indicates that there are two distinct
personalities here. There is the angel
of the Lord addressing another personage as God and saying, “O LORD of hosts, how long wilt Thou
have no compassion for Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, with which Thou hast
been indignant these seventy years?”
[13] “And the LORD
answered the angel who was speaking with me with gracious words,” now the point
in that passage is to show that even in the Old Testament there is evidence of
the Trinity, that there are distinct persons in the Godhead, although it is
just evident in the Old Testament it is never developed in the Old Testament
and it is not until you get into the New Testament that you have a clear
presentation of the doctrine of the Trinity.
And you see it first evident when Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist
at the River Jordan, at the inauguration of his ministry, that you have Jesus,
the Second Person of the Trinity, incarnate, being baptized; you hear the Father’s
voice from heaven; and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a
dove. And there you see Father, Son and
Holy Spirit. But even in the Old
Testament there are many passages that indicate that there is a plurality in
the godhead, that God is one in essence and three in personality.
So
the person that we have here in Judges 6 is the preincarnate Jesus Christ,
Jesus Christ before He was incarnate on that first Christmas about 4 or 5
BC. So we see Him appearing to Gideon and
giving him instructions; this is special revelation. There are two categories of special revelation in the
Scripture. When we talk about
revelation as a whole, the revelation of God, we talk first about two
categories of revelation; there is general revelation and special
revelation. General revelation is
nonverbal revelation. Psalm 19:1 says,
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth His handiwork.” This is nonverbal revelation. What the Scriptures testify to is that as we
look at creation we look at the trees, we look at the animal kingdom, we look
at even a snowflake and we see its intricate design and that tells us something
about the nature of the Creator and His ability. That is general revelation; it doesn’t give us specifics, it
doesn’t give us content but it does tell us something because we can come to
certain conclusions about the Creator of something by looking at how it is
created. That is called general
revelation and it is always nonverbal and nonspecific.
Then
there is special revelation. Special
revelation is verbal and specific.
There are two categories of special revelation; there is
non-inscripturated special revelation, that is when God addressed certain
people in the Old Testament, either directly or to a prophet, it was not always
recorded in the Scripture. There were
things that God said to Adam and Isha
in the Garden that were not recorded. There were things that God said
subsequent to that that were not recorded, things that God said to Enoch;
remember Enoch lived in the Old Testament, prior to the flood, he was the
father of the oldest man in the Old Testament, Methuselah, and yet Methuselah
died before Enoch did. That is because
Enoch never died physically; the Scripture says he walked with God and he was
not. He just had such close fellowship
with the Lord and the Lord communicated many things to Enoch and we know from
some other passages and some tradition that Enoch had a fairly good
understanding of God’s prophetic and timetable and one day Enoch was just
translated directly from his physical human existence right into heaven. And we don’t know what God told Enoch, we
don’t know all that Enoch knew and all that God had revealed to him. That is special revelation, but it is
non-inscripturated special revelation.
There were a lot of things that God revealed to Daniel and yet at the
end of Daniel we’re told that some of those things were sealed up. There were things that John saw in the
Revelation that were not necessarily inscripturated.
So
we have special revelation that is not in Scripture and then we have special
revelation that is in Scripture. And
that is confined to the 66 books of our English Bible, 39 Old Testament books
and 27 New Testament books that have been given through the prophets of the Old
Testament or apostles in the New Testament, that have been given as the sum
total of God’s revelation to man that is sufficient for everything we need, for
life and godliness, according to 2 Peter 1:3.
Now
this is an example of special revelation; God is specifically appearing
objectively. There are objective things
that happen. Gideon is not having a
mystical experience with what he thinks is God. There are objective things that are happening here that are going
to revolutionize Gideon’s life.
Remember, we see Gideon hiding in fear of the hordes of the Midianites
and Amalekites comeing through and he’s down in the threshing floor hoping
nobody will see him and he’ll be able to get just enough wheat to get by until
the next harvest. He is operating on
fear, he’s not trusting God, and yet as a result of what happens he is
transformed. It reminds us somewhat of
the transforming power of the resurrection on the attitude of the apostles;
they all ran in fear with the exception of John and it was after they saw the
physical resurrected Christ that they once again had tremendous courage to go
out into the world, and with the exception of John, they were, according to
tradition of what we can glean from extra Biblical sources they were all
martyred for their faith; they were willing to all die for the fact that Christ
rose from the dead and not one of them, even under the most excruciating pain
and torture was willing to change his story.
It was the reality of history.
That’s
what we see here, and the angel, in verse 21, and the fact that he stuck out
his staff and the offering immediately burned up and was consumed, that he
gives historical verification; he gives objective means of validation to the
revelation of God. That is important
because today we live in an age of mysticism.
People want to say oh, well God told me to do this and it’s God’s will
for me to do that and I just know God wants me to do this other thing, and all
that’s happening is they’re having a love affair in their mind with what they
think is God and whenever that idol of their mind, which is really their own
emotion, makes them think that something is attractive and they want to deal
with it, then what happens is they justify it by saying this is God’s will and
God spoke to me. But the phase, God
spoke to me, or God told me to do this is a term restricted to special
revelation. And God is no longer
speaking today; this is clear from Hebrews 1:1, that “in past times God has
spoken to us through His Son and the apostles.” It is past tense, God is not presently giving special revelation
and anyone who says God spoke to me or God told me to do this is blaspheming
God, and they are basically creating in their own mind their own concept of
what God wants them to do in order to justify or rationalize some
decision.
Now
the angel of the Lord here does objectively appear to Gideon. Judges 6:12, “The angel of the LORD appeared to him and said to
him, Yahweh is with you, O valiant warrior.”
I just love this whole episode because we get a tremendous glimpse into
the sense of humor that God has because at this moment Gideon is anything but a
valiant warrior. He’s cowering in fear
down in the winepress trying to thresh out the wheat and God looks at him in
terms of what he is going to be and calls him by that name. Now I imagine Gideon was looking up and
whoever this was who appeared and thought who in the world do you think you are
and what kind of pills did somebody slip you in your morning coffee. But this is the angel of the Lord, and he
announces to Gideon what he is going to do through him.
Then
Gideon turns and he says…and you can see that Gideon has a number of problems
here with this announcement. I think
that in this situation as in others in the Scripture more was communicated but
God the Holy Spirit abridged the conversation so that we would catch the true
gist of what was said. It’s just like
things in the Sermon on the Mount; you read the Sermon on the Mount out loud
you’ll read it in about seven minutes.
I think that Jesus spoke much longer than that but God the Holy Spirit
comes along and abridges it for us and condenses it for us so we get exactly
what we need to get from it. It is a
divinely inspired summary of the conversation and that’s what we have
here.
“The angel of the LORD appeared to him
and…” [Judges 6:13] “Then Gideon said to him, O my lord, if the LORD is with us,” so
he’s responding to that first statement, “the Lord is with you,” then he says
“if the LORD is with us,” if He’s really with us, and here we see that Gideon
just doesn’t have any doctrine in his soul and he’s confused and he probably
represents the general confusion of Israel.
You see, they cry out to the Lord but they don’t have any doctrine
behind it. They’re crying out to the
Lord mostly in pain and misery from the discipline that they’re going through
but there’s not any real doctrine in their souls to understand and interpret
what’s going on around them. That’s
what we see in this decline; we have two more judges to go through, Jephthah
and Samson; by the time we get to Samson they don’t even cry out to the Lord
any more, they don’t even turn to the Lord and at the end of the book of Judges
they are still under the heal of the Philistine oppression. They don’t understand the dynamics of what’s
going on and so all they have is what somebody told them that happened two or
three hundred years ago and they’re not even sure that that happened, maybe
that was just some legend, maybe somebody just told us that, how in the world
can we trust in God who will let all of these things happen around us. That has a contemporary ring to it; how can
we trust God who lets evil go on in the world like this, lets suffering like
the holocaust and some other things that have gone, how can God really love His
creation if He’s going to let these things happen.
Gideon goes on to say if the Lord really
is with is, “why then has all this happened to us? And where are all His
miracles” we heard about the miracles that Jesus performed, we hear that today,
Jesus did this and you hear about that but nothing happens today, God must have
left us, He must be on the other side of the universe being concerned with
something else or maybe He’s just taking a nap. You hear this kind of objection today just as much because we
don’t understand the Scripture. “…if
the LORD is with us,
then why is all this happening to us?
Where are all these miracles which our fathers told us about, saying,
‘Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the LORD has abandoned
us and given us into the hand of Midian.”
So Gideon’s mental attitude is not one
that inspires confidence. It’s not one
that tells us that this is a man who has been studying the Word; in between
hiding out in the winepress he’s not going back and studying Scripture; this is
not a man like David who is spending his time meditating day and night on the
Word of God. Gideon is not a spiritual
giant. I want to make sure you
understand that. These men, too often they are just like we are and that’s why
I think we can gain tremendous hope and confidence from them because God still
deals with them in grace and meets them where they are, no matter how badly
they fail, no matter how badly we fail, as long as we’re still alive God has a
plan and a purpose for our life and there is always a grace solution to our
problem.
Judges 6:14, so “The LORD looked at him
and said, “Go in this your strength and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian.
Have I not sent you?” What he means by “this your strength,” he’s not talking
about Gideon’s strength because what we see in the development of the episode
in verse 7 is he’s going to take away of the things that Gideon would rely
upon. By “this your strength” he’s
referring to Himself, that He is our strength, that it is God who provides us
everything we need to be delivered from the problems around us, whatever
problems they may be, whether they are simple or complex, whether they have to
do with extreme horrible abuses or different horrible things that we might encounter
in life, you can just imagine the kind of sexual abuse or child abuse that took
place with the Israelites when they were enslaved in Egypt. Slavery is not a pleasant thing and yet God
told them that no matter what they encountered in Egypt that God was sufficient
to solve all their problems and to heal all of their wounds. And this means that the only solution is
God’s solution and the human solution is no solution.
So “The LORD said, “Go in
this your strength and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian. Have I not sent
you?” In other words, isn’t this the
will of God. Now Gideon is going to
come along in verse 15 with some objections and we’ll hold off looking at those
objections but we’re going to stop here and get into the doctrine of the will of
God. We have to look at the doctrine of
the will of God in order to understand what the applications are from this
passage. How do we know God’s will for
our life? That’s usually the question
that you hear people ask. People tend
to ask that when they are in the midst of crisis situations in their
lives. You hear it more and more from
younger people than you do from more mature folks because we seem to make more
of our crucial decisions when we are young, when we don’t know a whole lot and
we don’t have a lot of experience at making decisions and we know that the
decisions we make may have serious ramifications.
It seems to me it’s been mostly high
school age, college age, young adult age that are consumed with the question,
how do I know God’s will for my life because they’re making those foundational
decisions, they’re trying to decide whether to go to college or not, what to
major in, what their career should be, sometimes they get romantically involved
at too early an age and they’re trying to decide whether or not they ought to
get married. They ought to put that off
as long as possible, I think, because today we realize that people mature much
slower than they did even a generation ago.
A sociology class I had in college, the average age of a male that got
married was 24 and a woman was 22. A
hundred years ago the emotional maturity of a man was reached at about the age
of 15 and for a women about the age of 14, women sometimes mature emotionally a
little quicker than men do. By 1988 men
did not reach emotional maturity until they were about 23-24; just a generation
before that it was about 3 years earlier.
So just between the late 60s to the late 80s men, the maturity age at
which men on the average reached emotional maturity was bumped up about two
years and the same thing happened with women.
And what happens is you go out and get married before you’re emotionally
and it’s a recipe for disaster. People
need to find out what they’re going to do in life and what they want out of
life before they make crucial decisions like getting married. But that comes from something called wisdom,
which comes from doctrine and not too many people want to apply it, especially
when they start getting emotionally involved with somebody because they just become
overwhelmed with their emotions.
The will of God also comes to bear when
you get a little older sometimes when you have to face decisions about
retirement, when you have to make decisions about maybe some career changes as you
got from one career to another, I think they say today that most people will go
through six different career moves in their life and hold different jobs. These questions always come to bear.
So let’s start off with some basic
definitions. The term “will of God”
relates to three aspects of divine volition in relation to His creation. Too often we think subjectively; we think in
terms of what is the will of God for my life but we have to get beyond the
subjectiveness of our own situation to think objectively in terms of what the
Bible says. We have to think what is
God’s will overall, and that relates to His own volition in relation to His
creatures and in relation to His creation.
Just one principle that we ought to note
here in terms of making decisions because that’s the unstated aspect of the
will of God, whenever you talk about the will of God or divine guidance the
point is really how do I make decisions; how do I take Biblical principles and
Bible doctrine and make crucial decisions in life and know that somehow I’m
making good decisions, because we all know or should know that bad decisions
limit our future options. If you make a
bad decision when you’re seventeen years old and you decide not to go to
college or you decide to go out and have fun and party, then when you’re
twenty-five years old it’s much harder to go back to college and retrace those
steps. And when you’re thirty-five it’s
much harder; when you’re forty-five and four kids its almost impossible and now
you realize that you can’t get certain jobs and certain opportunities bypass
you because you just don’t have a college degree. So it is crucial to make good decisions when you’re young because
they will affect the rest of your life.
We won’t even talk about making bad decisions when you’re 17 or 18 and
getting married because we certainly know that that will mess up your life
later on.
Point one, three types of divine
volition: The first is God’s sovereign
volition, His sovereign will and this is defined as God’s sovereign volition
with regard to His creation, where He brings to pass what he wills and what He
has decreed. God’s sovereign will
relates to what He has decreed to occur in human history, what He has
determined to bring to pass in human history.
It is secret; we do not know what His sovereign will is. His sovereign will includes the acts of
sinful creatures; it includes evil, it includes the negative volition of His
creatures, it includes everything that comes to pass in human history but we do
not know what it is. Therefore, it is
secret, it is unknowable and when we ask the question, what is God’s will for
me to do in this situation, we’re not talking about God’s sovereign volition
because we can’t know it until after the fact.
If we draw it out the sovereign will
would look like this circle; this would encompass all the aspects of God’s
sovereign will, everything that He has decreed to take place in human
history. It includes evil; it includes
the fact that God’s sovereign will allowed for, and this is where we use the
term permissive will, sometimes, in talking about God’s sovereign will, that He
permitted creatures to have volition, free will, and therefore to make bad
decisions. So it included in it evil;
it includes good. This does not mean
that God is the author of evil or that God is morally responsible for evil but
that in God’s sovereign will He allows for creatures to make wrong
decisions. It is the negative
decisions, the simply decisions of creatures that introduce sin and evil into
the world; it is not God’s will that introduced sin and evil to the world. So God’s sovereign will includes all that
is, all that actually comes to pass in human history and the history of the
universe.
This is different from God’s moral
will. Sometimes we call God’s moral
will His revealed will. This refers to
what God has revealed that man is to do.
For example, God’s moral will to Adam was “thou shalt not eat from the
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day you eat
from it you will certainly die.” That
is God’s revealed will; don’t eat! But
God’s sovereign will, which is also His permissive will allowed for Adam to
make a bad decision and to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil and thus plunge the human race into sin. So God’s moral will, which we sometimes call
His revealed will, refers to what God has specifically revealed for man to
do. So what we have here in Judges 6 is
God’s revealed will for Gideon is to “go in this your strength, and deliver
Israel from the hand of Midian.”
Then a third category of God’s will is
what I call God’s overriding will. This
takes place when God tells us to do something and we don’t do it and then
somehow God overrides our wrong decision.
It can also take place, I think, when God tells us to do something or we
want to do something that is right, for example we have a responsibility as
believers to contribute financially to the local church to support the ministry
of the local church and to support foreign missions. And there are times when we have a desire to give and to support,
we really would like to support a missionary or a particular church, and yet to
the degree that we would like to do that God overrides and limits us. Maybe we just don’t make the kind of money
we ought to make or maybe …now this is not a means to justify rationalizing not
giving but sometimes the Lord may put us in a situation where we just don’t
make very much money or perhaps we go through difficult times and we lose our
job, that God is overriding our will.
Our will is if I had the money I would give it. God says I’m going to override that decision
for whatever reason and you’re not going to have the financial resources to
contribute to the ministry. So that’s
another example of how God’s overriding will may override our own
decision. Now that does not mean that
God forces our will in one direction or another but He does not allow us to
bring to completion some decision that we have made for His sovereign will.
Some key verses for God’s sovereign will
are: Daniel 4:35, “And all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as
nothing, but He,” that is God, “does according to His will in the host of
heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and no one can ward off His
hand, or say to Him, ‘What hast thou done?’”
God’s will is overriding. He is
in control of His creation therefore we need not fear what man can do to
destroy the earth, to destroy creation because we know that Jesus Christ
controls history.
Proverbs 21:1, “The king’s heart is like
channels of water in the hand of the LORD, He turns it wherever He wishes.” Now that doesn’t mean that God necessarily
is interfering with his volition, although it may. For example, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, now that came
after Pharaoh had hardened his own heart; it came after Pharaoh had already
rejected the gospel. The only
critically free area that anyone has to have is in relationship to the gospel
and in relationship to spiritual growth.
I do think there are other times when God does move a person’s will,
perhaps, in one direction or another.
He clearly speaks of how He hardened Pharaoh’s heart; once Pharaoh had
made his negative decision God just reinforced it in a particular direction. “The king’s heart is like channels of water
in the hand of the LORD,” so even when you have a king who is evil God is the
One who still controls history despite bad government policy. “He turns it,” that is the will of the king,
“wherever He wishes.”
Revelation 4:1, “After these things I looked,
and, behold, a door standing open in heaven, and the first voice which I had
heard, like the sound of a trumpet speaking with me, said, Come up here, and I
will show you what must take place after these things.” God’s sovereign will controls history so
that He can tell us exactly what will take place in human history.
Ephesians 1:11, “Also we have obtained
an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose, who works all
things after the counsel of His will.”
What His criteria are, why He makes the decisions He does we do not know
but we do know that His will is the ultimate factor in all of the universe.
Proverbs 16:33, “The lot is cast into
the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD,” the first clause recognizes
the reality of chaos and chance in the universe, that there is freedom. One of the greatest things that I think
helped me understand the relationship between real freedom in human history and
the sovereignty of God which is the question of the sovereignty of God versus
the free will of man, it’s the major question that plagued theologians for
centuries, was to recognize the fact that when God created the animal kingdom
in Genesis 1, He put within all of the DNA structure of all the creatures a
certain amount of flexibility to handle the chaos that would occur as a result
of sin. That flexibility is the
flexibility of what happens in terms of free will but yet there are still
boundaries that are set and still a control factor that it would not go beyond
limits and that control factor relates, by analogy, to the will of God. So there is true freedom within certain
boundaries. And God overrides and God
rules as to what the results of that are.
So the lot cast into the lap, which is rolling the dice, it’s pure
chance, but it’s every decisions is from the Lord, it’s not that the Lord
reaches down and moves somebody’s volition one way or the other, but He
overrides it in a certain way to prevent things going apart from His will.
Romans 9:19, “You will say to me then,”
this is an objection, “Why does God still find fault?” if every decision is
from the Lord, “For who resists His will?” Paul then makes it clear that there
is still human freedom and human volition because God has decreed that His
sovereign will coexists in human history with human volition. That is what makes mans truly free decisions
his own; they are not God’s decisions.
Man truly makes decisions and he is accountable and responsible for
those decisions and yet God is the One in ultimate control. So in human history God’s sovereign will is
not antithetical to human volition.
The third point; the specifics of God’s
decreed will are secret, unrevealed, and unknown. They cannot be known until
after the fact. We don’t know what God
has decreed to occur this afternoon until after it happens. So I am truly free
to make whatever decisions I will make because there’s nothing that is forcing
or determining my decisions. Human
history, once transpired, is the outworking of God’s ultimate decree.
And finally, we can only know the
specifics of God’s revealed or moral will.
We can’t know God’s sovereign will till after the fact. We can only, therefore know the specifics of
God’s revealed or moral will which includes all the precepts, mandates, and prohibitions
of Scripture. We will stop there and
finish next week.