As we daily read our Bibles and when reading in the Old Testament, I am sure at one time or another we are challenged, first with trying to clearly understand and how to personally apply to our lives what we read. It might be when we read in the Psalms which teaches about who God is and or how the writer is spiritually or emotionally challenged by his conflicts. Or in the Proverbs, that relate to the many every day issues of life. And for most of us the challenge of understanding the many different prophecies of how they applied to the people then but also how can that prophecy apply to us today.
When we read the historical books of the Old Testament it also presents us with the challenge of how do these events that happened so many thousand years ago apply to our lives today? What spiritual principles can I identify about who God is by what He did? And how do these spiritual principles work in my life today?
Applying these three questions and discovering the answers when we read Judges chapters 6 to 8 about Gideon, will lead us to a deeper understanding of who God is in our relationship with Him. No matter our current situation is the its circumstances we are experiencing; and despite of our own spiritual immaturity and the immoral and spiritual depravity of the culture we live in, we will always learn about God and how He can work in our lives.
In chapters 6 to 8 of Judges, we read about how God uses Gideon. Who was Gideon? The Fire Bible gives us a brief explanation. “Gideon, an Israelite judge, was son of Joash, from the tribe of Manasseh. Gideon described his clan as the least powerful in Manasseh and himself as the least important in the clan. His story tells how God can take a weak person and use him for great purposes.”
Warren Wiersbe in his commentary of Judges about the life of Gideon tell us the following. “God called a farmer in Manasseh named Gideon to become the deliverer of His people. Gideon started his career as somewhat of a coward (Judges 6), then became a conqueror (7:1-8:21), and ended his career as a compromiser (8:22-35). Gideon is the only judge whose personal struggles with his faith are recorded. Gideon is a great encouragement to people who have a hard time accepting themselves and believing that God can make anything out of them or do anything with them.”
As with many born-again believers in Christ, in our relationship with God we also have obstacles in our lives that will prevent us to be who God created us to be in Christ Jesus and to experience who God is by how He uses us for His purposes.
- 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”
- Ephesians 1:11-13, “11 In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, 12 in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory.”
In the first verse of Judges chapter 6 we read, “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord”. In verse 3 it tells us by whom the Israelites were experiencing the results because of their evil, “…the Midianites, Amalekites and other eastern peoples invaded the country.”
In verses 2 to 5 it tells us to what extent. 2 Because the power of Midian was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves and strongholds. 3 Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, the Midianites, Amalekites and other eastern peoples invaded the country. 4 They camped on the land and ruined the crops all the way to Gaza and did not spare a living thing for Israel, neither sheep nor cattle nor donkeys. 5 They came up with their livestock and their tents like swarms of locusts. It was impossible to count the men and their camels; they invaded the land to ravage it.
There are times in the life of the believer in Christ that the hardship we experience is because the lives we live is “evil in the eyes of the Lord”. In other words this is the same as what the apostle told the Christian believers in Galatians 6:7-8, 7 Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. 8 The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction”. When a Christian is living and doing things that are “evil in the eyes of the Lord” it is because they are disregarding their relationship with God. For some it is easy to blame God for all the hardship and difficulty they are experiencing but many times they fail to look at themselves first.
As a result of all the adversity the Israelites were experiencing it finally caused them to turn to God, Judges 6:6 NLT, So Israel was reduced to starvation by the Midianites. Then the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help. For many Christians hardship or adversity will finally cause them to eventually to seek God for deliverance.
In verses 7 to 9 of chapter 6 we read that in reply to Israel’s cry to God for help God sent His prophet to remind them what He did in the past for the people of Israel. However, in verse 10 God also reminds them of what He told them, “I said to you, ‘I am the Lord your God; do not worship the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.’ And in the last sentence of the verse, God tells them of their disobedience. “But you have not listened to me.”
Israel was very clearly living in disobedience to what God said in the first and second of the ten commandments, Exodus 20:3-5 NLT, 3 “You must not have any other god but me. 4 “You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. 5 You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection for any other gods.
One other possible reason God said what He said in verse 10 is because when living in disobedience to God’s word and in sin, it becomes a normal way of life in spite of the fact the person says they know and love God. Jesus tells us the following in John 14:15, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.” And in 1 John 5:3 John tells us very clearly, “This is love for God: to obey his commands.”
We always need to ask God humbly in prayer if there are any areas in our lives in which we are disregarding God’s Word by living in disobedience and sin by accepting as normal and adapting our lifestyles to what our culture says is normal?
The “worship the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.”, ver. 10, that Israel accepted and considered as a normal way of life, was the immoral and spiritual depravity of what was mentioned in verse 1, “the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord”.
Starting with verse 11 we see Gideon, the man who God chose to deliver Israel from seven years (ver.1) of oppression and destruction by the, “…the Midianites, Amalekites and other eastern peoples invaded the country.” (ver. 3).
Next week we will be studying the four points that Warren Wiersbe mentions in his commentary concerning Gideon “Before the Lord could use Gideon in His service, He had to deal with four doubts that plagued him and were obstacles to his faith. These doubts can be expressed in four questions.”
Pastor John
