All the generations of the ‘fearful’ Gideon
A lot happened within the camp of the Israelites since God gave Moab into their hands and made an example of Balaam, son of Beor, the Midianite diviner.
Many stories of note have occurred, but another character that I think is worth reflecting on is Gideon, the fearful guy who has become a symbol for ministers who are reluctant to honour God’s call on their life.
Gideon’s story started like the typical story of just about any other person or event in the book of Judges. I don’t know why the book of Leviticus and Numbers gets smoked and Joshua sits pretty like an Egyptian queen. Besides the battle of Jericho, most of Joshua is like a written map with no pictures. Joshua as a book is incredibly boring, after a few battles, the book soon tapers into a long drawn-out list of land allocations and no one is talking about it (tears).
I said the book of Gideon is typical because by the time we get to the book of Judges, there was a clear pattern of the Israelites doing what was evil in God’s sight (mostly idol worship which usually involved sexual immorality with the pagan tribes in honour of their gods). Once this happened, the pagan tribes would go to battle with them, win and then oppress them in the land that God gave them. The same happened with Gideon.
God came to him at the height of one of Israel’s sufferings. It was so bad that Israelites were hiding in caves and forest as a result of their immorality.
Gideon aptly represents the reluctant, skeptical minister. He could not reconcile the happenings around him with the reality of God being with anyone. So when the angel of the Lord told Him “I am with you,” Gideon, pointed to what he was surrounded by.
Judges 6:13
“Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.”
Ultimately, it is more blessed to trust, have faith and hope in God, even when circumstances surrounding us do not match what His promises are to us, but the story of Gideon gives us proof that God is benevolent enough to give a skeptic some grace.
You also start to understand Gideon’s skepticism when you see his background. In a nation like Israel, who you are, where you are from, and such were a big deal. And poor Gideon was from a weak clan in a half-tribe. Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh became half-tribes in Israel, Gideon was from Manasseh.
Gideon gathered an army of 22,000 men for the Lord, but God stripped that number down to 300 and then reassured him.
Helped by Yahweh, he won the war and secured an era of peace for the Israelites, which is where we like to end the story.
But this is not the full story.
There’s a kind of repetition that occurs in Christianity that makes it hard for us to fully conceptualize what the writer is saying because we presumptuously assume that we understand the words. But words connote incidences, happenings, and bridges being created to merge varying contexts.
We say for instance that prominent biblical characters were men like us, but we never ask, “In what sense?” The sense in which biblical characters are similar to us can only be determined when we appreciate and correlate their full stories to what is happening in our day.
Gideon’s story takes a downward turn after his death.
The Israelites failed to honour his family, but one of his sons, Abimelek, rose and demanded that his father be honoured. He convinced the people to make him judge of Israel and then with his new found power, he went home and killed all his father’s sons save one who escaped.
Isn’t it interesting how the old testament reads like ancient lore? Hollup… the old testament is ancient lore.
Judges 9:1–5
‘Abimelek son of Jerub-Baal went to his mother’s brothers in Shechem and said to them and to all his mother’s clan,
“Ask all the citizens of Shechem, ‘Which is better for you: to have all seventy of Jerub-Baal’s sons rule over you, or just one man?’ Remember, I am your flesh and blood.”
When the brothers repeated all this to the citizens of Shechem, they were inclined to follow Abimelek, for they said, “He is related to us.”
They gave him seventy shekels of silver from the temple of Baal-Berith, and Abimelek used it to hire reckless scoundrels, who became his followers.
He went to his father’s home in Ophrah and on one stone murdered his seventy brothers, the sons of Jerub-Baal. But Jotham, the youngest son of Jerub-Baal, escaped by hiding. ‘
Bruh, I’m not sure what the family values were prevalent in Israel at the time, but they must have been pretty broken mehn.
Eventually, a man named Gaal rose against Abimelek and stirred the people against him. An indignant governor informed Abimelek and he went to battle with the people. Abimelek started to advance against them and soon, they had to hide out in strong towers.
Unfortunately, Abimelek set about a thousand of them on fire in the tower outside the city.
However, his victory was short-lived because as he approached another strong tower that was in the inner city, a woman spotted him from afar and threw down a stone, cracking Abimelek’s skull. Unwilling to die by a woman’s hand, Abimelek told his armor bearer to draw his word and plunge him through and this was the end of the reign of Gideon’s generation in Israel.
This series of events, though grim do provide a powerful imagery for the concept of a strong tower as a powerful hiding place in times of trouble.
Not much is known about Jotham or what became of him since he went into hiding, but he was the only son of Gideon who survived him.
My next entry in this series would probably be about Ehud, the left-handed Judge who snuck into the enemy’s camp and stabbed a really fat king and Samson (just because it’s him lol). They’re incredibly quirky and I hope I get to write something funny about them.
I hope that in the future, I get to share more of the things that stood out to me from studying my bible and getting to know my God. I invite you to this same community of God-knowers who have faith in and believe the testimony of the man Jesus Christ who was God in the flesh, who died for your sins and was resurrected for the justification of anyone who believes this good news; that it pleased God to punish Jesus for your sins and resurrect him as you, so that the urge to sin against God is no longer irresistible to anyone who believes.
If you need a bit more context, you can start from here
https://www.youtube.com/live/BoeaFTvC5HM?si=ghO8PL9ApPwbGSlG
Love and cheers.
