The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites.
When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” “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.”
The Lord turned to him and said, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?” Judges 6:11-14
Gideon is having a bad time. His people, Israel, are under the thumb of the ferocious Midianites, who have a terrifying new weapon of war: camels, hundreds and thousands of camels.
Things are so bad that Gideon is reduced to threshing the family’s wheat-crop in a wine-vat: a job that really needs an open space and a stiff breeze to blow the husks away, not just a stone bath designed for treading out the grapes. That shows how desperate he is to keep what he’s doing secret from the Midianites.
So Gideon is doing a job for his father that’s both inefficient – a bit like when you have to dry the washing on radiators and bits of furniture because you can’t put it on the line or in a machine - and humiliating. We can imagine his mood.
A stranger comes and sits down to watch. I doubt if this did much to improve Gideon’s mood. After a bit he, the stranger, speaks. Not “These are difficult days, aren’t they?” or “You’re doing a great job – keep your chin up!” or even “Keep at it, these times can’t last for ever”.
No: he says, incredibly, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior”.
You’d need to ask an expert in biblical Hebrew what the Hebrew is for “Come again?” or “Pull the other one!” or “You can’t be serious!” But something like that, I imagine, is what Gideon thought on hearing the stranger’s words.
His actual reply, though, is far more polite: “Pardon me, my Lord… but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?”
Yes, the age-old question: Why, Lord?
It’s hard to imagine a more natural response. The stranger’s words simply don’t correspond with reality - if anything, God has abandoned them, surely? So Gideon asks for an explanation. And the key thing about the incident – the thing that has application for all God’s people in every generation – is that God gave him not an explanation but a job: “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand…”
I wonder if it was at this point that Gideon began to get an inkling of who the stranger was. We need to remember that in the Bible angels tend to look pretty much like human beings, and when Gideon called him “my Lord”, that was probably just a polite form of address, like “Sir”. But what this man is saying is so very strange that Gideon finds himself looking at him very closely indeed. He doesn’t look like some kind of crank or deranged person, so could it be, could it just possibly be…?
Well, as the story unfolds it becomes clear that the stranger is indeed an angel – indeed, three or four times he is simply called “the Lord”. Gideon is in the presence of God himself, and in a few minutes there will be a display of pyrotechnics to prove it.
There are various lessons we can draw from this story. But the one I want to focus on is the one I mentioned a moment ago: Gideon asked for an explanation: but God gave him a job instead.
We often feel very puzzled about what’s going on in our lives. This may be on a big front - the coronavirus pandemic is an obvious example. Or it may be on a more personal front - why have I become ill, or my business collapsed, or that relationship broken down, or that job not been offered to me?
I don’t think God minds if we question him – he did, after all, put up with the questioning of Job for quite a long time! But we might as well get used to the idea that very likely he won’t satisfy our curiosity; what matters is what we end up doing to put the situation right. He told Gideon, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand”. Roll up your sleeves, Gideon, and get busy! Which is exactly what he did.
Regarding the pandemic, depending on our circumstances we might be tempted to give in to despair, or just to become listless and drained of energy. It may not be easy to see precisely what God is calling each of us to do. But as long as God gives us another day of life, there is something for us to do, however modest and ordinary-seeming – befriending a neighbour when we meet them in the street, contacting a forgotten friend, volunteering for some task, being specially patient and considerate at work. The only way to find out is to ask God in prayer, and then leave ourselves wide open to whatever he might say.
There’s a bit of the story I have glossed over, but it’s vitally important. In verse 14 the Lord says to Gideon “Am I not sending you?”, and in verse 16, “I will be with you”.
If we know that, what else do we really need to know?
Heavenly Father, my head is always full of questions and perplexities, especially when things are hard. But please help me to leave them trustingly in your hands, and to get on with doing whatever it is you are calling me to do. Amen.
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