One altar, and the cross it points to

Gideon's Altar, The LORD Is Peace

A frightened man threshing wheat in a winepress, hiding his grain from raiders, is not where you expect to meet the angel of the Lord. Yet that is where Judges 6 finds Gideon, and there God addresses him as a mighty man of valor, a title that must have sounded like irony to a man crushed by fear. The visit unsettles him. When he realizes he has seen the angel of the Lord face to face, he is sure he will die. But the word that comes is peace. Judges 6:23 tells him not to fear, that he shall not die. And Gideon responds by building an altar and giving it a name, recorded in Judges 6:24, Jehovahshalom, which means the Lord is peace. It is a small altar built by a trembling man, but its name became a testimony that has outlasted his fear. It marks the place where a frightened soul found peace with God.

“Then Gideon built an altar there unto the LORD, and called it Jehovahshalom: unto this day it is yet in Ophrah of the Abiezrites.”Judges 6:24

The altar in Scripture

Judges 6 opens in a dark season. Israel had done evil, and for seven years Midian oppressed them so severely that they made dens in the mountains and caves, and their harvests were stripped bare. Into this misery God sent a prophet, and then the angel of the Lord came and sat under an oak at Ophrah, where Gideon was secretly threshing wheat by the winepress to hide it from the Midianites. The scene is one of national and personal defeat. The angel's greeting in Judges 6:12, that the Lord was with him as a mighty man of valor, met with Gideon's honest protest. If the Lord was with them, why had all this befallen them, and where were the wonders their fathers had told of? He felt abandoned and small, the least in his family, his clan the poorest in Manasseh. The dialogue is remarkably candid, a man arguing his weakness against a commission he cannot yet believe. Gideon asked for a sign and prepared an offering. Judges 6:19 through 21 tell how he brought a young goat and unleavened cakes, and the angel touched them with the tip of his staff, and fire rose out of the rock and consumed them. Then the angel departed from his sight. Fire from the rock, an offering accepted, was the confirmation that this was truly the presence of God, and it filled Gideon with dread. Judges 6:22 records his fear that he had seen the angel of the Lord face to face and would die. But the Lord answered him in Judges 6:23, Peace be unto thee, fear not, thou shalt not die. In response Gideon built an altar and called it Jehovahshalom, the Lord is peace, as Judges 6:24 records, and it stood in Ophrah as a lasting witness. Only after this encounter, grounded in peace, was Gideon sent to tear down his father's altar to Baal and eventually to face Midian.

What it comes to mean

The order of the story is the heart of its meaning. Gideon is not first sent to fight and then given peace as a reward. He is given peace first, at an altar, and only then commissioned for the battle. The altar of Jehovahshalom stands at the beginning of his obedience, not the end of it. Peace with God is the ground the fearful stand on before they are asked to do anything at all. Notice that the peace came to a man who felt exactly the opposite of peaceful. Gideon was hiding, doubting, arguing, and convinced he was about to die. God did not wait for him to summon courage or resolve his questions before speaking peace to him. The word came into the middle of his fear, unearned and steadying. This is not the peace of a man who has conquered his anxiety; it is the peace God gives to the anxious. We should be careful not to sentimentalize the name. Jehovahshalom does not promise that Gideon's circumstances will be easy. Midian is still encamped, the danger is still real, and the very next command is a costly and dangerous act of obedience. The peace is not the absence of threat but the presence of God as friend rather than judge. The altar declares who God is toward Gideon, and on that settled relationship a frightened man can begin to move. That an altar carries this name is itself instructive. Altars are places of sacrifice, of blood and fire and the meeting of the holy God with sinful people. To name such a place the Lord is peace is to say that peace with God is found precisely at the altar, at the place of offering. It is not found by avoiding God in the winepress but by meeting Him at the appointed place. Gideon's fear that nearness to God meant death was answered by an altar that renamed that nearness as peace.