The judges of Israel

Gideon

The fearful hero · During the Midianite oppression · Delivered Israel from Midian · The country was in quietness forty years

Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to hide it from the Midianites when the angel of the LORD greeted him as a mighty man of valour. Fearful and full of questions, he asked for sign after sign, tore down his father's altar to Baal by night, and then, with only three hundred men and a trumpet and torch in every hand, watched God rout a vast army. He refused the crown, but the golden ephod he made became a snare to Israel.

And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him, and said unto him, The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valour.Judges 6:12 (KJV)

His story from Scripture

Israel did evil again, and the LORD delivered them to Midian seven years. Midian came up like locusts, with camels without number, and stripped the land bare, so that Israel made dens in the mountains and caves. When they cried unto the LORD, the angel of the LORD came and sat under an oak and found Gideon threshing wheat by the winepress, hiding it from the Midianites. The angel said, The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valour. Gideon answered with the ache of the whole book: if the LORD be with us, why then is all this befallen us, and where be all his miracles.

God sent him to save Israel, and Gideon protested that his family was poor and he was the least in his father's house. He asked for a sign, then for the fleece to be wet and the ground dry, then for the fleece dry and the ground wet. God bore with him. He tore down his father's altar of Baal, and was called Jerubbaal for it. Then God whittled his army from thirty-two thousand down to three hundred, so Israel could not say their own hand had saved them. First all who were afraid were sent home, and twenty-two thousand left; then God tested the rest at the water, and kept only the three hundred who lapped from their hands.

Even then, to steady Gideon's fear, God sent him down to creep to the edge of the enemy camp by night, where he overheard a Midianite tell a dream of a barley loaf tumbling into the camp and overturning a tent, and his fellow answer that this was nothing other than the sword of Gideon, into whose hand God had delivered Midian. Encouraged at last, Gideon divided his three hundred into three companies, and gave each man a trumpet and an empty pitcher with a lamp hidden inside. At his signal they broke the pitchers, held up the lamps, blew the trumpets, and cried, The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon. The whole host of Midian fled and the LORD set every man's sword against his fellow. Gideon pursued the Midianite kings Zebah and Zalmunna across the Jordan, and when the men of Succoth and Penuel refused his weary soldiers bread, he took the victory and then repaid their scorn. When the people begged Gideon to rule over them, and his son after him, he refused, saying, I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD shall rule over you.

His character, honestly

Gideon is the most human of the judges: brave and cowardly by turns, obedient but always needing one more sign, tearing down Baal's altar at night because he feared to do it by day. The text does not hide his doubt. And it does not hide his later failure. After the great victory he asked the people for their golden earrings and made an ephod of them, and all Israel went a whoring after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his house. He took many wives, and a concubine in Shechem bore him a son he named Abimelech, which means my father is king, a shadow of the very crown he had refused. The man who pulled down one idol made another, and the seeds of the next disaster were sown in his own household.

How God used him despite his weakness

Gideon is the clearest proof in the book that God saves not by human strength but by his own power through weak and fearful people. God deliberately reduced the army until victory could only be a miracle. He met Gideon's fear with patience, answering sign after sign, meeting the trembling man where he was. The mighty man of valour was a title of grace, not a description of the man; it was what God would make him, not what God found. And even when Gideon later failed, the deliverance still stood, because it had never depended on Gideon's goodness in the first place.

The cycle deepens

Gideon's story runs the familiar course, evil, oppression, crying out, deliverance, and forty years of quiet. But the darkening is plain. The deliverer himself ends by making an idol, and his refusal of the crown is undone by his son's grasping for it. The rest lasted only as long as Gideon lived, and as soon as he was dead the people turned again to Baal and forgot both the LORD and the house of Gideon. Each turn of the wheel drops lower than the last.

How he points to Christ

Gideon shows that God delights to save through the weak, so that the glory is his alone, and in that he points to the God who would save the world through a manger and a cross. But Gideon also points to Christ by contrast. He refused an earthly crown, yet failed his people and made an idol; Jesus is the King who truly rules, who never fails and never leads his people astray. Gideon's word, the LORD shall rule over you, is the longing of the whole book, and it is answered in the King who has come to reign forever.

A note on honesty: the book of Judges is one of the darkest and most candid books in the Bible, and it does not flatter its own heroes. The failures named above are the ones Scripture itself records. We do not whitewash them, because the point of the book is not how good the judges were, but how faithful God was to a people who could not save themselves, and how deeply they, and we, need the true Deliverer.

Related: Previous: Deborah and Barak · Next: Abimelech · The Kings of Israel and Judah · All the judges of Israel