P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

“JUST A MINUTE HERE, GOD”

There was a story in the Los Angeles Times a while ago about the perils and difficulties of being a military recruiter. We didn’t save it, and I don’t remember for sure the branch, but it seems that this one officer in the Marines had been assigned to a difficult outpost. It was his task to persuade young people that Semper Fi – the celebrated slogan of the United States Marine Corps – was what they should adopt in their own lives. And of course, once you sign on the dotted line and get your head shaved and get your bag packed for boot camp . . . you’re in for a while. There’s no going back. You can’t change your mind if you don’t like the aftershave your D.I. – drill instructor – is wearing.

And this guy simply wasn’t having any luck getting high school kids to catch the vision of being among “The Few. The Proud. The Marines.” After six months, nine months of full-time work, he had maybe signed up one student, and had a mushy maybe from a couple others. It was a big commitment, and not that many were ready to don uniforms and board an aircraft carrier bound for Baghdad.

Do you ever feel like saying to God, “Uh, I’m not sure”? I guess we can’t exactly ask our heavenly Father to give us time to go and get a second opinion someplace – that would be ludicrous when you think about it – but there are times when we’re just not ready. We think we trust Him, but we’re not positive.

Well, friend, our Bible study this week and next is about one of the most celebrated cases ever where a person says: “Hang on, God – not so fast now. I gotta think it over.” And after God patiently gives this person a miracle – a personalized, one-on-one miracle just to prove His good intentions to one guy – Gideon turns right around and asks God to run the test results again, this time flip-flopping the parameters. He makes God win the chess game twice, once using the white characters, and the second time the black.

I think most of us remember at least two things about this colorful Old Testament character. First of all, our friend Gideon is famous for what we call “putting out a fleece.” By the way, if you want to go to Yahoo or Google and just type in that expression, “putting out a fleece” – in other words, asking God for a specific sign – there are a lot of Internet web sites out there discussing the ramifications of telling God: “Hang on, I don’t know about You. Mama used to warn me about Marine recruiters who want me to go to war in an army of just 300 soldiers.” Should we give Gideon high marks for getting his fleeces answered, or low marks for making the requests in the first place?

Which, of course, leads to the second thing we all remember about General Gideon. With a motley collection of just 300 ragtag soldiers, he wiped out a Midianite army of some 135,000 trained fighting men. That sounds like an elite commando force, but Gideon’s guys didn’t have AK-47s or tanks or nuclear weapons of any kind. Just bugles and blow torches.

So, with the clanging of steel all around us, and the smell of napalm in the morning air, we want to spend some Bible study time around these two issues. Is it wrong to ask God to show us His credentials, to do the fleece trick both ways for our satisfaction? And then, just how successfully can we face our own Midianite moments in life when heaven is on our side?

Our story starts in the book of Judges, chapter six, and it isn’t a good beginning for God’s people. Instead of saying, “Show us a sign,” they were to the point of saying to God, “You know what? Don’t show us anything. Don’t bother.” They were essentially ignoring heaven. Here’s the intro:

“Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and for seven years He gave them into the hands of the Midianites. Because the power of the Midianites was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves and strongholds.”

In a way, what we have here is the classic struggle, often recounted in literature or films, of the “villagers,” or townies, versus the visiting prep students, the rich dormitory kids. The New International Version has an extended description of the demographics here, and they put it in these terms. Listen:

“The story of Gideon begins,” they write, “with a graphic portrayal of one of the most striking facts of life in the Fertile Crescent: the periodic migration of nomadic people from the Aramean desert INTO the settled areas of Palestine. Each spring the tents of the bedouin herdsmen appear overnight almost as if by magic, scattering on the hills and fields of the farming districts.”

So while the children of Israel were trying to settle in, build homes, plant crops, and shop every Sunday afternoon at the local Albertson’s after taking the kids to the mall and soccer practice, their lives were being invaded annually by these outsiders. And it wasn’t just a case of the visitors sending their children to your local public school. It got a lot more violent than that. Here’s the rest of the NIV report:

“Conflict between these two ways of life (herdsmen and farmers) was inevitable. In the Biblical period, the vast numbers and WARLIKE practice of the herdsmen reduced the village people to near vassalage.”

Here are verses 3-5 of the war bulletin:

“Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, the Midianites, Amalekites and other eastern people” – more about that in a moment – “invaded the country. 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. 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 ravish it.”

These same NIV scholars suggest that Midian, as dominant as it sounds here, didn’t think they could take on Israel all by themselves, so they were constantly allying themselves with other tribes, like the Moabites or Amalekites, getting together federations for these yearly invasions. It’s much like in the popular board game, Risk, where sometimes the red armies and the black armies decide to gang up together against the green armies so they can wipe him out and get all of South America. But here in the book of Judges the invading coalitions weren’t just rolling dice – three cubes against two. It was a deadly sport, and the nation of Israel could almost set their watches by the first appearance of soldiers on the horizon. It was like the return of the swallows to Capistrano, except that these visitors had swords and spears. And because God’s chosen people had flagrantly apostatized from God and turned their backs on Him, He actually permitted these godless nations to dominate Israel. Could He have prevented it? Certainly. Did He have the power? No question about it. But there are times when God wants to communicate the plain reality that His fullest blessings and His most ironclad protections can only happen when we obediently cooperate with His will for us. You can’t go to His embassy if you refuse to carry His passport.

And you know, friend, it’s the same now. All of you who have college kids away at school – speaking of dormitories – have had to explain to them that tuition support and money for textbooks and letting them use the family VISA card for gas are privileges that only keep on as long as their GPA stays where it should. Not because you’re mean, but because you want to protect their abundant future. Endless keg parties aren’t going to fulfill their dreams or yours, and so you’re not going to fund a lot of boisterous Saturday nights.

The good news is that even when God’s people have strayed, God is willing to take their phone calls. He communicates. What He says is straightforward, but He doesn’t screen Israel’s calls. Here’s a bit more, beginning in verse 7:

“When the Israelites cried to the Lord because of Midian, He sent them a prophet, who said, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I brought you up out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. I snatched you from the power of Egypt and from the hand of all your oppressors. I drove them from before you and gave you their land. I said to you, “I am the Lord your God: do not worship the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.” But you have not listened to Me.’”

I think I got an e-mail or two just about like that from a certain Joe Melashenko when I was a college freshman, except that it arrived by Pony Express, of course. But you know, friend, when God sends a prophet, it’s done out of love. When He picks out a Gideon and works military miracles through him, it’s because He wants to give us our freedom back. All through this colorful story of wet-and-dry fleeces and victory against the insurmountable odds, we find God caring and overruling, always for good.

And the point for us today is this: when it does come time and He asks us to sign on the dotted line, the best response should be: “Got a pen? Show me where.”