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Full Episode
Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap. Yesterday we learned about Israel's first four judges, and they were all pretty good by God's standards, especially the last one, Deborah. Forty years after Deborah, the Israelites fall into sin again and are oppressed by the Midianites, who are their distant relatives through Keturah.
That's the woman Abraham married after Sarah died. The Israelites were so oppressed and afraid that they hid in caves to escape the Midianites. And the Midianites also ate all their food supply. Not cool. After seven years, as things went from bad to worse, the Israelites cried out to God. Maybe they expected him to send a judge again, a military leader to rescue them like he had in the past.
But God doesn't owe them that, and he knows they need something different at this point. He sends a prophet, someone to speak truth and call out their sin. We have no idea how they responded to this when it happened because the text immediately takes us to the next scene. Cut to a man named Gideon, hard at work, beating out wheat in a wine press.
Which is an unusual place to do that kind of thing, by the way. It's kind of like when you put the Girl Scout cookies in your sock drawer so the kids can't find them. Much like you, Gideon was trying to hide the wheat from the Midianite food stealers. Meanwhile, the angel of the Lord shows up, and this appears to be God the Son. God the Father also seems to show up here, disembodied.
It's kind of a confusing text to navigate, but it seems likely that God the Father and God the Son are both on the scene. God the Son tells Gideon that God is with him. Gideon's response is something we've probably all thought before. He basically says, The great irony is that Gideon was questioning the presence of God to the very presence of God.
God tells Gideon that he's the man to deliver Israel from this oppression, but Gideon pushes back. He's from the weakest clan in his tribe, and he's the least important person in that clan. God promises to be with him, but Gideon still doesn't know it's God he's talking to at this point, and he's skeptical.
Gideon obviously knows this man is someone important, possibly a prophet, because he offers to bake him some food. That's an especially big deal given the scarcity of food at this time. Gideon asks for a sign and offers the food. Then God the Son cooks it with his fire stick and disappears. Okay. Finally, Gideon recognizes who he's dealing with, and he panics.
God the Father tells him not to be afraid, to receive his peace. Then, in an act of worship, Gideon builds an altar there and calls it, The Lord is Peace. Yahweh Shalom. God also tells him to tear down his father's altar of Baal and his Asherah and to build an altar to God there. Then he's supposed to use the wood from the Asherah to offer a sacrifice to God.
As the least of his family, this is probably not going to earn him any brownie points with his dad. He obeys God, but he does it in the middle of the night so he doesn't get caught. But he does get caught, and the men of the town plan to kill him. But in an unexpected turn of events, his dad stands up for him.
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