As this story from the Book of Judges begins, the enemy Midianites are encamped about 7 km north of Gideon and the people with him, who are in camp beside the spring of Harod. In Hebrew, the spring of Harod means the spring of trembling, which fits the story line, and which also fits the inner meaning, in this story line on our own lives.

This is Part 2 of a three-part study on the story of Gideon that Coleman Glenn and I have been doing. The sub-title we've given this series is “Weakness and Strength.” Throughout the story you see these themes coming through. In part 1, Gideon was called to lead his people against the massive Midianite enemy army. But he's not feeling strong; he’s hiding in a winepress when the Angel of Jehovah says to him, “Jehovah is with you, you mighty man of valour!”

Gideon asks for a sign - some proof - and the angel makes fire come out of a rock and consume Gideon’s offering. In the strength of that Gideon tears down the altar of Baal in the town, blows a trumpet, and gathers the people together for battle.

But then, he feels weakness. Gideon needs another sign that the Lord will really be with him. There’s similar weakness and strength in our early efforts at spiritual growth. The call of Gideon in us is some sense of a desire for something deeper, something spiritual, something more than the pursuit of pleasure that the Midianites represent.

The tearing down the altar of Baal is a commitment to do something for more than just our own pleasure and enjoyment. When we embark on trying to become a better, more spiritual, person don’t we also experience doubts - doubts about what it is that we’re going to do as spiritual people? Or doubts about our ability to actually follow through with our intentions?

That brings us to this story, in Judges 7. Gideon and the people are gathered together for battle but are at a place of trembling. What we’re going to explore today is how the Lord takes what we have, refines, mobilises and equips it with the power of His truth to go and rout the Midianites.

Finding the Right People for the Fight:

The first task, at this point in the story, is to find the right people for the fight. There they are, outnumbered 5 to 1, and Jehovah says something to Gideon that probably sounded crazy to him:

“The people who are with you are too many…”

Gideon may well have thought, “We were doing pretty well to get 32,000 people to come when the odds are this bad, and You want less?”

The Lord knew that if that many people went to battle and they won they would then think that it was because of them that the battle had been won. When we find ourselves with some motivation to change and become a better person we can have a lot of our self involved: “I’m deciding to do the right thing!".

That's admirable in one sense and misguided in another. We need to realise that it’s only through the Lord’s strength and the people He picks that we will have victory.

Round 1: “Whoever is fearful and afraid, let him turn back…”

In the story, there are two rounds of removing people from the army. First, Gideon is told to say,

“Whoever is fearful and afraid, let him turn back and depart at once from Mount Gilead” (Judges 7:3). “And twenty-two thousand of the people turned back, and ten thousand remained” (Judges 7:3). These are the people who get behind a cause - sort of. There are the people in the front of the group, leading the charge saying, “Yeah!!” And then there are the people who are just as happy to be somewhere towards the back saying, “Yeah…”. If you ask them, “Do you want to be here?”, their response might be, “Yeah… sure.” And if you ask further, “Actually, would you rather go home?”, their response is, “Yes! See ya!”

If we look within ourselves when we’re trying to change we’ll probably find that there are a fair number of ideas and thoughts that aren’t quite on board. If you imagine a natural example of someone deciding that they’re going to be a better student, they might say, “Yeah, I’m going to develop my study skills and be proactive and optimise my time management.” And you ask them, “What does that mean? What will that look like?”

They’d say, “Uhh…. I dunno. But that’s the sort of stuff you’re supposed to do, right?”

The number of people that turned back, 22,000, is significant. In the Word, 12 means fullness, completeness, all, like the 12 tribes of Israel, 12 disciples, and 12 gates into the Holy City New Jerusalem.

The number 11 is almost but not quite 12, not fully there, not completely integrated into a whole. The 22,000 is a multiple of 11, and has a similar meaning. Those religious ideas that we don’t fully get or buy into are not going to be effective against the Midianites, so it’s better if they just go home.

Round 2: “Everyone who laps from the water with his tongue, as a dog laps…”

So what in us IS fit to fight against the Midianites? Jehovah says that the 10,000 soldiers still with Gideon are still too many. This is the sort of description that just screams that there must be some sort of deeper, symbolic meaning in the story. Otherwise all these weird-seeming details would be just the whims of a bizarre god.

The people are commanded to go down to the water and, though it’s not exactly clear from the text what it looked like, those that drank like dogs were the ones who were selected. The teachings of the New Church provide this explanation of the significance of this difference.

In Apocalypse Explained 455:9, it says, “Midian” here means those who do not care for truth, because they are merely natural and external; therefore Midian was beaten by those who “lapped the waters in the hand with the tongue like a dog,” who symbolize people who have an appetite for truths. From a natural affection, they seek to know truths, a “dog” meaning appetite and eagerness, “waters” truths, and “lapping them with the tongue” to have an appetite for and to eagerly seek.

This lapping represents the part of us that really wants to know the truth, the part of us that is so eager that we’re bouncing up and down as our Master brings the water dish. You might think, “I’m not sure that there’s much of me that is that eager to learn the truth.” There were only 300 men out of an original 32,000. That’s not much, and it's probably just a small part of our minds, but it’s enough. It's what the Lord selects in us.

To identify the part of you that is represented by these 300 men, I find it’s helpful to think of people who just love a certain subject area and lap up any new information they can get on it. Think of a kid who memorises tons of facts about rugby or cricket and can tell you what the final score was from a game from the 1970s. Or a teenage girl who knows everything about her favourite band. There are times when we just love learning more about a certain subject.

Do you know any people who have that sort of passion about truths from the Word? It can be helpful to try to pick up their infectious enthusiasm and eagerness. I had a professor in university who taught ancient history - not the most exciting of courses to the average college student. She had such genuine, infectious enthusiasm about her subject area that it would rub off on her students. People would say, “I never knew that someone could care so much about an old broken pot.”

Think of those people in your life who have that sort of passion for learning from the Word and look for that in yourself - even if it’s just 0.9% of yourself (which is what you get if you divide 300 by 32,000). That part of you that’s eager to learn the truth - that’s what the Lord will use to rout the Midianites.

Seeing the Camp and Overhearing the Dream:

After the second round of winnowing, Gideon has the group that Jehovah has approved for him to take into battle, but there’s one final thing that Jehovah has him do before the battle to give him the courage to attack. He says, “afterward your hands shall be made firm to go down against the camp” (7:11).

At nighttime He tells Gideon to take his servant, Purah, and sneak down to the camp of the Midianites. One thing that happens in this part of the story is that he sees the enemy as a whole for the first time and it’s overwhelming. “Now the Midianites and Amalekites and all the sons of the East, were lying in the valley as numerous as locusts; and their camels were without number, as the sand by the lip of the sea in multitude” (7:12).

This is what the life of external pleasure can look like. It’s everywhere - like the sand of the beach - consumerism and self-absorption and this pandering to people’s lowest desires - it’s just saturated throughout the world we live in. And we can feel like, “Who am I to think that I won’t get caught up in all that stuff?”

But then, they go down to the camp and they overhear one man telling another about a dream he had about a baked loaf of barley bread overturning and collapsing a tent. A dream at nighttime means a dim perception of something - not a clear sight but some sense of something. This tent being knocked over and collapsing means the camp of Midian, which seemed to have such a solid hold over the children of Israel, no longer having any dwelling place there. This means us getting to have some sense that the focus on just having as much pleasure and fun as possible just doesn’t have to have as much of a hold on us as before. With the Lord’s help, we can look down on it from above and see it for what it is and say, “I don’t actually want that.” Gideon hears the interpretation that the other man gives that this dream means that God has given Midian into Gideon’s hand. Then he worships the Lord, returns to the camp and musters his men for battle.

Torches and Trumpets:

Gideon divides the men into 3 groups, gives each of them a trumpet, an empty pitcher, and a torch to go inside the pitcher. They surround the camp, blow the trumpets, break the pitchers so the torches can be seen, and yell, “The sword for Jehovah and for Gideon!”

Eagerness for the truth leads us to learn the truths that we can use to combat the enemy—trumpets and torches. The Word can seem to us like an empty pitcher sometimes—like it’s meant to hold water but it’s dry and there’s nothing there. But when we’re eager for the truth we can sometimes see that it’s actually got a torch inside it, burning and shining.

The trumpet can blast and announce the arrival of the power of Jehovah in the situation. Think about the desires for a life of pleasure and then think of these words of the Lord from the Sermon on the Mount blasting through the air like a trumpet and shining down onto where those ideas are camped:

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21)

“Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things shall be added to you. (Matthew 6:31-33).

“Every man’s sword against his companion….”

After they smash their pitchers and blow their trumpets they don’t attack: they just stand there and the Midianites destroy each other. This reveals something about Midian: it seems to be this cohesive group that is working together, like all the ideas out there about pursuing having a good time above all other things seem to be all one message. But Midian’s name in Hebrew means strife or contention.

We might think of people who pursue pleasure as being happy and fulfilled but a life that’s focused on pleasure actually is not peaceful at its heart. It’s competitive. It’s a craving, desperate want for more - for better experiences or better stories than everyone else... a cooler car, a nicer house, better clothes - more better clothes - never satisfied with what it has, always anxious that someone else has something better. It doesn’t want to commit to doing one thing because what if something better comes along? And then, even while doing something fun, there’s FOMO, fear of missing out on what other people are doing. And there’s bingeing - bingeing on TV, food, alcohol, whatever - underneath all of that is not peace and contentment but stress and unhappiness.

With the Lord’s help we can see that we don’t have to worry about that stuff. We worry about earthly treasures getting stolen or damaged but heavenly treasures can’t be stolen or broken. And we don’t need to worry about who has the best clothes and house and stuff. All those conflicting external ideas about what we should do and say and wear and go to etc. they can keep on fighting it out. We can focus on seeking first the kingdom of God and his justice.

Getting Reinforcements to Pursue the Enemy:

Then the enemy flees and Gideon and his men pursue them. Gideon calls in reinforcements. It seems that it’s fine to have extra people involved at this point. Given that some of the men he called were from the same places he’d called them from before, it seems likely that some or even many of the original 32,000 may have been involved.

The principle seems to be that as long as eagerness for the Lord’s Word leads the way, then other, less motivated or integrated ideas can fall in behind and help out. It’s important that they pursue the Midianites, to kill as many of them as possible and drive the rest all the way out of the land. When we notice that selfish desires for just having a good time are losing hold in our lives, it’s important to really drive them all the way out, to really examine ourselves and where we still have Midianite tendencies lurking.

Because Gideon's army pursues the Midianites, and calls in the help of the men from the mountains of Ephraim, they manage to even capture the two princes of Midian, Oreb and Zeeb. These princes symbolize the ruling falsities that have been in charge of our pleasure-seeking. Oreb means raven, which is a black bird with a harsh cry that in the Word is a symbol of falsity that has no interest whatsoever in what the truth is. Zeeb means wolf. A wolf in sheep’s clothing looks innocent but is actually destructive of innocence, just like certain kinds of pleasure seeking can seem like harmless fun but actually lead to destroying things that matter. It’s good that the men caught these princes and killed them.

Conclusion

In conclusion, when we look out at the world we see a lot of secularism and consumerism and people who just seem so shallow and obsessed with pointless stuff. When we compare that to the few religious people we know, the odds seem to be against us. We can think, “How is our small group ever going to have an impact against the overwhelming cultural trend?” How are my children ever going to get to adulthood without being totally corrupted and having everything good and religious stolen away by pleasure-seeking Midian?

Probably for most of us, if we’re honest, we can look inside ourselves and see that there’s part of us that buys into it - part of our minds and hearts that wants it too. We want to have the most fun, see the coolest things, have the coolest stuff. That’s when it can be so powerful to remember this story of how 300 Israelites routed 145,000 Midianites. Even the smallest bit of eagerness for the truth has the power from the Lord to win against worldliness every single time - in our lives and in other people’s lives. The Lords truths, when eagerly taken in, can allow us to see pleasure-seeking for what it is - an infighting, anxious turmoil - that we can rise above, shine the light on and drive out of our lives with the Lord’s help.

(References: Gideon: Weakness and Strength, Part 3 of 3)

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There’s a saying, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” (Orson Welles).

In part two of this series, we read about Gideon’s miraculous rout of the Midianites. With just 300 men he took on an enemy force of 145,000 and won. We often stop the story there and get our happy ending. But, in the Bible, that’s not where the story of Gideon ends. It carries on, and there’s not such a happy ending. It seems important to look at this and talk about what it means for our efforts at spiritual growth, because if we just read the success stories in the Bible we might get a rather skewed picture of what to expect in our lives.

There are two main sections of this part of the story:

1) Finishing off the Midianites (and dealing with some Israelites along the way), and

2) what happened after the battle.

The first thing that happens in this chapter is that the men of the tribe of Ephraim are angry at Gideon for not involving them in the battle from the beginning. They say, “What is this thing you have done to us by not calling us when you went to fight against the Midianites?” (Judges 8:1). Nothing has been done to them. It’s wasn't about them; it was about beating the enemy, not who about who got to do the beating.

Nonetheless, for the men of Ephraim it really seems to matter who did it. A few chapters later in the Book of Judges, they complain to another judge who just led Israelites to another great victory. They say, “Why did you go to fight the Ammonites without calling us to go with you? We’re going to burn down your house over your head” (Judges 12:1). And in that case they fight against the judge - and the judge wins and kills 42,000 of them.

The teachings of the New Church say that Ephraim represents intelligence (Secrets of Heaven 264). And when intelligence is called in from the mountains to help, by Gideon and the 300 who lapped, it’s a powerful ally. Similarly, when we have a humble desire to seek what the Lord says, then it can be really powerful to use our minds to their full extent and think through all of the ramifications of the truth which helps with capturing the selfishness that might be trying to get away. But, when they’re just the men of Ephraim on their own, they seem to represent intelligence that has a lot of pride in its own power. Watch out for the pride of Ephraim in yourself after you make some progress in your spiritual life — it might just want to destroy the humble desire to learn and follow the truth — the very thing that actually gave you victory in the first place.

Gideon and his men now carry on chasing the Midianites, trying to capture their kings, Zebah and Zalmunnah. They cross the Jordan river and come to Succoth and Penuel - two border towns near the edge of the land of Canaan.

Chasing the Midianites into this region seems to represent really trying to drive the selfish love of pleasure for its own sake (which is what is represented by Midian) right the way out of our lives — even out of our more external thoughts and habits.

Here they encounter resistance. They’re exhausted and they ask for bread to sustain them and the people of Succoth and Penuel mock them, saying, “Oh, so we should give you bread because you’re just about to capture Zebah and Zalmunnah? Right… No — not going to happen.” It’s a picture of cynicism. They’ve got elders and princes - people who’ve been around the block a few times, and a tower with well-established defenses.

There’s part of us that doesn’t believe that we can actually change our external behaviour too. But, “Jehovah said to Gideon, ‘By the three hundred men who lapped I will save you, and give the Midianites into your hand’” (Judges 7:7). They were going to capture the Midianites because Jehovah said so and they didn’t have to have any bread from Succoth and Penuel to do so.

Gideon and his men go on, attack the camp of the Midianites, “while the camp felt secure” (8:11) and capture the kings. Then they go back to Succoth and Penuel, and Gideon does something that to us seems totally brutal and unnecessary: “And he took the elders of the city, and thorns of the wilderness and briers, and with them he made the men of Succoth know. Then he tore down the tower of Penuel and killed the men of the city” (8:16-17).

I think that spiritually this is a picture of actually bringing order to our external life. The power of eagerness for the truth can tear down our cynicism. Using thorns and briers to make “the men of Succoth know” sounds like an echo of the many other times in the Word where Jehovah says, “…and then they shall know that I am Jehovah.” Jehovah is the one with the power, in case that wasn’t already clear.

Once Gideon is done with Succoth and Penuel, he deals with the kings of Midian. As we work on fighting against an evil in our lives, we gradually see more and more of what it has done to us. Gideon talks with them and this is the first time we hear that they had killed Gideon’s brothers. In the Word brothers are a symbol of charity—of love for our fellow man. How many times have we been given an opportunity to help someone and we’ve decided to do something fun instead? And so they need to be killed.

Gideon’s son, Jether, can’t do it—he’s too young— and our younger self can’t quite bring itself to really make an end to the love of pleasure for its own sake. Gideon can, though. His name means hewer or chopper.

In the positive sense this is him living out his potential—chasing the Midianites down and cutting them down. And because of this, a little further on, it says, “Thus Midian was subdued before the children of Israel, so that they lifted their heads no more. And the country was quiet for forty years in the days of Gideon” (Judges 8:28).

Can’t we stop the story there? We have to look at what happened after the battle.

After the Battle They Want Gideon to Rule Over Them

Remind me, who was it that won the battle? Jehovah, using Gideon and the 300 men who lapped. Without Jehovah, Gideon would still be cowering in a winepress somewhere while the Midianites overran the land. Jehovah didn’t need the 32 thousand men. He didn’t need the 10 thousand men. He needed 300 that were eager to follow Him, to listen to Him, to lap up His teachings.

Jehovah in Hebrew means the One who Is. The teachings of the New Church explain the meaning of this name of God in this way (from Secrets of Heaven 1735, from John Elliot's translation):

"Jehovah… [is] Love itself, to which no other attributes are appropriate than those of pure Love and so of pure Mercy towards the whole human race, that Mercy being such that it wills to save all people, to make them eternally happy, and to impart to them all that is its Own—thus out of pure Mercy and by the mighty power of love to draw towards heaven… all who are willing to follow. That Love itself is Jehovah…."

The Lord’s pure love is what won the battle for Gideon, what wins the battle against selfishness in us. It’s the driving force, the motivation, the strength, the endurance. If we didn’t have love from the Lord to want to be a good person, to care about other people, to live for something more than ourselves, we would still be nowhere, having done nothing.

But the people want Gideon to rule over them. And then his son. And then his son’s son. And on forever. Really, Gideon without Jehovah is not something you want to rule over you. To take Gideon and his line of sons after him and ask that to rule over you is to take one thread of the truth and make it everything. A hewing and chopping approach is good for some things, like getting rid of Midianites, but it's not good for everything, especially once it’s been separated from Jehovah.

A branch that abide in the vine bears much fruit but if a branch stops abiding in the vine—no matter how much fruit it bore in the past—it’s going to wither and die because there’s no life in it (John 15:4-6). The people want Gideon to be king because it looks like he’s the one who gave them victory. It looks like what made us successful was a certain approach that we took that worked in that circumstance. Our lazy selves like simple—we like one size fits all solutions.

But that is not the kind of solution that the Word provides. The Word of God is frustratingly complex at times. In one place it says, “Beat your ploughshares into swords….” (Joel 3:10). And we say, “Got it! Take the fighting approach!” But, in other places it talks about people beating their swords into ploughshares (Isaiah 2:4 ; Micah 4:3 ).

It can be hard to keep going back to the Word with eagerness to learn what it has to say. It takes patience. It take intellectual humility to say, “I don’t get it.” It takes a willingness to hear something different than what we might want to hear. When we don’t want to do that work we want Gideon rule over us instead of Jehovah and he makes us an ephod to worship.

Gideon Makes an Ephod

Gideon requests that the people give him the golden earrings from their plunder and he makes some sort of golden ephod out of it. An ephod is a priestly apron and, functionally, in the Bible they were used to get answers from God (1 Samuel 23:9-13; 30:7-8). They are symbolic of the literal sense of the Word where we get answers from God. Gideon's making an ephod for himself means giving people a substitute for the Word to get answers from. This is when we feel like we’ve had some success in becoming a spiritual person and we feel like we’ve got a good enough grasp of the Bible that we don’t actually have to read it.

To get a feel for what this looks like in real life I want to read you something from a fascinating book called Stages of Faith by James W. Fowler in which the author attempts to describe 6 different stages of development that a person’s faith can go through. Here are a few quotes from one of the many interviews that Fowler had conducted as part of his research. This an interview with a teenage girl about her faith that Fowler says is typical of Stage 3—Synthetic-Conventional Faith:

“I feel like I’m not afraid of anything now because I know what I believe in and I know what I want to do in life, and nothing could really set me off course. …. Before, if we moved… I got into people, different people, and I sort of changed as the people went. But I have learned that just the best thing is to be yourself” (p155).

When asked what she thinks God is she says, “God is different to a lot of people….I don’t go exactly by the Bible. I think you should try to make… people happy and at the same time enjoy yourself, you know? In a good kind way….” (pp155-156).

When asked what she thinks will happen to her when she dies she says, “I have this feeling, like, when I die I’m going to go to heaven because I’ve tried on earth to be good to people and I believe in God and I’m a follower” (p156).

When asked what it means to go to heaven she said, “I guess I’ll find out sometime. But, see, I don’t want to ask too many questions like that. …. I never wanted to go that much into it. I just want to do what the Bible says” (p157).

She knows what she believes and that she’s going to heaven and she just wants to do what the Bible says but she also doesn’t “go exactly go by the Bible” or want to really go that much into it. She’s got her ephod - her version of the truth which is “the best thing is to be yourself” and “try to make people happy and at the same time enjoy yourself… In a good kind way.”

That’s pretty much what the Bible says, right? The point of this is not to make fun of this teenage girl but to recognise this exact same tendency in ourselves. Beating the Midianites only gets us this far - that is, not very far at all in the big scheme of things. What about the Philistines, and the Assyrians, and the Babylonians all still to come?

The teachings of the New Church say:

If after temptation a person does not believe that the Lord alone has fought for him and brought him victory, the temptation he has undergone is merely external. Such temptation does not extend into him deeply or cause anything of faith and charity to take root. (Secrets of Heaven 8969)

At this stage, while we think we’re worshipping God, we will also be playing the harlot with this idol at the same time. And it can be a snare to us, just like it was to Gideon and his house. During Gideon’s life, “the country was quiet for forty years” (Judges 8:28) and it sounds like the people were at least still worshipping Jehovah alongside of this ephod. But, we read, “So it was, as soon as Gideon was dead, that the children of Israel turned back and again played the harlot with the Baals, and made Baal-Berith their god” (Judges 8:33).

Worshipping the Baals was the real problem in the first place. If the children of Israel had been worshipping Jehovah, the Midianites never would have been a threat. It was because they were worshipping the Baals that they were vulnerable to attack. The problem with this ephod version of the Word of God is that it can be a stepping stone right back to worshipping Baal again. And worshipping Baal is not just loving pleasure above all else: it’s “worship from the evils of the love of self and of the world” (Apocalypse Explained 160:2). It’s embracing hell, while still thinking that we’re somehow God’s chosen people.

The particular Baal that they made their god was Baal-Berith which means “lord of the covenant.” The covenant was meant to be an agreement between Jehovah and His people that they would follow His commandments and He would bless them. To worship a Baal of the covenant would seem to be a corruption of that idea - to make God and His covenant with us into our own image. To say, “I’m a good Christian and that means that I can live however I want and God is going to look after me and give me whatever I want.”

If we stop the story here with Gideon’s death and the people’s return to idolatry, it’s a pretty depressing picture. But, of course, the bigger story doesn’t stop here, there are more judges to come - more amazing victories over seemingly overwhelming odds and, too, more terrible decisions by the people who are supposed to be following Jehovah.

But the story doesn’t stop with the judges—there are the stories of the kings, good and bad, and prophets, and eventually the story of Jesus Christ and His life and death and resurrection and eventually Him calling us to be with Him in the Holy City New Jerusalem.

As we look across that whole storyline, with a willingness to acknowledge the defeats as well as the victories, one message that seems to come through is, “Don’t stop your story where you are.” Don’t think that you’re done. Keep striving to worship only Jesus Christ (who is Jehovah come down into this world to save us). Remember that is the Lord’s love—and only the Lord’s love—that will give you victory over your enemies. Remember that the Lord will save you, by the 300 men who lapped. Ignore the pride of Ephraim that wants you to think the power is in your intelligence. Destroy the cynicism of Succoth and Penuel who don’t believe change is possible. And keep going back with urgency to the Lord in His Word—stay thirsty for the truth, eager to learn, willing to follow and the Lord will give you victory and keep leading you towards a happy end.

(References: Arcana Coelestia 3021 [1-8])