That's All You Need to Know

For His divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness. 2 Peter 1:3

I was thinking about Gideon some more. His story is probably best known for giving us the phrase “putting out a fleece”. Gideon offered a sacrifice to the Lord and the Angel of the Lord sent out fire from His staff to consume the offering. Gideon was terrified, but also encouraged that it wasn’t merely a hallucination. He was emboldened enough that he risked alienating his family by tearing down his father’s Baal altar. His father actually intervened on Gideon’s behalf against the neighbors who were offended by the altar’s destruction, saying, in effect, if Baal is really a god, he can deal with Gideon himself. This statement gave Gideon his nickname, Jerubbaal, “Baal contends”.

Prior to going to battle, Gideon requested a sign from the Lord. He put a fleece on the ground overnight. The next morning the ground of the threshing floor was dry, but the fleece was soaked. Not content with that sign, Gideon reversed his request the following night. The next morning the fleece was perfectly dry but the ground was wet with dew.

In the verse at the top, the Apostle Peter assures us that we have everything we need for “life and godliness”. The provision is given through knowledge of God. I suppose it goes without saying that this is not “head” knowledge or factual knowledge – I’ll say it anyway. A person can read the Bible daily and know the facts of it well without having gnosis of God. One of my grandfathers was an agnostic socialist who read the Bible regularly – mainly, I think, to find things that he could use to annoy my very devout grandmother.

The knowledge Peter speaks of is an intimate knowledge. Preachers often use the phrase “a personal relationship with God”. What they are trying to convey with a sort of amusing prudery is the kind of relationship spouses have with one another. Peter could have said that we need to know God in the biblical sense.

It’s a sad fact of the decline of our culture that so few people really grasp the power of faithfulness. To know someone I can fully and perfectly trust is indeed a rare blessing in the 21st Century -- rare perhaps because it requires trustworthiness on my side as well. Husbands and wives should be an earthly metaphor of the soul’s marriage with the divine.

Under the Old Covenant, people who knew God intimately were few and rose like lightning rods above the majority. Moses was one, David another, perhaps Daniel, Samuel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. Include the twelve other writing prophets along with Elijah and Elisha, and it is still a very select group over the course of 1400 years. Men like Gideon had faith and were obedient but remained always a little tentative and unsure.

It is like Isaiah speaking of Christ in chapter 53, “by His stripes we are healed” -- it was being done. Peter quotes the prophet after the Cross and says, “by His stripes we were healed” -- a done deal, an absolute certainty and accomplished fact.

I am not implying that there’s something wrong with a person asking for a “fleece”, or that God will not reveal Himself to us in some miraculous and undeniable ways. He gives us signs – from the wonderful little synchronicities we delight in to divine billboards that a purblind pig couldn’t miss. You don’t stop giving your wife flowers just because you’ve been married thirty or forty years.

Through the Cross Christ made the way for “whosoever will” to enter into that Divine marriage, to know God and to be known. Through that intimate relationship we have all we need to live and to fulfill the purpose of our creation. As Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life and have it in abundance.”

We need nothing more than knowledge of God, but how do we reach that place of “knowing God”? Simply reading the words in the Bible or any revealed text is not enough. I am inclined to quote John 7 :17, imitating George MacDonald, as a starting place. But a picture might be helpful.

In the film Jeremiah Johnson, the protagonist acquires a beautiful girl of the Flathead tribe as a wife – quite suddenly and inadvertently. The girl, Swan, speaks French but no English and the trapper knows no French or Flathead. As they are attempting to share a meal, Jeremiah tries conversing but realizes the futility of it. Finally he points to himself and says, “Fine figure of a man. Mighty hunter. Yes?” The Swan looks at him placidly. “Yes?” he says again, encouragingly. At last after some effort, he gets her to repeat the word. “Yes,” she replies with obviously minimal comprehension.

Satisfied, he settles back and says, “Yes. That’s all you need to know. For now.”

God Calls Them in the Air

The Angel of the Lord came, and He sat under the oak that was in Ophrah, which belonged to Joash, Abiezrite. His son Gideon was threshing wheat in the wine vat in order to hide it from the Midianites. Then the Angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” Judges 6:11,12

Samson, of course, gets all the attention in Judges, but, to me, Gideon is at least as interesting – more so in some ways.

As I mentioned yesterday, Judges records a number of cycles. When Gideon is called, Israel was at one of its nadirs. The Midianites, largely nomadic, would sweep in and pillage Israel. Normally, threshing was done in a high, open area to allow the breeze to catch the lighter chaff as the grain was tossed upward, making the separation easier. Gideon is down in a wine vat, essentially a hole cut into the rock, hiding from the Midianites while he flailed away, sweating and laboring to get enough grain separated out to have something to eat. It was a miserable situation brought on by Israel’s abandonment of God.

Paul, speaking of Abraham in Romans 4:16, 17, says: He is the father of us all in God’s sight. As it is written: I have made you the father of many nations. He believed in God, who gives life to the dead and calls things into existence that do not exist.

When the Lord shows up, Gideon does not look like a mighty warrior. As is evident in his subsequent conversation, Gideon does not see himself as a warrior or significant in any way.

God says to an old, childless man with an elderly, barren wife, “You are the father of nations.”

He says to a man cowering in a hole, “You are a mighty warrior.”

I am not merely what I appear to be, and -- though there is a truth in “as a man thinketh in his heart so is he” – I am not limited to what I have come to think about myself. I am what God says I am. I am what God sees in me.

The Lord declares that He is with Gideon. Gideon responded by looking at the disastrous situation of himself and his people. “If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? I’ve heard all the stories about Egypt, the Red Sea, and the conquest of Canaan, but that’s all the past. It looks like God has abandoned us and handed us over to Midian.”

How often I have said the same thing when push came to shove. “God has abandoned me.” It’s not true. I don’t think there are always easy answers. It would be simple if I could say that I am always to blame for my own suffering. In fact, it sometimes appears that none of my good deeds go unpunished, as they say. Nevertheless, God does not hand me over to the enemy any more than He handed Job over. I am the clay. He is the Potter. He shapes me by His own hand, and then there is the fire – but we’ll leave that for another day.

Let’s go back to Gideon who had all the excuses. He was of Manasseh – not the most prestigious of the tribes. Not only that, his family was small and insignificant even within Manasseh. He is the youngest of the sons – hence, the least important, and his father, Joash, was an idolater, having built an altar to Baal.

As Gideon lays out all the reasons why he is not the guy, the Lord responds:

“Go in the strength you have ... Am I not sending you? ... I will be with you.”

That’s really the bottom line. I have to go in the strength I have. How can that possibly be enough? I don’t have what it takes. I don’t have the education. I don’t have the intellect. I don’t have the eloquence, the charm, the beauty, the physique.

God says, “Don’t worry about what you don’t have. Take what you have and go. That’s the key. Step out there. This is God talking to you – think about it. I am right there with you. Do you somehow think that I don’t know what I am doing?”

So today, in spite of the obstacles, in spite of my fears, I will go in the strength that I have and see what happens.