READER, have you ever seen a slumbering lion in a menagerie? How quiet and harmless he looks! His enormous head reposes peacefully upon his huge fore paws, his fangs and talons are invisible, his eyes are closed, or opened only now and then to look sleepily at you, and, but that you are better informed, you would suppose the creature to be as inoffensive as some large good-natured dog. He certainly does not look so dangerous as the shaggy bison with his fiery eye and massive horns. But now only let the keeper touch him with his staff, at the same time exposing to his gaze some object of prey, and how he is changed in a moment! His form dilates as he springs from his recumbent position; his fierce eyes flash fire; his great jaws expand enormously; his talons are protruded; his ponderous head is raised; his every muscle is strung to tension; and his roar shakes the den as he bounds with desperate force at the object presented before him. His energies are all aroused, and you see before you a picture of power, ferocity, and daring hardly to be equaled in nature.
But all these features were in the slumbering lion, although, till touched by the staff, they might not have been even suspected to exist by one entirely ignorant of the creature’s nature. They were there, but not active. Now we have already seen that in natural character Gideon was not one of the lion-like men of old; no amount of rousing would have discovered in him qualities at all resembling those which they possessed. But we have also seen that there was by grace that in him which, though as yet invisible to human eyes, and even to himself, was more mighty far than the fiercest king of beasts that ever trod the desert, or shook with a roar like muttered thunder the woods in which he prowled. Yes. Who shall limit the power of FAITH? Who shall say to it, “Thus much mayest thou accomplish, and no more?” Ah, but faith, which breathed so truthfully in Gideon’s reply to the angel’s salutation, is slumbering now! Called to prove in deeds the faith which was in him, nature only speaks! As he mentally gazes on the countless hordes of Israel’s enemies, his heart fails, and he looks around for means wherewith to meet the overwhelming difficulty. Manasseh may be a powerful tribe, but Gideon’s family, although a part of it, has no influence to move them against the foe and even were it otherwise, his personal weight even in his own father’s household is wholly insufficient to rouse them to the attempt! The means — the means — alas! there are no means. “O my Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel? behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.”
How true to nature and our oft experience is all this. Difficulties no sooner present themselves than the believer’s first thought too often is to glance at the means which may be brought or left to meet them.
But patient grace can bear all this and more. Perhaps it was well for young Gideon that HE whom he took to be only a man — a prophet, was not a man at all. How sternly might Elijah have rebuked the manifest inconsistency between Gideon’s first and last reply. But no word of rebuke proceeds from the gracious mouth of him who had stooped to sit beneath the oak of Joash the idolatrous Abi-ezrite. No. Grace passes by the failure, and words of full comfort and encouragement meet the utterances of despondency and unbelief. “Surely I will be with thee, and thou shalt smite the Midianites as one man.” These are ever the ways of grace. Love leaps the barrier which our faults and failures would obtrude upon its path, passes over all and takes us to itself.
Now Gideon assumed that he who thus addressed him was only a man, a prophet. Nevertheless he takes for granted that he speaks as the Lord’s representative, and at once receives the gracious message as the word of the Lord. Faith instantly responds. Doubts and fears are given to the winds; difficulties are forgotten; means are forsaken; the Lord, the Lord is enough, only let him be assured that it is he indeed, and not a noon-day dream. “If now I have found grace in thy sight” (how full of humility are such words addressed as he intended them to be to a man only), “then show me a sign that thou talkest with me. Depart not hence, I pray thee, until I come unto thee, and bring forth my present, and set it before thee.” In glad haste he goes to prepare his offering of gratitude and love for the messenger of the Lord, and on his return “a sign” is vouchsafed him, such as he had little anticipated. Touched by the staff in the hand of the Lord, fire proceeds out of the rock and consumes the kid and the unleavened cakes, dimly understood but recognized types, to an Israelite’s faith, of Him the great Offering and Sacrifice to God of sweet-smelling savor by whom alone he could approach. Thus by the Lord’s own act Gideon was made nigh by sacrifice, and so brought into a position to serve Jehovah — a lonely worshipper in the midst of a crowd of idolaters. And what made it all the more gracious was that it was entirely the Lord’s own doing. Gideon had not approached in the ordinary way by sacrifice. True, he had intended his gift as an offering to the Lord in the person of one wham He took to be his representative, but the Lord not only accepted it, but going in grace beyond all Gideon’s thoughts, turned it into a burnt offering with his own hand, thus, as it were constituting Gideon a worshipper, and giving him “a sign” far beyond all his hopes and expectations. Surely this was a fitting conclusion to an interview so graciously begun. “Then the angel of the Lord departed out of his sight.”
Gideon was now indeed in a position to serve the Lord; he himself had set him in it, and none could take it away. But he was not yet in a condition to do so. Does the difference exercise our souls as it should do? We make much, and rightly, of our standing, would it not be well if we felt a, little more concerned about our state? The first should make the question as to the last all the more important in our eyes, and would ever do so if rightly apprehended. “What manner of people ought we to be IN ALL holy conversation and godliness.”
But Gideon was very far from apprehending his position as yet. Indeed it is doubtful whether he at all understood what the Lord had done for him. His heart was not yet set free from the spirit of bondage again to fear; so far from it that he no sooner discovers that he had seen an angel of the Lord face to face, than, utterly unconscious that the Lord had made him nigh and set him where he might commune with himself in holy liberty, he cries out, “Alas! O Lord God for because I have seen an angel of the Lord face to face!” How slow our hearts are to comprehend the goodness of the Lord! Nevertheless patient grace can still bear with Gideon’s weakness, ignorance, and unbelief, and although he might justly have been reproved for so readily forgetting all “the kindness of God” in word and deed shown unto him, “Peace be unto thee, thou shalt not die,” comes like rain upon the tender herb and lifts his drooping spirit once more into assured security.
Thus the Lord had sought him out, looked on him in grace, passed over all his failure, brought him nigh, and spoken peace to his troubled soul; drawing him with cords of love, with the bands of a man, that so, as fire sprang from the hard, cold rock when touched by the staff in his hand, Gideon, touched to the heart by grace, might yield in the divinely-begotten energy of faith and love, service acceptable to the Lord. God of Israel.
And so it was. “Then Gideon built an altar unto the Lord, and called it Jehovah-shalom.” In the stronghold of idolatry, in the midst of Baal’s worshippers, in Ophrah of the Abi-ezrites, who owned no other god, he raised a testimony for Jehovah, and called it by a name which at once declared the Object Of his worship, the Source of his hope, and the desire of his heart for Israel: “The Lord send peace.”
Thus the work of faith began.