The Smallest One Hiding in the Winepress

There was a man named Gideon, and he was afraid.

Fear can make a person feel small. It can make him look for a place to hide.

So that is where we find Gideon. Hiding. He was down in a winepress, a low stone pit where people crushed grapes with their feet. It was no place to do his work. He was supposed to be out in the open, beating the wheat in the wind so the good grain could blow free from the dusty husks. But Gideon was crouched down low, doing it in secret, at the bottom of a pit.

Why was he hiding?

Because enemies had come to his land. Hungry raiders called the Midianites. They swept in like locusts and took everything: the wheat, the sheep, the food. So God's people lived frightened and poor, hiding their bread in caves and holes in the ground.

And Gideon thought to himself, I am the smallest. The very least. If anyone in this whole land has been forgotten, it is me.

Then someone came and sat down under the big tree nearby.

It was an angel, a messenger from God himself. And the very first thing he said to that trembling man hiding in the pit was this:

"The LORD is with you, mighty warrior."

Mighty warrior.

Gideon almost laughed. Me? He looked down at his dusty hands. He looked at the cold stone walls he was crouching behind. "Mighty?" he said. "Oh, no. My family is the weakest one. And I am the very littlest in my family. You have the wrong man."

But God did not have the wrong man.

God was not looking at the trembling. God was not even looking at the winepress. God was looking at Gideon and seeing the brave, free man he was going to make him into. He called Gideon by the name of who he would become.

God did not say, "First be strong, and THEN I will be with you." He said, "I am with you," to a frightened man hiding in a pit. He loved the smallest one. He chose the smallest one. And he called him mighty before Gideon had done one single brave thing.

Do you remember the brave mother's song, just a page ago, about how God lifts the lowly? Here he was, doing it again. He looks at the small, the scared, the last-in-line, and he says, you. You are the one I want.

And one day, far down the years from Gideon, God would do this again, only bigger. He would look at frightened, hiding, ashamed people, people just like you and me. And he would not wait for them to grow strong first.

He would send his own Son to come and find them. To climb right down into the low and frightened places where they were hiding. And he would give every one of them a brand-new name.

Beloved.

As for Gideon, the smallest one in the weakest family, he wiped the dust from his hands and stood up. God had work for a mighty warrior to do, and the strange, wonderful shape of that work is waiting on the very next page.