The Smallest One Hiding in the Winepress

Forty years after Deborah sang her song, the camels came.

Every harvest the Midianites rode in from the desert, more than anyone could count, and swarmed over the fields like locusts. They took the wheat, the sheep, the oxen. God's people had stopped listening to him again, and now they hid in caves and cried, "LORD, help us!"

Gideon was hiding his wheat. He was threshing it down in a winepress, a stone pit for stamping grapes. (Threshing in a winepress is like flying a kite in a closet. There is no wind down there, but there are no Midianites either.)

Under the oak tree nearby, the angel of the LORD sat down.

"The LORD is with you, mighty warrior," he said.

Gideon looked up from the dust. "Please, sir, if the LORD is with us, why is all this happening? Our fathers told us how he brought them out of Egypt. Now it looks like he has left us."

Then the LORD himself turned to him. "Go in the strength you have, and save Israel. Am I not the one sending you?"

"Me? My family is the weakest in our tribe, and I am the least one in my family."

"I will be with you," said the LORD. "You will strike down the Midianites as if they were one man."

"Then give me a sign," said Gideon. "Please don't leave until I bring you an offering."

"I will wait."

Gideon hurried off to cook a goat and bake bread. The angel had him lay it on a rock, then touched it with the tip of his staff. WHOOSH! Fire leaped out of the rock and burned it up, and the angel was gone.

"Oh no!" cried Gideon. "Lord GOD, I have seen your angel face to face!"

"Peace," the LORD told him. "Do not be afraid. You will not die."

So Gideon built an altar there and named it The LORD Is Peace.

That night God gave him a harder job: tear down his father's altar to the false god Baal and build one to the LORD instead. Gideon was too scared to do it by day, so he took ten servants and did it in the dark.

By morning the town was furious. "Who did this? Bring out your son, Joash. He must die!"

But Gideon's father stood in the doorway. "If Baal is a god, let him fight for himself."

(Baal did nothing at all. He never had.)

When the Midianites filled the valley again, the Spirit of the LORD came on Gideon. He blew a trumpet, and men came running from four tribes. Still Gideon asked God for a sign with a sheep's woolly fleece: wet fleece on dry ground, then dry fleece on wet ground. Both times God patiently did it.

Gideon's courage came and went like the dew on that fleece. He could chase the camels away for a while, but he could not stay with God's people forever.

So the question Gideon asked under the oak hung over Israel for more than a thousand years. If the LORD is with us, where is he?

Then a baby was born in Bethlehem, and the Bible gives him a name that answers Gideon: Immanuel, which means "God with us." He grew up and died on a cross, and on the third day he rose. That night his friends hid behind a locked door, as scared as a man in a winepress. Jesus stood among them and said what Gideon heard beside the burning rock: "Peace be with you."

Gideon's question had its answer. God was with them, standing right there in the room.