The Welcome Valley Reader
Challenging the Gods
Yet, things
hadn’t really been routine. He worked in secret. He threshed at the winepress,
not the stone-paved threshing floor. He dared not work openly lest the enemy
occupation army confiscate his grain. Time after time he raised his tool and
slammed it against the wheat, not knowing if his hiding place was adequate or if
his family would face starvation in the coming winter.
His name was
Gideon, and his nation staggered under oppression. Armies from nearby Midian had
invaded and deliberately destroyed huge quantities of crops. People had resorted
to hiding themselves and their belongings in caves. Poverty reigned. The nation
began to pray. Even their prayers seemed to fail. God hadn’t sent a warrior to
rescue them. He’d sent a prophet to remind them that they’d left Him for the
competition. Under the circumstances, God wasn’t in a hurry to help them out of
their trouble. It wasn’t the very best time to be one of God’s chosen people.
A voice interrupted the farmer. “The LORD [is] with you, you mighty man
of valor.” (Based on
Judges 6:12 other quotations not necessarily exact unless accompanied by a
reference.)
Gideon answered this unusual greeting politely, addressing the stranger
as “Lord”. But his underlying perplexities and hopelessness spilled out.
“And Gideon said unto him, Oh my Lord,
if the LORD be with us, why then is all this befallen us? and where
be all his miracles which our fathers
told us of, saying, Did not the LORD bring us up from
The visitor didn’t bother to rehash the question of why those who guide
their lives by spiritual fiction must crash into reality. He just told Gideon to
go in this his might, to go and he would deliver his homeland from the feared
Midianites.
Gideon remained doubtful. He was the youngest son of a poor family. He
wasn’t a military leader, although likely a reservist. Midian was exploiting his
country. He was hiding from them as he spoke. How could
he beat
Midian?
The stranger spoke with confidence and authority, as if he were a
messenger of God. He didn’t back down.
Gideon asked for further evidence that this guy knew what he was talking
about. He also hurried off to fix lunch for his unusual guest.
When Gideon returned, the visitor instructed him to lay the food out on a
flat rock. Gideon complied. The visitor touched the meat and bread with his
walking stick. Fire leaped from the rock and burned the food. The man vanished.
It was enough to make anyone’s hair stand on end. Gideon was terrified.
Only an angel could call fire from an ordinary rock and disappear. Angelic
visitations were about as rare then as they are today. In his tradition, angels
didn’t usually mean good news. They represented an often-offended Heaven. An
angel’s visit seemed like God tapping him on the shoulder, fixing him in an
angry stare, and whispering, “I’m coming for you.”
But even in the presence of the angel, there had been an even larger
supernatural element. God had been speaking through the angel. God continued
speaking when the angel left, and He spoke hope. Very few people have heard God
speak in an audible voice. Gideon likely heard from God through a quiet inner
conviction accompanied by the realization that the Almighty had just
communicated with his soul. This spiritual voice within gave reassurance rather
than judgment.
Now, he and his servants approached his father’s shrine. It was dark. The
preceding day represented a spiritual experience like few have had before or
since. But the experience hadn’t ended. That same divine voice had instructed
him to destroy the shrine. The shrine included the altar where his family prayed
for Baal to help their crops. It also included either a stand of trees or one or
more Asherah idols. (A simple reading of older translations of the Bible
strongly suggests that sacred groves of trees were planted around altars. More
recent translations suggest that these “groves” were thin wooden idols of a
pagan goddess. In either scenario, the wood towering above the shrine would have
been seen as a dwelling place for deity.)
Challenging Baal was dangerous. After all, Gideon’s family and community
depended on Baal for rain to grow their crops. Baal was a widely revered god who
was believed to have risen to rule over a whole pantheon of regional deities.
Smart people tried to keep Baal appeased. They certainly didn’t attack his
shrine. If the popular god did shrug off the insult, his worshippers wouldn’t.
Gideon had threshed his grain by a winepress to hide from the enemy. He attacked
the altar of Baal at night to hide from his friends and family. His life had
been dangerous before God spoke to him. Things were only getting worse. Gideon
took his life in his hands, and the grove began to fall.
Gideon hitched one of his father’s oxen to the stone altar. “Gidup!” The
oxen pulled against its yoke. The altar collapsed, the sacred reduced to rocky
rubble. No cheering crowds supported him--just ten servants who likely hoped the
gods and neighbors would remember the whole thing was the boss’s idea, not
theirs.
Gideon finished his night’s work by building an altar to God. He
sacrificed the ox that had toppled Baal’s altar and burned the sacrifice with
wood from the grove. He’d made a statement, even if he’d done it with as much
anonymity as a rural community afforded. He could only trust that the God who’d
spoken to him was really as superior as claimed.
The neighbors found their place of worship desecrated the next day. An ox
had been offered on a new altar. The statement was obvious. Someone wanted to
stop their spiritual progress. They’d moved beyond the old traditions of an
exclusive God they couldn’t see. They were now in tune with the surrounding
culture. They were no longer shackled by God’s all-encompassing Law. Many of
their needs were now met by this popular contemporary god. They’d learned to
stand in awe not only of God but also of Baal. They’d found freedom in a god
they could buy off with sacrifices. They didn’t plan to risk the wrath of Baal
or challenge their newly found spirituality.
They asked around, figured out who’d done what, and came to Gideon’s
father. Gideon wasn’t exactly a teenager at home. He was a man with a teenage
son of his own. But in the ancient
They came to the father and stated their case. Gideon had insulted their
god. This was offensive to them. Moreover an angry Baal might ruin them all.
They intended to fix the situation. “Hand over Gideon so we can kill him.”
Gideon’s father had honored Baal up to this point. After all, the altar
and the grove stood on his land. Whether motivated by loyalty to his son or a
sudden realization of how far he’d strayed from the God of his fathers, the old
man took a stand. “Are you advocating for Baal?” he challenged. “Let anyone who
pleads for Baal die. He is a god. Let him plead for himself.” He went so far as
to put his son on the line, “Let Baal plead against him.” It became Gideon’s
second name—Jerubbaal, let Baal plead
against him.
Perhaps many of the neighbors found that name terrifying. Baal had
overpowered other gods. Everybody believed in Baal. The last thing a thinking
man in that culture would want was for Baal to speak against him. His father’s
defense had turned into a potential curse. Let Baal plead against him? Thanks,
Dad! The decision to follow God alone had better be right.
The decision
to follow God was right. The neighbors backed off. Baal, of course, had never
been a real god in the first place. The curse of the destroyed altar never
caught up with Gideon. He led a fraction of an army to defeat the dreaded
Midianites. He conquered a powerful enemy nation, a nation which, incidentally,
depended on Baal. Gideon would live to old age, judging and leading his people
in the name of God. Let Baal plead against him? No big deal!
***
Most of us know of Baal only as an item from history and archeology. We
don’t believe in him. We don’t fear his power. But we all face our own cultural
idols. For some, those idols are real stone images their friends believe house
living spirits. For others, the temptation whispers subtly. “There is no God,”
is really the same statement as: “Baal is a god.” It’s just a more sophisticated
way of claiming that what “we the people” believe in is more important than
God’s revelation of Himself. But blatant atheism isn’t the only problem. “This
is what we think today,” applied spiritually, is the same statement as:
“Everybody worships Baal.” It’s just a less obvious rebellion. God still calls
each of us to reject the dead pseudo truths of our fallen cultures and step out
in exclusive faith in Him and obedience to His Word.
Let science, let the gods, let culture, let the smartest people of our
world plead against us. If we’re true to the God of Gideon, we face no
meaningful threat. We can only win.
And if it
seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve;
whether the gods which your fathers served that
were on the other side of the flood,
or the gods of the Amorites, in
whose land ye dwell: but as for me
and my house, we will serve the LORD. (Joshua 24:15)
Be ye not
unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with
Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement
hath the
But God
forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom
the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. (Galatians 6:14)
This story is in the public domain and may be copied and distributed freely.
How to Have a Relationship with God
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A Father's Faith * A Man for an Impossible Situation * A Mother's Triumph * All they Did Was Show Up for Work * Angels in the Sky * Buried Alive * Challenging the Gods * Dealing with the Evidence * Enforcing the Enforcer * God's Man and the Devil's City * Magic Vs. Miracle * Reclaiming a Failure * Taking Away the Stone * The Beginning * The Decision * The Devoted One * The End of the Boy King * The Flood * The Good Samaritan * The King and the King of Kings * The Making of a Traitor * The Man Who Sold His Rights * The Man Whose Eyes Were Opened * The Outcast * The Secret Agent * The Stranger * The Testing * The View from the Cave * The Weak Commando * Two Men, Two Scandals, Two Results * When Actions Weren't Better than Words * Where Is the God of Elijah? * Willing to Pay the Price
Bridges to Burn * Come in Out of the Cold * Dropping Out * Dying Faith * Everything I Didn't Have * Failed Horizons * Failing for the Lord * Fire Danger * Living Water * Negligence * Sir * Spring or Rock Formation? * Stepping Toward God * Swimming with Piranhas * Tax Day * The Abandoned Skyscraper * The Beacon * The Cat in the Trash Can * Those New Antique Locomotives * The Road Through the Swamp * Tracks in the Woods * Trusting the Unseen