No King in Israel (13)

How would you feel if you had just seen God and escaped alive?

The modern believer has difficulty putting himself in the sandals of an oppressed Israelite whose family worshiped Baal, and whose only impressions of the God of Israel came from oral history: of his nation’s deliverance from Egyptian slavery, its sojourn in the wilderness and its miraculous conquest of Canaan. Gideon had stories of wonderful deeds recounted by the elders of his people. Meanwhile, Christians thousands of years later are habituated to platform messages in which the word “Abba” is alleged to give us license to crawl into Daddy’s lap for a good cuddle.

Ugh. It’s a frivolous and childish view of God, and it’s not the least bit like what Gideon experienced when the angel of the Lord appeared to him.

II. Twelve Judges in Chronological Order (continued)

5. Gideon (continued)

Judges 6:17-21 — An Offering

“And he said to him, ‘If now I have found favor in your eyes, then show me a sign that it is you who speak with me. Please do not depart from here until I come to you and bring out my present and set it before you.’ And he said, ‘I will stay till you return.’ So Gideon went into his house and prepared a young goat and unleavened cakes from an ephah of flour. The meat he put in a basket, and the broth he put in a pot, and brought them to him under the terebinth and presented them. And the angel of God said to him, ‘Take the meat and the unleavened cakes, and put them on this rock, and pour the broth over them.’ And he did so. Then the angel of the Lord reached out the tip of the staff that was in his hand and touched the meat and the unleavened cakes. And fire sprang up from the rock and consumed the meat and the unleavened cakes. And the angel of the Lord vanished from his sight.”

A Sign That it is You

The attentive reader will notice Gideon recognizes he is in the presence of a supernatural being with great authority, but hasn’t yet grasped the magnitude of the dignitary who has graced him with his attention. So he asks for his first of three signs. He wants to know “that it is you who speak with me”. Hmm. Who is this “you” of whom he speaks? Perhaps he wonders if he’s hallucinating or dreaming, and wants to ensure there is genuine divine authority behind the commands he has received. At very least, he deems it appropriate to give some kind of gift to such a person. He wants to show his respect.

A Day is as a Thousand Years

Think about what went into this “present” from Gideon’s end. He didn’t have goat meat in the fridge fresh from the local butcher. When it says he “prepared a young goat”, he had to kill, butcher and cook it. Likewise, he did not simply look around for the first cakes he could find, but rather baked them unleavened from scratch. The broth was presumably goat soup, again, simmered on the spot. This meal must have taken hours to prepare. All that time, the angel of the Lord patiently waits for him. For the Lord, a delay to accommodate the whims of a mere servant of Heaven is apparently no trouble at all.

Doesn’t it remind us “that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”? Even angels mark time when the progress of their mission is slowed down, but there is no indication Gideon’s visitor was even slightly perturbed by his host’s lengthy disappearance into Joash’s kitchen. The passage of minutes and hours has no meaning to one who is from eternity to eternity or, for that matter, to one who is omnipresent. Even the urgency of his mission can be subordinated to the needs of the moment.

Baskets and Pots

The meat Gideon brought to the angel was in a basket, the broth was in a pot. It is an unorthodox offering for one habituated to tabernacle worship prescribed right down to its specifics under the Law of Moses. The angel of God is untroubled. He turns a convenient rock into a rudimentary altar, has Gideon set the meat and cakes (unleavened, of course) upon it, then has him pour the broth over them, perhaps after the manner of a drink offering.

No priest is required; the angel of the Lord supplies the flame. Fire springs up from the rock at the touch of the tip of the angel’s staff and consumes the offering entirely. Whatever Gideon may have expected, this is not it. He is stunned, but his visitor confirms the most extreme of Gideon’s speculations about his identity in a single, casual gesture.

Then he promptly disappears.

Judges 6:22-24 — The Lord is Peace

“Then Gideon perceived that he was the angel of the Lord. And Gideon said, ‘Alas, O Lord God! For now I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face.’ But the Lord said to him, ‘Peace be to you. Do not fear; you shall not die.’ Then Gideon built an altar there to the Lord and called it, The Lord Is Peace. To this day it still stands at Ophrah, which belongs to the Abiezrites.”

Then Gideon Perceived

Whatever suspicions Gideon may have had about his visitor’s true nature, the realization that he had been in the presence of the angel of the Lord knocks him for a loop. He expects the worst.

This seems to have been a common fear in the days of the judges. Later on, Samson’s father Manoah had the same reaction when he realized he had seen God; he expected to die. His wife had more common sense, recognizing that the angel had made promises to them about the birth of a future son who would never come into existence if God simply struck the couple dead.

In this case, since no one else was present (and definitely not a prudent wife), the Lord himself speaks to Gideon and reassures him he will live. Again, common sense tells us an angel would not call a man to service and then destroy him over something the angel had voluntarily chosen to reveal.

Seeing God and Living

So then, the expectation that seeing God face to face would be a terminal event was not an exceptional one. After wrestling with an angel and receiving the blessing he sought, Jacob said, “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” He too evidently thought he was an exception to some fixed rule. Later, God said this to Moses expressly, “You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” That seems to hard-code an important principle for future generations.

That said, many people in the Old Testament saw the angel of the Lord, and many lived. It should be evident that the angel of the Lord, being the preincarnate Christ, was the exception to the rule. That sublime Christmas lyric comes to mind: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see. Hail the incarnate deity.” Just as the humanity of Christ provided protection for his fellow men and women from the destructive power of the vision of Glory, so the guise of the angel of the Lord was apparently sufficient “insulation” for men to interact with the eternal God without being destroyed.

Still, nobody who met the angel was fooled about his identity. They knew they had seen God, even if it was at one remove. They were not less impressed because they were still alive, just exceedingly grateful.

Peace Be to You

The angel of the Lord had vanished from Gideon’s sight, but God continued to speak, and Gideon heard. There is a glorious generosity in his words, “Peace be to you. Do not fear; you shall not die.” The normal rules do not apply. God has made an exception. In fact, he designed the entire situation to accommodate Gideon’s need for assurance and protect him from his own fears. No wonder Gideon built an altar! This would not be the only time he worshiped. Moreover, he built that altar in “foreign” tribal territory in (temporary) confidence that the eternal God was his security.

To This Day

That altar “still stands at Ophrah”, says this particular writer of Judges. (I am assuming for logical reasons that Judges had more than one writer.) We have no way to estimate what year he wrote these words. As I may have mentioned earlier in this series, Judges was not a completed project until at least a few years after 722 BC, a fact we can confirm from a reference to the “captivity of the land” in Judges 18:30, which occurred that year. So perhaps Gideon’s altar stood for over 500 years, or perhaps it was a shorter period, and the editors of the final version of Judges elected to leave the original writer’s comment as it stood.

In any case, those words “The Lord Is Peace” testified to an important truth for good long time. Israel would need to hear it repeatedly.