The Scripture’s Account of Gideon: Preliminary Considerations

Judges, Judges 6:1-32

Post last updated on January 17, 2025

 Image credit:  Wikimedia Commons

Editors and publishers of Bible editions have, over the years, helpfully organized the Bible by chapters and verses to aid the reader in searching its contents, but the reader must remember that scripture’s words display and define its most proper order. They constitute the arrangement that belongs to the Spirit’s work of inspiration and preservation. It is a brief but true summary to state that the Bible and its parts have been written in such a way to highlight the Spirit’s intended emphases, culminating as they do in the revelation of God in the Lord Jesus Christ. To, therefore, ignore the words and patterns of scripture in order to make a practical but peripheral point is to hazard at least two dangers: 1) The revelatory aspect of scripture is suppressed for a practical application of some abstracted part of the text, and 2) the reader’s practical reflections may become humanistic and utilitarian, drawn as they are to first answer contemporary and personal concerns of the reader, rather than the intention of the Spirit, as evidenced in the text. In such cases, an important but peripheral point may too easily eclipse the emphatic message of scripture.

It is in this respect that we recall that the prophets wrote the scripture as they were each moved by the Holy Ghost (2 Peter 1:21). Accordingly, we also recognize and then repeat that scripture interprets itself by the details that are evident in the Spirit’s ordering of scripture’s narrative (1 Corinthians 2:13). Therefore, we are instructed to pay attention to the character of the text itself—its own internal patterns. The manner of words in which each scene is presented will have essential bearing on the way that it is connected to other parts of scripture, simply because the words and their ordering invite and also require particular connections to other parts of the Bible.

* * *

Judges 6 possesses this distinctive: The narrative is obviously arranged in such a way to tell us something about Gideon, his character, and his time; but importantly, the same passage also predicts something about God’s work in the world through Christ. The interior and emotional life of Gideon, connected as that is to his eventual activity, becomes the basis for further reflections about Jesus Christ, taking New Testament passages into that consideration. How do we come to this conclusion? By the choice of words and the ordering of events in Judges, noting how they correspond in detail and type to what will eventually follow in the life of Jesus Christ. It is in this aspect that history is made prophecy, even without the technical appeal as such. In other words, in a variety of New Testament passages, the writer will tacitly cite scripture, recalling the Old Testament passages;¹For just one of numerous examples, in Romans 10:11 Paul cites Isaiah 28:16. but in other places the connection between the Old and New Testaments is more subtle, though not less definite, confirmed in patterns and typologies.

As such, we are also instructed that the preacher must properly respond to these different features of scripture, by recalling them in his sermon. It is true that he must highlight the historical and practical significance that describes and prescribes human obligation; but most fundamentally, he must speak to those revelatory features of scripture that highlight the character and work of God. In fact, a preacher might achieve a surprising kind and degree of success in moral and practical instruction—advanced by his motivational powers—but yet fail to preach a Christian sermon. Indeed, a Muslim khutbah, or even the teaching of a Hindu swami or guru, might instruct and command its audience to ethical practices, but a Christian sermon must additionally disclose the revelatory content of scripture, and then attach it to it the doctrine and moral elements; otherwise, the sermon is not Christian, for its attempts to change behavior without connecting the fundamental facts of the world to their source and reason.

The Roman Catholic philosopher, Joseph Pieper, has simply and accurately described this tendency by the term, moralism. “The essence of moralism,” he writes, “which many think is something specially Christian, consists in the violent separation of being and duty from one another and in proclaiming something as obligatory without seeing and making visible its link to being.”²Josef Pieper, The Christian Idea of Man, trans. Dan Farrelly (St. Augustine’s Press, 2011), 15. Pieper properly connects the prerequisite idea of being to what follows in creaturely obligation, but he says more than this. I take Pieper to also mean that moralism is, particularly, a Christian error because only the Christian doctrines regarding God, man, and scripture require a uniform agreement in respect to what they mean for human obedience. Losing any one of the interdependent facts means that the understanding or significance of others is soon lost.

In other words, there is nothing surprising or erratic in God’s commands to man, especially since the connection between being and obligation is actually and ultimately answered in the person of Jesus Christ. The fact that God the Son has assumed a human nature and then achieved obedience in a human body (Philippians 2:7-8) confirms the kind and character of human obedience within the confines of human nature, bringing their righteous expression into conformity with God’s will. This draws a traceable line between God’s expectation for man and man’s obligatory performance, as achieved by Jesus Christ. Consequently, it makes the sinner’s refusal of Jesus Christ a refusal of God’s righteousness (For example: Romans 3:21-26, Romans 10:3-4, etc.). How this compares, for instance, with the Islamic conception of Allah is distinguished in the way that Allah’s power, decrees, and commands, prescribe righteousness, rather than his character prescribing his commands, which leads to a fearful, arbitrary judgment.³This has some connections to the philosophical idea, now called Voluntarism. The reader might find an article by Matt Marino useful: The Voluntarist Doctrine of Allah. The reader might also refer to the book by James R. White, What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Koran (Bloomington, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2013), 145-64.

* * *

Accordingly, I have decided to quickly name three features of Judges 6 that prompt and then require the reader to think about the text in a Christian manner. These few features—to which others may be added—highlight the revelatory character of Judges 6. The content that actually instructs us to faith lies in the connection between the historical and revelatory aspects of the passage—those passages that, revealing the failures of men, predict the acts of God that will confirm the definition of righteousness and the basis for faith. As such, Gideon’s story, though situated in the days of the Judges, also forecasts to the reader something about the salvation of men through Jesus Christ. For example: The first part of chapter 6 recalls Israel’s faithlessness and apostasy, which is noted in the fact that God delivers Israel into the hand and rule of the Midianites (Judges 6:1-6). The LORD will eventually elevate Gideon as a deliverer of his people (Judges 6:14-17); but before that deliverance, an unnamed prophet is made to proclaim the cause and character of God’s judgment upon Israel (Judges 6:7-10). God’s judgement is heard in the words, “And I said unto you, I am the LORD your God; fear not the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but ye have not obeyed my voice” (Judges 6:10).

This order of events in Judges 6 will be recognizable to anyone who has also read the gospel accounts. There, we find Israel under the rule of the Roman Emperors, long dispossessed of its national sovereignty because of apostasy. In that national situation, John the Baptist is made to appear and explain the cause and character of God’s judgement upon the covenant people. Only after this declaration is Jesus introduced, and his redemptive work proclaimed and achieved by his death on the cross and subsequent revelation. The events of Judges and the gospel narratives do not match in every detail, but the reader of scripture will recognize the similarities, eventually understanding this as an essential pattern in scripture’s revelation. These are the connections that keeps us from moralism and provide the fundamental basis for a Christian sermon, chiefly because in this connection we see how that the scripture reveals Jesus Christ.

This is followed by another introductory post for Judges 6, The Character of a Prophet’s Speech as Divine Testimony.