Judges 6-7
Are You a Barney Fife or a Mighty Warrior?
April 18, 2004
 
	I don’t know whether you’ve heard of me before—my name is Gideon…No, not 
the guy who prints Bibles for all those hotel rooms…I’m a person whose story is found 
in the Old Testament in the book of Judges.
	It was a difficult time in Israel’s history. My people had broken the promises they 
had made to God at Mount Sinai. They had abandoned God in favor of false gods such as 
Baal and Ashtoreth. So God did as he had said that he would. If we weren’t going to 
respect him as the true God, then he would give us over into the hands of the people 
around us—people like the Midianites and the Amalekites. The Bible says that during 
my time the power of the Midianites was so terrible that my people were holing up “in 
mountain clefts, caves and strongholds.” (Judges 6:2). My people were basically living 
like animals—scared rabbits, to be precise.
	Survival was tremendously difficult, for whenever we planted crops, the 
Midianites would come in and take them. And if it wasn’t the Midianites, it was the 
Amalekites. Things got so bad that my people finally realized that their only hope was to 
do what they should have been doing all along--turning to God. So that’s what they did, 
pleading with him for deliverance.
	One day shortly afterwards I was out threshing wheat—well, actually I wasn’t 
out threshing wheat—that was the normal way of doing it—outside, with oxen and a 
sledge in an open, raised place in order to have exposure to the prevailing winds. That 
was the normal way of doing it. But these weren’t normal times. So I was threshing 
wheat in a winepress. The winepress wasn’t getting much use anyway—the grape 
harvests were being destroyed by the Midianites. In fact, that’s why I was threshing 
wheat in the cramped space of a winepress—I was attempting to keep it from the 
Midianites. 
	Suddenly the Lord appeared to me and said, “The Lord is with you, mighty 
warrior.” (Judges 6:12). Now something struck me a bit odd about this—I mean, aside 
from the fact that I was speaking to the Lord.
	What struck me as odd was that he had called me “mighty warrior”? Mighty 
warrior?!?! Me?!?! I was threshing grain in a winepress! I was the Barney Fife of the 
Bible!
	And yet he said to me, “Go in the strength that you have and save Israel out of 
Midian’s hand.” (6:14). “Go in the strength that you have”? What strength? I didn’t even 
have the strength—the courage, that is—to thresh wheat in the normal way. And I was 
supposed to save Israel?
	I didn’t know if anyone was up to the task, but I certainly knew that I wasn’t. I 
mean, even the name of my hometown made me a bad candidate for this. My hometown 
was Ophrah—which in Hebrew means “place of dust”—not exactly the sort of place 
from which great military leaders come!  So I said to the Lord, “But Lord, how can I 
save Israel?” My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” 
(Judges 6:15) I was the runt of the family, and my family was the runt of the tribe. There 
was no way that I was capable of saving Israel!
	And although I didn’t mention it when I spoke to the Lord, you can understand 
how I might have been thinking it—“Those Midianites are so many, so menacing, so 
mighty.” I say it again--there was no way that I was capable of saving Israel! 
	And of course I was doing exactly what you so often do when faced with a 
similar situation. I was focusing on me and thinking that this plan, this battle, the 
outcome was all about me, all dependent upon me. 
	If I would have closed my mouth and opened my ears I would have heard the rest 
of what the Lord had said to me. He said, “Go in the strength that you have and save 
Israel out of Midian’s hand.” (And at this point my ears had shut down as I began to 
think of my response.) He then went on to say, “Am I not sending you?”
	And that was really the key, wasn’t it? If the Lord was sending me and was 
assuring me of victory, then I could go assured of victory—even if my human reason 
didn’t see how such a thing could happen.
	But I wanted to be sure it was the Lord. I asked him to wait right there until I 
could bring an offering to him. He said that he would wait. Yes, I asked God to wait, and 
he said that he would do so. What amazing condescension on his part to wait!
	When I came back and presented him with the offering, he told me to put it on a 
rock. Then he touched it with his staff, and “fire flared from the rock, consuming the 
meat and the bread.” (6:22). Now I knew for sure it had been the Lord, and I knew that I 
could trust his words.
	But maybe you’ve had the experience that I had shortly after that. It’s the same 
experience that Peter had when in faith he boldly stepped out of that boat on the Sea of 
Galilee. You remember—he saw the wind and the waves, and his faith wavered. Well, 
that’s what happened to me. As the time for battle drew near, I saw the massive armies of 
the Midianites, the Amalekites, and the rest of their allies camped in the distance. And 
my faith wavered.
	So I said to God, “If you will save Israel by my hand as you have promised—
look, I will place a wool fleece on the threshing floor. If there is dew only on the fleece 
and all the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you 
said” (6:36-37). Did God respond to my request made in weakness? He sure did—and 
how! In fact, there was so much dew on the fleece that I was able to wring a bowlful of 
water out of it.
	Well, that was that—my question was answered, my doubts had been addressed. 
Right? You’d think. But the devil was really coming after me, really tempting me to 
doubt—even though God had already given me his word and two signs to back it up. So I 
said to God, “Do not be angry with me.” And then I asked him to do the opposite—cover 
the ground with dew but leave the fleece dry. So that’s what God did.
	So now I’m ready. I am ready to go into battle and take on the Midianites. I’ve 
got about 32,000 men. I figure that even if the Midianites have twice as many men as I 
do, I am ready to fight bravely, to live up the name “mighty warrior”, and to defeat them. 
I’ve got my men together and I’m about to go out and draw up the game plan on the 
chalkboard, give them a rousing pep talk, and send them tearing out onto that battlefield.
	Except the Lord comes to me and says, “You have too many men…” As soon as I 
heard those words, I started thinking to myself, “Too many!?!?! I don’t even have 
enough. We’re outnumbered terribly, and it will take all the bravery, courage, and 
fighting skill that we have to defeat them.” 
	And that sort of thinking is exactly why God thought that I had too many men, 
for he said, “You have too many men for me to deliver Midian into their hands. In order 
that Israel may not boast against me that her own strength has saved her…” God knew 
that if our 32,000 men defeated what I learned later to be their 135,000 men, we might be 
tempted to talk about how and think that our bravery, our strength, and our skill had 
made each of us the equivalent of 4 of their men. 
	So God told me that I should tell the soldiers that if they were scared, they could 
go leave. Well, 22,000 of them took me up on my offer. That left me with only 10,000 
men. 
	At this point most generals would have looked around at their tiny army and 
frantically began redrawing the battle plans in their head, trying to figure out how in the 
world they were going to take 10,000 men into battle against the enormous Midianite 
army. And most generals would hardly have been able to believe their ears when God 
spoke again and said, “There are still too many men. Take them down to the water, and I 
will sift them for you there.” But I knew that it wasn’t my army, but God’s army, and I 
knew that it wasn’t my battle, but God’s battle. So we went down to the water and God 
split the men into two groups according to how they drank water. The group he left me 
with consisted of 300 men. 
	300 men against 135,000 men. If there was ever a time for the devil to tempt me 
to doubt, this was it. But God cut that off immediately by speaking again and reminding 
me of what he had already said. God said, ”With the three hundred men…I will save you 
and give the Midianites into your hands.” (7:7). 
	There are two key words in that statement of God’s. The first is “I.” It’s a 
reminder that since the one speaking is God, he is capable of doing anything. The second 
key word is “will.” That word is a promise, and God always keeps his promises. When 
God says, “I will” you can be sure that it will take place. So I was now sure that the 
battle was as good as over.
	Later that night I snuck down to the Midianite camp and eavesdropped on some 
soldiers there. When I first got there, I couldn’t believe how big their camp was and how 
many soldiers there were. They were “thick as locusts”, and “Their camels could no 
more be counted than the sand on the seashore.” (7:12). But I reminded myself not to 
allow the things I could see to distract me from what I had heard from God. The writer to 
the Hebrews said, “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do 
not see.” (Hebrews 11:1). I didn’t see how this victory would all take place, but I was 
absolutely sure and certain that it would—because God had said so.
	I became even more convinced of that when I heard a couple Midianites talking 
about a dream one of them had had—a dream in which a loaf of barley bread came 
rolling into the Midianite camp and hit a tent with such force that the tent overturned and 
collapsed. One of them said, “This can be nothing other than the sword of Gideon son of 
Joash, the Israelite. God has given the Midianites and the whole camp into his hands” 
(7:14). Even the Midianites realized that God was fighting for us and that therefore they 
had no chance against us.
	So I went back to camp and armed the men for battle. Now you know that 
weapons then were a bit more primitive and a bit less powerful than they were today, but 
I think you would be surprised to realize that our weapons were trumpets and some jars 
with torches inside. At this point, though, nothing surprised me. And at this point, 
nothing really frightened me, either. The battle was the Lord’s, so I knew that things 
were in good hands.
	I told the men that we were going to sneak up the edge of the camp, blow our 
trumpets, and break the jars. We did, the Midianites panicked, striking out with their 
swords at anything that moved, and we basically stood around while they did so. 
Eventually many of them fled, and we pursued them, decimating their army.
	Cool story, huh? 
	But that’s not all it is.
	No, take something out of this story for yourself, for your life, for your dealings 
with and relationship with God.
	The very first thing you ought to take out of it is this: Things don’t go well for 
you when you rebel against God. Because when you rebel against God, when you break 
God’s commandments, when you make false gods out of other things in your life, you 
make God angry. And living in caves and mountain clefts and threshing grain in a 
winepress is a piece of cake compared to facing the eternal wrath of God for sin. 
	But see this also: God hears his people when they cry out to him. God responded 
to our cries for deliverance from the Midianites, and God has heard your cries for 
deliverance from the punishment for sin—eternal death in hell. 
	And know this: This battle is entirely the Lord’s. God didn’t ask you for aid when 
it came to saving you from your sins. God didn’t ask you to wrack your brain drawing up 
battle plans. No, he fought that battle for you according to his plan by sending his Son to 
fight the temptations of the devil during his life on earth and then to fight the last enemy, 
death.
	And if you think that I appeared hopelessly outnumbered against the Midianites, 
things looked even worse for Jesus. He was outnumbered in Gethsemane—even more so 
once the disciples ran away. He was outnumbered at his trial. He was outnumbered as he 
was being beaten. Truly the hymnwriter was right when he said, “Many hands were 
raised to wound him. None would intervene to save.” He was outnumbered. And when 
he finally was crucified and died, he appeared not just to be outnumbered, but 
overwhelmed by the battle. The battle appeared to be over.
	It wasn’t over yet, but it is now. Although Jesus appeared to have been knocked 
out on Good Friday, on Easter Sunday he reached up and grabbed death by the throat and 
choked the ...well, the death out of it. 
	Do you sometimes have doubts—even though his Word should be enough for 
you? If you’re like me and you wish that God would somehow visibly reassure you, God 
deals with such weakness patiently, lovingly. He dealt with my doubts by making wet 
fleece and dry ground. He deals with your doubts by coming to you in the Lord’s Supper 
as a visible assurance that your forgiveness has been won by Christ’s body and blood.
	Now that your doubts have been allayed, now that your faith has been 
strengthened, do as I did, and be a mighty warrior for the Lord. And understand what that 
means. It doesn’t mean that I performed great feats of strength. No, I wasn’t a mighty 
warrior in the way most people would think of a mighty warrior. I just blew a trumpet, 
broke a jar, and chased down some Midianite versions of Barney Fife. No particularly 
impressive feats of strength there.
	But it isn’t mighty feats of strength that make the warrior truly mighty. What 
made me mighty is that I followed God’s commands. It made me mighty because when I 
followed God’s commands, I had all the mighty power of God supporting me.
	Remember that when God comes to you and says, “Go in the strength that you 
have and defeat the world and defeat your sinful flesh.” Don’t look and say, “Those 
things are so mighty, so menacing. There’s no way I can defeat them. The best I can do 
is to hope that they don’t inflict too much damage.” If you say that, you’re forgetting 
about the strength that you have. You’re forgetting about the weapons he has given you. 
You’re forgetting that God has equipped you splendidly for such warfare. Oh, the 
weapons seem as inconsequential as trumpets, jars, and torches. Paul calls them things 
like “the shield of faith” and “the sword of the Spirit.” (Ephesians 6:16,17). 
Inconsequential though it may seem, because my faith was based in the Lord, I was 
shielded from 135,000 Midianites. When your faith is based in the Lord Jesus, you will 
be shielded from 135,000 temptations of the devil. And when you have the “sword of the 
Spirit”—that is, God’s Word—you have a weapon that is stronger than any self-help, 
personal willpower, or any patch. You have a weapon that can cut down the devil 
himself.
	Go, mighty warriors. Go confidently—confident that you are forgiven. Go 
boldly—knowing that through God you have a strength that is unparalleled, knowing that 
you are the mightiest of warriors. Amen.