The Story

In the days of the judges, a fierce people called the Midianites swept into Israel year after year, like a swarm of grasshoppers too many to count. They stole the crops, took the animals, and left God's people nothing to eat, so that Israel hid in caves and dens in the mountains. For seven years this went on — until the children of Israel cried unto the LORD.

God's answer was threshing wheat by a winepress, hiding it from the Midianites. The young man's name was Gideon, and he did not feel like a hero at all. But one day an angel of the LORD sat down under an oak tree nearby and greeted him with the words of our memory verse — calling him a mighty man of valour, and telling him the LORD was with him! Gideon had many questions: if the LORD was with them, why had all this trouble come? God did not scold him for asking. He simply gave His promise: "Surely I will be with thee, and thou shalt smite the Midianites as one man". Gideon put food on a rock as an offering, and fire sprang out of the rock and burned it up — a sign that God Himself was speaking. That night Gideon also tore down his father's altar to the idol Baal, and later God gave him two more signs with a fleece of wool on the ground: one night the fleece was wet with dew and the ground dry, and the next night the fleece was dry and the ground wet. God was patient with Gideon's questions, and Gideon grew brave.

Men came from all around to join Gideon's army — thirty-two thousand of them! Then God said something surprising: "The people that are with thee are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands". If the army was big, Israel would boast that their own hand had saved them. So Gideon announced that anyone who was afraid could go home — and twenty-two thousand went! Ten thousand remained. Still too many, said God. At the water, God kept only the three hundred men who lapped the water up with their hands: "By the three hundred men that lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into thine hand".

That night, Gideon crept down to the edge of the enemy camp and heard a Midianite telling a dream about a loaf of barley bread that tumbled into the camp and flattened a tent — and his friend said it could only mean Gideon's sword. Gideon's heart leapt; he worshipped God right there. He divided his three hundred men into three companies, and gave every man a trumpet, and an empty pitcher with a lamp hidden inside it. In the middle of the night they surrounded the camp, blew the trumpets, smashed the pitchers so the lamps blazed out — and cried, "The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon." The Midianites woke in terror, ran, shouted, and turned their swords on each other — and fled. Three hundred men with trumpets and lamps had won, without a battle at all — because God won it for them.