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El Cajon Seventh-Day Adventist Church

Lessons From Gideon

Vincent Bujor

Do You Need A Sign From God?

Won’t Be The Same

Father in heaven, Lord, we thank you so much for your amazing promise, your word that stands fast though the heavens fall.

And Lord, as we dwell upon a powerful story this morning, a story of encouragement and faith, We pray that you draw us nearer to your throne, to your heart, and that we may see you face to face.

Give us your Holy Spirit, we ask in Jesus' name.

If you have attended the Bible study seminar that we had just recently, you might remember that I said that there are 2 different ways how to preach a sermon if you make it very broad.

Okay, there is the topical sermon, which means You preach about a topic like forgiveness or the Holy Spirit or something like that.

And then there is also the text-based or the textual sermon.

Now, for this Sabbath and next Sabbath, we're going to look at a story that is just found.

It's a text and we're gonna look at that text together Here's why I love text based sermons so much.

First of all, they're easy to follow you can read through them Once you get home again, you can you can study them by yourself And the cool thing about textual sermons is that when you hear them, you gain tools how to study scripture so you can do that at home as well.

When evangelists and preachers prepare a topical sermon, it requires a lot of research, a lot of more work, but a textual sermon is very powerful because you take the text, you do exegesis, that's how you call it, you dive into the text and you find out what you can get there.

Now I want to kind of set the stage here for this story that we're going to look at It's going to be a little serious, we're going to look at it not only this morning, but also next Sabbath Judges chapter 6, You have to remember that the book of Judges is dealing with probably 1 of the craziest periods that was ever recorded in history about God's people.

I mean, in the book of Judges you find remarkable stories, incredible stories, crazy stories.

Stories that make you think, oh man, what did these people do back then?

Like stories, for example, of a guy who had 70 half-brothers, not 17, but 7-0, 70 half-brothers, and 1 day he decided to kill all of them together at once.

Stories of a woman who found, who basically had made up this plan to kill her enemy and she murdered him with a tent peg.

Stories of civil wars happening, people dying, up to 10, 000 people dying at once.

And you might think to yourself, why is that stuff in the Bible?

Why do we have these stories in the book of Judges?

Well, first of all, the Bible is such an incredible book that when you are reading it, you realize that it doesn't paint a beautiful, sunny picture of how things ought to be or how the people were back then.

The Bible is inspired and it is also, you know, 1 evidence that you can also receive from, because, you know, to learn that it is inspired is that the stories are so accurate and raw and honest and sometimes even brutal that you realize the Bible is telling you straight up how wicked and selfish we humans are.

And then the Bible says in Judges 21, verse 25, that during this period, it was about the period of 1400 BC until 1050 BC, right after the Israelites had gone into the promised land, they had, you know, conquered the enemy, at least most of them, and settled in the promised land.

During This time, those about 350 years, 400 years, everyone was doing what was right in their own eyes.

If we study the context of this story here, we realize that people have become lazy.

God's people came into Canaan and God still had a work for them to do.

But they were like, you know what, now we're comfortable.

There were still people out there that were making their lives hard, but they didn't bother, they didn't care, they didn't drive them out, and God's people became kind of complacent.

Worshipping idols and graven images and all these kind of things, and there was sexual immorality, people didn't really know, The moral standards sunk lower and lower.

There was no spiritual leadership during this time.

And God, the Bible tells us, raised up judges, singular people, individuals who had to help in the case of emergency.

Let me tell you something there were some cases of emergency.

I mean it is so crazy when you read through these chapters and you have some time in the next coming months and all 1 family in this church is reading through the book of Judges at the moment.

If you haven't read through it, maybe you should do that at 1 time and just kind of read how God is delivering his people over and over and over again.

A couple years later, They fall back into idolatry.

A couple years later, they do what's wicked in God's sight again.

A couple of years later, they're becoming selfish and selfish again and again.

And by chapter 6, Israel had messed up 5 times.

5 times, at least 5 times, that's what the text says.

They were doing evil in the sight of the Lord at least 5 times, willingly leaving God, rebelling, doing evil.

And then we had an enemy, and the enemy was called the Midianites, okay?

A group of people who also lived in that region.

And the Midianites, you know, were oppressing the Israelites, so the Israelites had to flee, And they had to live in caves.

I mean When God took Israel out of Egypt That was taking them out of slavery into the land that God had for them And now we get to a point just a couple years later that Israel had to not only like not only were they oppressed by the Midianites but they had to live in caves in the land that God had chosen for them.

The Midianites and the Amalekites they destroyed the livestock and all the agriculture that the Israelites had.

So in other words they had problems getting food, they had problems with their economy.

And God's people waited 7 years before they cried out to God again.

It makes me wonder Sometimes how long are we waiting until we cry out to God when there is trouble coming?

We call our friend, we call our pastor, we call our mom, we call our siblings, we call everyone but instead of God.

It would be good to call God first, to go to prayer first and then ask God for help.

And it's so interesting, if you go to chapter 6, and open your Bibles please, we're going to follow along here.

We're just going to stay in chapter 6 this morning.

Judges chapter 6, and there you read how all of this stuff is happening and then comes this unnamed prophet This guy doesn't even have a name in scripture in verse 9 Or verse 8 and verse 9 and 10 The Lord said the prophet unto the children of Israel which said unto them thus saith the Lord God of Israel I brought you up from Egypt and brought you forth out of the house of bondage and I delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of all that oppressed you oh There were many people that oppressed the Israelites and attacked them and all sorts of things, right?

God says, I did all of that for you, and I drove them out from before you, and I gave you their land, and I said unto you, I am the Lord your God.

Fear not the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell.

Some people today try to twist the story, try to make it look like the God of the Old Testament was a cruel God and a God who indulged in violence and he loved to torture people.

Are you listening to what's happening here?

God has always been loving, just, and merciful, and it was his people, it's us, that make the mistakes.

He came out of nowhere, he disappeared again, 3 verses, then he's gone.

There was a man named Gideon, and he was threshing wheat, the Bible says in the wine press.

Now if you know anything about agriculture and most of us don't, which is why I take the time now to explain this, This might really seem confusing.

The way you do it, the way you usually thresh the wheat, and by the way, threshing wheat, if you don't know what that is, right, it's separating the grain, the edible part, from all that other stuff that grows, okay?

So you take the, you know, if the grain grows, you take the grain and you want all the husks and the stalks and all that, you want that to go away.

You go into an open surface area, ideally outside where you have wind blowing, and then you thrash the wheat, you hit it, okay?

That's how you actually separate the edible part from the rest that you don't want to eat.

And once you've done that, there's still a lot of mess there.

You throw up the wheat, and usually the wind is blowing away the edible, I mean, the stuff that you don't need, right?

And the grain that's actually edible, that's the 1 you want to use for your sandwich you want to eat, okay?

That thing is falling down to the ground and you have the edible part right there.

All right, so you hit it, open surface area, you throw it up, there's some wind coming usually, right, that's ideal, and then it goes away and then you have the stuff left that you will need to eat, okay?

Now The Bible says that Gideon was threshing wheat, where?

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Series

Lessons From Gideon

Do You Need A Sign From God?

Transcript

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