You Shall Defeat Them as One Man

During this Advent season we have been reminded that the first Christmas wasn’t the first time our Lord revealed Himself to His people on earth. In fact, the Son of God—The Pre-incarnate Christ—comes to His people in tangible ways, even throughout the Old Testament, to speak to them and to bring them deliverance.

We first discovered the Burning Bush where the Lord spoke with Moses regarding the rescue of God’s people from their Egyptian slavery. This foreshadowed the greater salvation to come when the Lord would join Himself permanently to our human nature to rescue us from our slavery to sin, death, and the devil.

Last Wednesday, we got to hear one of the greatest names of Advent and Christmas, which is Immanuel that means “God with us.” The One we worship is not merely a God who is above and beyond us but a God who comes to be with us and live among us. This is wonderfully foreshadowed in how the Lord was with His people in the Old Testament. The fiery cloud of His presence dwelt within a tabernacle covered in animal skins. He was there with His people to bless and lead and guide them.

The purpose of the tabernacle comes to its fulfillment in the birth of Jesus. John 1:14 says, “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.” The cloud and fire of the Son of God’s presence now dwells in human skin, body and soul. He is forever “God with us,” the true God who is among us as true man to lead and bless and guide us.

And now this evening the Angel of the Lord—the pre-incarnate Christ—appears to Gideon. God chooses that which is last and least and lowly to accomplish His saving purposes.

Gideon was the weakest of his clan and least in his father’s household. And yet, the Angel of the LORD has chosen Gideon to he his instrument to defeat the enemies of his people. God called Gideon a mighty man of valor, or warrior. But he did not appear to be very powerful at all. He was in hiding from the Midianites, who were oppressing the children of Israel.

So this evening we will hear of Hardship and Affliction, we will discover the Hidden Power that is at work with Gideon, and finally how One Man not only defeated the Midianites, but also defeated our enemies too.

Hardship and Affliction

When we suffer hardship and affliction, we are tempted to question whether or not the Lord is with us. But in love the Lord disciplines His wayward children, so that we may turn and cling to Him and be saved.

So we can understand Gideon’s response to the Angel of the Lord’s greeting: “the Lord is with you.” Gideon said to Him, Judges 6:13 “Please tell me this, my lord: If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all the wonderful acts our fathers told us about when they said, ‘Is it not the Lord who brought us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has forsaken us, and he has given us into the hand of Midian.”

There are times when the people of God today—the Church, Christians—feel like Gideon.

Perhaps there have been moments in the darkening days of Advent when you yourself have asked questions similar to his.

“If God is with us, if He really is Immanuel, why am I struggling or being mistreated or ignored?

If God is with me, then why are things such a mess?

Why do I feel alone?

Why am I sick and suffering?

Where is the power of God that we hear about in the Bible?

Like Gideon, we, too, may sometimes feel forsaken.

And yet, we also know, deep down, that the messes we experience are sometimes of our own making.

That’s how it was in Gideon’s day.

The reason God allowed Israel to be overrun by the Midianites is because the Israelites had done evil in His sight. This happens repeatedly in the Book of Judges.

The Israelites forsake the Lord to run after other gods—practice of idolatry— they think will give them more of what they want.

God’s anger is roused against this rebellious people, and He allows their enemies to overtake them. Then, in their distress, they cry out to the Lord for help.

And the Lord raises up a judge, a deliverer, to rescue them from the power of their enemies.

The land has rest, and everything goes well for a period of time. But then, the judge dies, the people become spiritually complacent and apathetic, and they forsake the Lord again, and the whole process starts all over.

This is a warning for us.

When everything is going well, we, too, can be tempted to become complacent in our faith, forgetting the Lord and forsaking Him for the things of this world.

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, if the Lord allows hardship to come upon us so that we might be brought to see what we have done.

But this is also for our comfort; the Lord is doing this for our good. He is seeking to work repentance in our hearts so in faith, we might call upon His name again and with greater fervency.

He disciplines us like a son whom He loves.

With the Law, He turns us away from our idols,

and by the Gospel, He draws us back and restores us to Himself.

Through Christ, our deliverer, we have rest once more.

Hidden Power

Gideon was in hiding; he was from the weakest clan of his tribe and weakest in his father’s house. Jesus also comes among us with His glory hidden, in poverty and lowliness and seeming weakness (Micah 5:2).

Gideon is a picture of Jesus. He was the one chosen by God to deliver Israel in that day and to bring them rest again.

Even though he was weakest and least, he was the Lord’s man for the job.

This is a consistent theme even to the end of the Gideon narrative.

Instead of defeating the Midianites with a massive army, the Lord insists that Gideon reduce his army down from thirty-two thousand to only three hundred men. — 300 against 120,000.

This was so that the victory would not be won by human strength (so they could boast in themselves) but solely by the wisdom and strength of the Lord.

The power of God being hidden beneath what appears to be powerlessness points us to a fulfillment in Jesus.

Gideon is a living prophecy of the victory over sin and death and the devil, which the Lord brings to us at Christmas.

It is the way of God that the last shall be first and the humble shall be exalted.

Jesus embodies this.

He is the mighty and eternal Son of God, yet He does not appear to be so.

His first crib was a cattle trough.

His birth took place almost secretly.

He appeared to be nothing more than a poor peasant boy.

He was born in Bethlehem, which Scripture says is little among the clans of Judah.

When, as an infant, His life was threatened by Herod, He was hidden away in Egypt for a time.

One Man

As Gideon and his meager army of three hundred men would defeat the Midianites as one man, in the same way, the one man Jesus alone defeats our spiritual enemies on our behalf by the power of His incarnation and cross.

Jesus, your mighty man of valor, who appeared to be vulnerable and helpless—not only in His birth but also in His death.

Nevertheless, He brought about the fulfillment of His own words, which He had spoken to Gideon, “I will be with you, and you shall strike the Midianites as one man.”

Gideon and his mere three hundred would defeat the countless Midianites as one man because the Lord was with them.

The Lord Jesus defeats all of our enemies, quite literally, as one man.

By His incarnation, He has taken our humanity into Himself,

By His death and resurrection, He has destroyed sin, death, and the devil once for all. “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom 5:19).

Jesus is an army of one, the only one who can deliver us from our enemies.

The one man Jesus defeated our powerful enemies through weakness because He is the Lord in the flesh.

Out of lowly Bethlehem came the One to be the ruler and deliverer of Israel.

The Midianites, in their confusion, would end up turning on and killing one another in their camp.

In the same way, Jesus turned death and Satan against themselves on the cross, delivering us forever from their power and the sin that oppresses us.

The one man Jesus became flesh—a human being, Tabernacling among us—putting on the humanity of all people in His conception and birth.

And so this one man’s victory also counts for all people in His death and resurrection.

The name Gideon means “one who breaks or cuts down.”

Jesus, our Gideon, has broken and cut down all false gods and the devil himself by the wood of the manger and the wood of the cross.

The Angel of the LORD first appeared to Gideon when he was threshing out wheat for bread in a winepress, and He departed from sight after Gideon offered up bread and meat on the rock.

All of this points us to the The Lord’s Supper—Holy Communion—where the Lord fulfills His promise to be with us in the flesh—where His body and blood, offered up on the rock of Golgotha, are given to us under bread and wine.

Though Jesus has departed from our sight, He is still present with us as true man in our need so that we might also share with Him in His divine glory.

And so we say with Mary in her Magnificat, “For the Mighty One has done great things for me; and Holy is His name . . . He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate.”

Finally, when the Angel of the LORD departed from Gideon, he completely understood that he had been in the very presence of God.

Gideon thought he would die for having seen the Angel of the LORD face-to-face. But Gideon is given a word of peace.

So, also, we are given peace, as God invites us into His Holy Sanctuary, His Divine presence, and we are able to do so without fear, through faith in Christ Jesus.

By His life, death, and resurrection, we are saved from judgment and reconciled to God.

The Son of God also comforts us by saying, “Peace be to you. Do not fear; you shall not die.” For the Lord Jesus is both the Mighty God and the Prince of Peace.

During this Advent season—and into Christmas—look to Jesus as our Gideon, who meets us amid our Hardship and Affliction, whose Hidden Power is hidden in ways we would never expect. And now with repentant hearts our hope in One Man who is born to be our eternal Deliverer and Savior.