The Charge (Elder Joe Story, 07/16/22)

Today, I invite you to turn with me to Judges Chapter 6.

Judges 6 · chapter mention

It's an interesting world we're in.

I've always been, at one time I was a bit of a crusader and I've known other people.

The facts who like to think that they can straighten the whole world out.

Have you ever felt like that?

Boy, if people just listen to me, we could straighten everything out and get it all going

right.

Interestingly if you go to Judges Chapter 6, we pick up on a situation that was going

Judges 6 · chapter mention

on in Israel a long time ago.

The nation had slipped into apostasy is what had happened.

Things were not going well at all because apostasy carries with it its own natural results.

People want to say, what's it matter what I do?

It's my business.

That's the attitude many people take.

In fact, I remember one time we had a guy in the church who was not living according

to God's written will and the church had to deal with it.

It was affecting the churches.

It was affecting their reputation throughout the whole area.

I remember talking to the man, he said, mind your own business.

Well, apostasy has a way of bringing about natural results.

Judges 6, then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord.

As we go on, we find that they were into Baal worship.

Anybody ever worship Baal?

I hope not.

Don't raise your hand if you did.

Baal actually at different times and in different places, the word Baal means Lord.

Baal was the storm god.

He's pictured on ancient Stella as having riding in a chariot with bolts of lightning

in one hand and a hammer in the other, thunder and lightning.

He was the guy that brought the rain.

Also he was in some cases referred to as the sun god.

Some of these gods had multiple hats, I guess.

Anyway, the people of Israel sinned in the sight of the Lord.

The Lord delivered them into the hand of the Midianites for seven years.

This was tough because the Midianites were not kind masters.

It says the hand of Midian prevailed against Israel because of the Midianites, the children

of Israel made for themselves the dens, the caves, the strongholds which are in the mountains.

They were hiding.

They had to.

Midianites were really tough on them.

So it was, whenever the children of Israel had sown, Midianites would come up.

Also Amalekites and the people of the east would come up against them.

Then they would encamp against them and destroy the produce of the earth as far as Gaza and

leave no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep nor ox nor donkey, for they would come up

with their livestock and their tents coming in as numerous as locusts.

Both they and their camels were without number and they would enter the land to destroy it.

So Israel was greatly impoverished because of the Midianites and the children of Israel

cried out to the Lord.

Now this was a cycle of things that seemed to happen with Israel every so often.

They'd be worshipping God, everything would go great.

Then they would go into apostasy.

After all, there were things about Baal worship and the worship of Ashteroth that were very

enticing, shall we say.

These were ancient fertility cults and the worship involved all kinds of licentiousness

and immorality.

So people would be drawn to that, just like people today are drawn to that.

They're well, it's well known that some of the magazines that promote sensuality and

licentiousness sell well.

That's why they're published.

People buy them.

You can make money at that kind of stuff.

The Israelites were getting into all this.

We don't want to spend a lot of time on the Baal worship, but it came to pass when the

children of Israel cried out to the Lord because of the Midianites.

I said, the Lord sent a prophet to the children of Israel.

We don't know who the prophet was.

It doesn't give his name.

Never anywhere, it's not there.

But we have his message and it's kind of an interesting message.

The Lord told them, I brought you up from Egypt and brought you out of the house of

bondage and I delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of all

who oppressed you and drove them out before you and gave you their land.

Also, I said to you, I'm the Lord your God.

Do not fear the gods of the Amorites and whose land you dwell, but you have not obeyed my

voice.

End of message.

Is there any hope offered in this message?

No?

God doesn't say, I will deliver you if you behave yourselves.

He didn't say that.

He just said, you've done this and this and this and that's why you're in trouble.

That's the end of the message.

That's a little discouraging, isn't it?

But God's not done.

God hears the cry of his children, but he wanted them to know they were suffering from

the Midianites.

They were suffering from a very terrible foreign occupation for a reason.

They had forsaken God.

Now the next thing God does starts in verse 11.

The angel of the Lord came and sat under the Terebinth tree, which was in Oprah and belonged

to Joash the Abbe-Ezerite while his son Gideon threshed wheat in the winepress in order to

hide it from the Midianites.

You see, who would think of going to the winepress to find wheat?

By the way, how does this sound to you?

Says he was hiding threshing wheat in the winepress.

Hmm, what kind of a guy is this?

Well, he's like everybody else.

He's hiding.

And Gideon said to him, oh my Lord, if the Lord is with us, because the Lord appeared

to him and said, the Lord is with you mighty man of valor, does he sound like a man of

valor?

If you get nothing else out of what I have to say today, I want this to be very clear.

Our God, our Savior Jesus, looks at every one of you, looks at me, not as what we are

or were, but as to what we can become by his grace.

Now that's pretty exciting stuff when you think about it.

We don't have to be what we've been.

We don't even have to be what we are.

We have a God who can change us and he could take a man like Gideon who's hiding and afraid

and turn him into a mighty man of valor.

And that is, to me, really exciting stuff.

Gideon said to him, oh my Lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened

to us?

And where are all his miracles which our fathers told us about saying, the day of miracles

is over.

Have you heard that one?

Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt, but now the Lord has forsaken us and delivered

us into the hands of the Midianites.

This man is about to see one of the most amazing deliverances that God has worked in history,

one of them.

God's done a lot of amazing deliverances, but this is one of them.

And he's about to be the instrument that God will use to bring this deliverance about.

And all he can think of is poor us.

We've had it so tough.

Hey, there's hope.

Listen to this.

The Lord turned to him and said, go in this might of yours and you shall save Israel from

the hand of the Midianites.

Have not I sent you?

What does God sending him have to do with it?

Well, let's look.

We won't waste a lot of time wondering about that.

He says again, oh my Lord, how can I save Israel?

Indeed my clan is the weakest in Manasseh and I am the least in my father's house.

There's a whole raft of reasons why I can't do anything.

Have you heard that one before?

And the Lord said to him, surely I will be with you and you shall defeat the Midianites

as one man.

Now, this is important.

When God sends you to do something, if God calls you or me to do something, he's there

with you.

He's there helping you.

He tells Gideon, first he says, have not I sent you?

And then he says, I will be with you.

And if God is calling you or me or anyone else to do something, you'll be with him.

Let me ask you, is there anything that he cannot do?

Don't answer that because it's a short answer.

The answer is no, he can do anything.

And you might be surprised to see God working through you.

I've seen it.

I was surprised.

Me?

He says, this isn't about you, Joe, this is about me.

But he uses me and he's used you and he's willing to use you.

Now, let's go on.

So he says, well, Gideon brings him some food and he puts it in front of him and the angel

of the Lord put out the end of his staff that was in his hand, touched the meat and the

unleavened bread, fire rose out of the rock and consumed the meat and the unleavened bread.

Gideon was saying, I've seen God.

And there was this belief amongst the Hebrews that if you saw God, you would die.

God said, don't worry, you're peace, peace, you won't die.

So Gideon is ready to go to work for the Lord and the Lord says, there's got to be something

done before you go to work for me.

And you don't hear this part of it in the children's stories very much, but it's very

interesting.

God says, take the young bull, the seven-year-old bull, and go tear down the altar of Baal that

your father built and use the bull as a sacrifice, build an altar to the Lord and sacrifice the

bull on it.

And so he did.

He did it at night, remember this guy was real brave, but he was afraid of his father's

household and the men of the town.

So he did it at night and the next morning, all the men of the town come head out to the

fields to work and there, well they stopped for their morning worship at the shrine to

Baal.

The image has been torn down, the wood from the image is part of the fire for the burnt

offering.

The bull is, remains of the bull being burnt there and the men are saying, who did this?

I don't know how many of you have lived in other countries, but I'll never forget living

in Pakistan, if you've lived in the East, all you really need to do to get a war going

is attack someone's religion.

Seriously.

And it can be pretty bad.

I was there in Pakistan back in the 70s when they had a problem with the Qadiani's, they

called them, also known as the Rabwais and they have a holy city called Rabwah.

The railroad goes, main railroad, north-south railroad goes right through there and there

are a bunch of medical students headed for the Himalayas on a holiday and they had a

stop in Rabwah.

It's outside the city walls, but all the people there are Qadianis.

Those who do not belong to that faith are not allowed in the town.

So these medical students were sitting out there in the train, cat calling out the windows,

making fun of the mocking the Qadianis.

Well a few days later the train came back through there with these medical students

on it and the station master, a Qadiani, hit a switch and put the train on a siding and

a mob boarded the train and attacked these medical students.

They beat them with hoses and chains, cut off the ends of their tongues and the whole

country from that happening went into crisis.

There were mobs burning mosques, there were just all kinds of things.

It almost brought the government down.

And once before a similar issue had brought the government down.

So these men saw this as an attack on Baal, on their religion and they were unhappy.

Who did it?

Well I don't care if you did it at night.

You had ten men with him.

I remember growing up hearing the old saying, you know, telephone, telegraph, tell a woman,

wait a minute, men are just as bad, right?

Try doing something with ten men and see how secret that remains.

So they all, the men of the town went to Gideon's father, to his house, bring out Gideon.

He has destroyed Baal.

He has destroyed the altar.

And this man says, Gideon's father says, look, if Baal is a god, let him answer for himself.

Let him take care of himself.

And Gideon got another name out of that because he became known as let Baal answer for himself.

That's a fun one.

And remember, he had attacked Baal.

This affects, I mean, the news spread like everything and the next thing we find is all

the Midianites, the Amalekites, the people of the east gathered together.

They crossed over and encamped in the Valley of Jezreel.

But the spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon and he blew the trumpet and the Abbezerites

gathered behind him and he sent messages.

So the men of Abbezer were converted and they were the first ones to rally to him.

He sent messengers throughout Manasseh, also gathered behind him.

He also sent messengers to Asher, Zebulun, Naftali and they came up to meet them.

Now this is fun because you got the army of the Midianites and we find out in chapter

eight verse 10 that they started out with an army of 135,000.

Now in those days, that was a huge army.

They had 32,000 men.

That is odds of a little over four to one.

How would you like to be facing an enemy with an army that much smaller?

Battles have been won against those odds.

So that's, you know, history tells us about small groups of men if they're properly situated,

motivated, use surprise, et cetera.

But small groups have won big battles.

But God comes down to Gideon and says, Gideon, if you'll save Israel by my hand as you said,

wait a minute, you said that.

That's all right.

Gideon was willing to go along.

Look, Gideon says, can I try something first?

And God says, yeah, you can try something.

And he said, OK, I'll put out a fleece tonight.

And if in the morning the fleece is wet and the ground is all dry, God said, OK, go for

it.

And that's the way it turned out.

Gideon got to thinking about it, fleeces draw water.

God, can we try it the other way?

The fleece will be dry and the ground will be wet with dew.

That's what happened.

So God had made it very clear.

And then God said something to Gideon that was very interesting.

He said, the people who are with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their

hands.

Let Israel claim glory for itself against me.

Lest Israel claim glory for itself against me.

My own hand has saved me, they'll say.

Now therefore proclaim in the hearing of the people saying, whoever is fearful and afraid,

let him turn and depart at once from Mount Gilead.

And I can just hear Gideon saying, what?

I need every man I've got.

And God said, make this announcement.

In fact, God was not being unreasonable.

If you go to Deuteronomy chapter 20, the first eight verses, they were supposed to make,

Deuteronomy 20 · chapter mention

the people of Israel were supposed to make an announcement before any battle that if

you had married a wife, just gotten married, go home.

Spend a year with her.

Then you can go to battle later on.

If you bought a house, a vineyard, had anything important going on in your life, go home.

And if you were fearful and afraid, go home.

God knows that in a battle, the first people to turn tail and run are those who are fearful

and afraid.

He wanted just the brave ones to stick around.

And so they did.

Twenty-two thousand of the thirty-two thousand went home.

That was it.

Ten thousand men.

The odds are thirteen and a half to one.

That's getting pretty heavy.

If you know anything about warfare, numbers, the more numbers you have to overwhelm whoever

you're against, the better off you are.

And if you know how to use them.

And God says, okay Gideon, that's fine, but you still have too many men.

Wait a minute.

I did what the law requires.

We lost twenty-two thousand men.

Are you sure?

And God says, yeah.

Now what we're going to do is run them down across the river or this creek and tell them

to get a drink.

This might be the last one they get for a while.

And they did.

Now you know the story.

Many of you know this story.

Most of the men, did you ever drink out of a creek?

Yeah.

Some of us have.

It's not a good idea usually.

But you get beaver fever and all kinds of things out of a creek.

But the men ran down as if they're going to battle.

And as they came to this creek, most of them got down on their knees and put their face

in the water and sucked it up.

That's how you get the most water.

Three hundred of them took their hands, kept their eye on the enemy, brought the water

up to their mouth.

And God said, those three hundred are what I'm going to use to deliver Israel.

And sure enough, they went into battle.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

Gideon by this time is definitely worried about things.

And so God told him, you're still worried.

Arise, go down against the camp.

But if you are afraid to go down, go down to the camp with Pura, your servant, and you

shall hear what they say.

And afterward your hands shall be strengthened to go down against the camp.

So he went down with Pura, his servant, to the outpost of the armed men who were in the

camp.

Now, the Midianites, the Amalekites, all the people of the East were lying in the valley

as numerous as locusts.

And their camels were without number as the sand of the sea.

And as he approaches his tent, he's being very stealthy.

His servant is being very stealthy.

And they hear a man in the tent wake up with a cry.

He's had a nightmare.

You ever have a nightmare?

You know what that's like.

You usually wake up, right?

And he starts telling his dream to his companion.

The man in the tent says, I've had a dream.

To my surprise, a loaf of barley bread tumbled into the camp of Midian.

It came to a tent and struck it so that it fell and overturned.

And the tent collapsed.

Then his companion answered and said, this is nothing else but the sword of Gideon, the

son of Joash, a man of Israel.

Into his hand, God has delivered Midian and the whole camp.

Apparently, the Midianites were not aware that 22,000 men, no, more than 22,000, 31,700

men had gone home from the Israelite army.

They were filled with fear.

Who filled them with fear?

Well, God did, sure.

And so Gideon, it's a fascinating story.

He takes his 300 men, gives each one of them a torch with some kind of a pitcher or cover

for it, gives each one of them a shofar or a trumpet, and he divides them into three

groups.

And I used to look at the picture that they had in the children's storybook where you

have this little knot of men running into the Midianite camp, some of them with swords,

some of them with torches, and some of them blowing trumpets.

No, it didn't happen that way.

Why would you give them trumpets?

What do you do in a battle with trumpets?

You blow them, what do you blow?

Signals, right?

I'll never forget, Jimmy and I had just moved to Sitka, Alaska, and we were staying in an

apartment up above the water, and across the water was Japanski Island and a Coast Guard

base.

And every morning, was it at 6 o'clock, you could hear Reveille being blown at the Coast

Guard base.

And every night at 10 o'clock was taps.

Those are signals telling the men it's time to go to bed, time to get up, that kind of

thing.

They also blew the charge, the retreat, a trumpet.

Not everybody in a battle would have a trumpet, just the leaders, the company commanders or

especially the regimental commanders.

And so on three sides of this Midianite army, the Midianites and Malachites, Gideon had

a hundred men on each side, and I'm sure they were spread out, and on the signal, they got

rid of the cover for their torches, shouted the sword of the Lorden of Gideon, and they

started sounding the charge.

And the Midianites came running out of their tents, and they looked, and over here, a hundred

torches, a hundred torches, a hundred torches.

And in their minds, well, I'm sure they believed that for every torch there was a thousand

Israelites.

Three hundred thousand Israelites surrounding them.

They didn't know that there were just torches and trumpets, right?

Well, let me ask you, was it just torches and trumpets?

Uh-uh.

No.

For every torch, there was an army.

I believe there was an army of angels.

You see, God can fight a lot better than any man ever thought of fighting.

And I don't care if you're dealing with Midianites.

I don't care if you're dealing with modern men and tanks and aircraft and everything

else.

There's not a weapon man has ever made that God can't handle.

And so, they're up there sounding the charge, three hundred trumpets and a thousand warriors

of God's choosing for every trumpet, and they, the Midianites look around.

Everywhere is the glint of armor, and they take their swords and start slashing.

Never mind that the armor they're looking at is their own.

Their own men.

And so, while Gideon's men are sounding the charge, holding their lamps aloft, by the

way, what would you hold a torch for in a battle?

Well, probably for several reasons.

Your men, your warriors will know where you're at, right?

And they also will have some idea of the layout of the battlefield.

And there was enough light to glint off the armor, but not for people to notice whose

armor it was.

And that night, the Midianites and the Amalekites destroyed each other at a great amount.

Gideon sent fast runners to let the Ephraimites know to take the fords of the Jordan, and

they killed a lot of Midianites.

And by the time Gideon gets across the Jordan going after the Midianites, there's only 15,000

Midianites left, still outnumbering the 300, right?

But they were on the run, and they got to where they thought they were safe, and when

Gideon showed up with his 300 men, this time they used their swords, and the Midianites

did not fare well.

Some of them escaped, but never again did Midian rebound to the point where they could

cause trouble for Israel.

Now, who won that battle?

God.

Did it take bravery on the part of Gideon to do what he did?

Did he have to trust God to do it?

Yes, he did.

Did the men who were with him, the 300, did they have to trust God?

Were they all committed, no matter what?

I would like to suggest, by the way, that God does not ask us to kill Midianites today,

for one thing, there aren't any.

Fair enough?

What does God call us to do?

God has called his people.

Revelation 14, I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven with having the everlasting

gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth.

You know that message, if you're a Seventh-day Adventist.

And you know that he wants us to spread it to the world, don't you?

If God has called us to do something, does he send us off by ourselves to do it?

No, he goes with us.

And so we have the light of the gospel message.

In fact, if you want to, by the way, you know John, the Apostle John tells us in the first

chapter of John that Jesus is the light, that lighteth every man that comes into the world.

Did you know that?

Every single person who ever lived has received some light.

And Jesus said, if I be lifted up, John 12, I will draw all men unto me.

The battle plan is simple, hold Jesus high.

I remember being asked to be an interim pastor one time in a Congregationalist church.

And I would preach the same thing there on Sunday morning that I preached in my church

on Sabbath morning.

That was kind of fun.

They loved it.

These people said, man, we're learning so much about the Bible.

Yes, they were.

And it was exciting.

They loved it.

So if you are holding the light of Jesus high, and I made up my mind when I was preaching

in that Congregationalist church, I said, well, I don't think I'm going to make Adventists

out of them in the next couple of months.

And I'm not going to try, but I want them to know one thing, and that is that no one

believes in Jesus more than Seventh-day Adventists.

And I want you to know that that's what it's all about is Jesus.

Now, does that mean we don't worry about things like the Sabbath?

Well, Jesus kept the Sabbath.

Why wouldn't I?

Does it mean we don't worry about things that the teachings in the Bible?

No, God gave us to them.

Jesus gave them to us.

They're very important, but we hold Jesus high, as high as we can.

And then number two, they had trumpets, right?

Paul says it's important that the trumpet give a certain sound.

Otherwise you don't know what it's all about, right?

You don't know what tune it's trying to play.

And I would like to suggest that God wants us to hold the trumpet and trumpet the gospel

message everywhere as much as we can by our lives, by our words.

People need to know that that light we hold up.

We hold it not only by our deeds, but by our words.

Now, as I said, we're not out to kill Midianites, but anytime you're out to save souls, you

will be in a battle.

Did you know that?

Because there is an enemy of souls, the enemy of humanity.

There is a real devil and he has real angels.

He took one third of the angels in heaven with him, Revelation chapter 12.

Revelation 12 · chapter mention

He drew one third of the stars with his tail.

We know that.

By the way, I've already mentioned that God can handle any weapon that man can make.

How about handling demons?

Can God handle them too?

Yeah.

It's very important that if we are going to win souls for Jesus, that we expect and

plan on God giving us the power from on high to do it.

We can't do it by ourselves.

I couldn't win a soul to save me, let alone someone else, without God's Holy Spirit.

And God is telling us, every one of us, go with this thy might.

Have not I sent you?

Has he sent you?

If he has, he will go with you.

And yes, the charge is being sounded.

I love Revelation chapter 18.

Revelation 18 · chapter mention

Last week, EW mentioned it, and I appreciated hearing him mention it Sabbath afternoon,

where he says, where Jesus tells us, by the way, this is the Revelation of Jesus Christ.

That's how this book starts.

After these things, I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority,

and the earth was illuminated with his glory.

This is a fourth angel after the three angels.

I believe we are getting very close to the end of all things.

Do you?

It's time for the work of that fourth angel, and he wants to use you.

He wants to use me.

He wants to use everyone who will keep their eye on the goal, even when drinking water.

He wants to use everyone who will keep their eye on him and hold him high, everyone who

will move forward at the sound of the charge and who is willing to be part of signaling

the charge.

What about you?

Jesus is coming, and I'm looking forward to the day when the battle is over.

The older I get, the more I look back.

I grew up hearing my dad say, oh yeah, they've been talking about the coming of Jesus since

1844, and he hasn't come yet.

And that's true, he hasn't.

Dad's long gone.

Jesus still hasn't come, but I am convinced that his coming is near.

Are you going to be ready for it?

He's looking for people who will be totally and completely willing to go forward in the

might of the Holy Spirit at the sound of the charge.

Will you?

Our loving Father in heaven, thank you so much for giving us your word.

Thank you for calling us into your service.

I thank you for having a plan for each of us, for using us to spread the message of

our soon coming Savior.

Father, we thank you for the power that you have promised and pray that this work might

soon be finished.

And now unto him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before

the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.

To God our Savior who alone is wise, be glory and majesty, dominion and power both now and

forever.

Amen.

Amen.