Judges 8:22-35
Date: August 4th, 2024
Speaker: Sam Crites
Scripture: Judges 8:22-35
The Life of Gideon, Part 4
Main Idea of Text: Even though Gideon refuses to be king, his poor leadership leads the Israelites back into the worship of idols.
8:22-28: Gideon refuses to be king but makes the mistake of confusing the worship of God.
8:22-23: Israel tries to make Gideon king, but he refuses because God is their king.
8:24-28: Gideon succumbs to temptation and makes an ephod of gold to be worshipped in his hometown of Ophrah.
8:29-35: Gideon dies and Israel returns to worshipping the Baals.
Main Idea of Sermon: Worshipping rightly requires us to worship God’s way.
Worship is God centered, not man centered.
Worship is clearly prescribed, not creatively crafted.
Worship is meaningless without memory.
Introduction:
Judges 8:22-35
Gideon’s Ephod
22 Then the men of Israel said to Gideon, “Rule over us, you and your son and your grandson also, for you have saved us from the hand of Midian.” 23 Gideon said to them, “I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the LORD will rule over you.” 24 And Gideon said to them, “Let me make a request of you: every one of you give me the earrings from his spoil.” (For they had golden earrings, because they were Ishmaelites.) 25 And they answered, “We will willingly give them.” And they spread a cloak, and every man threw in it the earrings of his spoil. 26 And the weight of the golden earrings that he requested was 1,700 shekels of gold, besides the crescent ornaments and the pendants and the purple garments worn by the kings of Midian, and besides the collars that were around the necks of their camels. 27 And Gideon made an ephod of it and put it in his city, in Ophrah. And all Israel whored after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family. 28 So Midian was subdued before the people of Israel, and they raised their heads no more. And the land had rest forty years in the days of Gideon.
The Death of Gideon
29 Jerubbaal the son of Joash went and lived in his own house. 30 Now Gideon had seventy sons, his own offspring, for he had many wives. 31 And his concubine who was in Shechem also bore him a son, and he called his name Abimelech. 32 And Gideon the son of Joash died in a good old age and was buried in the tomb of Joash his father, at Ophrah of the Abiezrites.
33 As soon as Gideon died, the people of Israel turned again and whored after the Baals and made Baal-berith their god. 34 And the people of Israel did not remember the LORD their God, who had delivered them from the hand of all their enemies on every side, 35 and they did not show steadfast love to the family of Jerubbaal (that is, Gideon) in return for all the good that he had done to Israel.
The life of Gideon is a story about worship. It begins with Israel worshipping the God of the Amalekites so God brings the Midianites in to oppress and discipline his people for their idolatry. To deliver them, God raises up Gideon and saves his people in such a peculiar and odd way that he alone could be given the credit for the victory. And it ends with Gideon confusing the worship of God’s people as the Israelites forget God and return to worshipping idols. The worship of the one, true and living God is the setting in which the story of Gideon’s life set.
So what can Gideon teach us about worshipping God? The answer to this question is the main idea of our sermon. The main idea of our sermon is this: Worshipping rightly requires us to worship God God’s way.
We are going to learn three things about worship from our sermon text this morning. First, worship is God-centered, not man-centered. As Gideon is dealing with the spoils of victory, it seems like he puts the focus back on God. They ask him to be king and he says no. He doesn’t want to be king because God is king. However, he immediately turns around and lets the Israelites treat him as a king. He has every man bring him a tribute of gold. He then takes that gold and fashions an ephod, which I will explain later is a garment of worship, and sets it up in his hometown as a monument to his achievements and victories. Gideon falls into a very subtle and clever trap. He seems to nod in God’s direction publicly, but, in his heart, he allows himself some liberties that ultimately rob God of the glory of the victory he alone provided. Allowing our worship to slip from God onto men is so easy, we must be careful to keep God at the center of our love and affection.
The second lesson we will learn about worship is that worship is clearly prescribed, not creatively crafted. What is the big deal about making an ephod? Is not God Gideon’s God? Doesn’t he have the right to worship God however he is able? The second mistake Gideon makes is becoming creative in how he worships God. God has been explicitly clear with his people who is supposed to worship him, when they are to do, how they are to do it, what tools and instruments they are supposed to use, how they are to dress, what time of year they are to do certain things. God prescribes, meaning he gives clear and direct instruction for how we are supposed to worship him. Gideon got creative and it caused confusion. We must be careful to only worship God as he has told us to worship him.
Lastly, worship is an act of remembrance, it is meaningless without remembering who God is and what God has done. The great tragedy of this story is that, in the end, because of Gideon’s failure in leadership, Israel forgot God. When you forget who someone is and what they have done, you cannot love and cherish them. Memory is an essential component of worship, in fact, it defines worship. Every Sunday, we come to the house of God to be reminded of the Gospel, to have the wonderful works of God recounted to us. We read a book that was done being written 2,000 years ago because our worship of God this morning is contingent on what Christ has done for us in the past. Gideon misunderstood this. He did not cultivate and lead the next generation to know God and cherish the memory of the victories he had given in the past.
Worshipping rightly requires us to worship God God’s way, so we work hard to keep him at the center of our affections, we train ourselves in God’s word so that we approach him rightly, and we testify to ourselves and to each other about who he is and what he has done, so that all of our loves and affections find their end in him. He is the point of our worship. What we have this morning, in the life of Gideon, is a really bad example, and sometimes, that is exactly what we need. A bad example to teach us a good lesson: worshipping God rightly requires us to worship God God’s way.
Worship is God-centered, not man-centered.
Now, as we begin our sermon, our first two lessons about worship come from verses 22-28. Let’s reread them together:
Judges 8:22-28
22 Then the men of Israel said to Gideon, “Rule over us, you and your son and your grandson also, for you have saved us from the hand of Midian.” 23 Gideon said to them, “I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the LORD will rule over you.” 24 And Gideon said to them, “Let me make a request of you: every one of you give me the earrings from his spoil.” (For they had golden earrings, because they were Ishmaelites.) 25 And they answered, “We will willingly give them.” And they spread a cloak, and every man threw in it the earrings of his spoil. 26 And the weight of the golden earrings that he requested was 1,700 shekels of gold, besides the crescent ornaments and the pendants and the purple garments worn by the kings of Midian, and besides the collars that were around the necks of their camels. 27 And Gideon made an ephod of it and put it in his city, in Ophrah. And all Israel whored after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family. 28 So Midian was subdued before the people of Israel, and they raised their heads no more. And the land had rest forty years in the days of Gideon.
The first thing that we can learn from these verses about worship is that worship should be God-centered, not man-centered.
As we have studied the life of Gideon, we have seen that Gideon is an extremely complex character. When I was a little boy, I was taught that Gideon was this warrior of faith that took 300 men and conquered an army of over 125,000 Midianites because he trusted God and was fearless before the enemy. That Gideon captures the imagination of little boys and looks really good on a felt board, but that is not the Gideon of Judges 6-8. Gideon is an extremely complex and challenging individual to wrap your arms around.
On the one hand, he has every reason to trust God. God appeared to him through the Angel of the Lord and promised him the victory over the Midianites, and yet Gideon asked for sign after sign demonstrating that he didn’t actually trust the Lord. But on the other hand, the book of Hebrews says he is one of the great heroes of the faith that we should look at and model our faith after. We have seen him take one step forward and two steps backward over and over again.
As we look at our text this morning, it seems like something similar is taking place. Gideon seems to do the right thing when they ask him to be king. They say be our king and he says, “No, God is your king.” That is true, and really, that is the point of the entire book of Judges. God is the king of Israel and Israel is in constant rebellion against him. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes and did recognize the sovereignty of their king.
So it looks like Gideon made the right move, but then look at what happens. He has every single person bring him a tribute of gold, and this is no small amount of gold. 1,700 shekels is about 42.5 pounds or almost $2,000,000 worth of gold in today’s market. What right does Gideon have to ask this of God’s people? Really, he has no right, because he is not their king.
And this is where the lesson is. Gideon did not refuse the kingship of Israel because he genuinely believed that God was king. If he did, the story would have ended their and it would have said that Gideon went back to Ophrah and planted cabbages. No, Gideon gives lip service to the sovereignty of God and then proceeds to act like a king. He verbally gives glory to God but in his heart he craves the credit and the glory that only belong to God. If Gideon is a story about God attempting to lead his people back to worshipping him, then Gideon fails because he ultimately leads the people to worship himself.
This is an important lesson for the Church to learn. It is so easy for us to slip up in our worship. The transition from God being the center of our worship to man being the center of our worship is so subtle and so hard to observe. We have to be so careful to constantly work to reestablish God as the object of our affections.
This is particularly true for leaders, whether they be pastors or bible teachers. Anyone that holds a place of leadership in the Church is in danger of potentially stealing God’s glory and making it about themselves. This could happen many ways, but let me give you one example.
I am not the best preacher in the world, but there have been many moments over the last two years where a particular sermon resonates for a particular person where it makes an outsized impact. In God’s kindness, instead of hitting a single, I hit a double or a triple. With nothing but good intentions in their heart that person will come up to me at the end of the service and say something like, “That was the best sermon I have ever heard on that passage” or “You just don’t know what is going on right now in my life, but I really needed to hear what you had to say this morning.” Now in that moment, every pastor is trained to say something like, “well praise God” or “all glory be to God.” The question is, do I really mean it? Or am I falling into the same trap as Gideon? “God is your king, but you know, if you felt so moved, you could do this for the Church or that for the Church.”
Now, I don’t want anyone to hear this sermon and stop coming up to encourage me at the end of the service. That is not the point at all, but what I want us to learn to do, both you and me, is to learn to encourage each other in such a way that God is at the center of the encourager’s heart and at the center of the heart of the person being encouraged. Turn with me if you will to Hebrews 10:24-25. Listen to what the author of Hebrews says about encouragement:
Hebrews 10:24-25
24 And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
Ok, so if you hear the way that I am applying this point about keeping God at the center of our worship and you stop encouraging others, you are missing the point, in fact, that would be sinful because Hebrews clearly commands us to encourage one another. We must think more carefully about how.
If we are going to keep God at the center of our worship, we must learn what encouragement is. It is not biblical encouragement to tell someone they are the best. Oh sister, you are always so put together when you teach. You wear the right things, say the right things, you look so pretty this morning. Or, brother, you are the most wise and discerning elder we have ever had. When we have a problem we know we can put you on it because you always take care of things.
That’s not encouragement. Why? Because it does not spur your fellow Christian on to love and good deeds. It does not make them look outward at the world, but inward at themselves. If you want to be a godly encourager, say the things that build the person up to look outward not inward. Sister, when you showed up at our house to watch our kids so that we could go and do this or that, it reminded me that I need to be ready and willing to drop what I am doing and sacrifice to serve others. Brother, the way that you quietly recognized that need so-and-so had in the church and you paid for their such-and-such it just reminded me that God sees all of our needs and meets them in Christ. Please keep doing that. There is a way for the encourager to give encouragement to the other person so that it spurs them on to love and good deeds and doesn’t build up their pride. Be that type of encourager.
And on the other side, those being encouraged must guard their hearts. Do not give lip service to God but bask in the praise in the secrecy of your own heart. My Grandma Martin used to say that the best thing you can say when someone compliments you is thank you, anything more is false humility, anything less is rude. The important thing is not what you say with your mouth but what you do with your heart.
Worship is clearly prescribed, not creatively crafted.
Let’s think about the second lesson we can learn about worship from verses 22-28: worship is clearly prescribed, not creatively crafted.
What did Gideon do with all that gold? Verse 27 says that he took the gold and created an ephod. An ephod is a garment that the high priest of Israel wore over his priestly robes. It had special rings sewn into it so that a breastplate of pure gold could be attached to it. It is an instrument or tool for worship that was exclusively reserved for the high priest. Israel already had one and they only needed one because there is only one high priest.
Gideon decided that it was a good idea to make an ephod and use it as a monument to his achievements and victories. He doesn’t send it to Shiloh where the tabernacle is, where the high priest might use it in the appropriate worship of God. He hangs it up in his hometown, and look at what verse 27 says about it. It says:
Judges 8:27
And all Israel whored after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family.
This is not a good thing. Gideon decided to get creative in his worship and it led Israel to idolatry and his family into misery.
God has been clear about how Israel was to worship. If you have ever read the Bible through in a year, you know that Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy lay out in explicit and painstaking detail how Israel was to worship God. In fact, this is the section of Scripture where most New Year’s resolutions go to die. God told them where to worship, how to worship, when to worship, with what tools they were to worship, who was allowed to perform what ritual. Everything was laid out for them, so when Gideon makes the ephod, he is not doing something noble. His creativity is causing confusion. He is not humbly facilitating the worship of God but arrogantly crafting his own way outside of God’s way. A good friend of mine once said, the more creative we are in worship, the more confusion we cause. And the more confusion we cause, the less effective we are at loving and treasuring the one true God.
This is a big problem in evangelicalism today. There is an assumption that God has not given us instructions on how to do Church and how to worship him on Sunday mornings. This is called the normative principle of worship. The normative principle of worship says that there is Christian freedom to worship God however we choose, so long as it is not prohibited by Scripture. This principle leads to pastor riding motorcycles down the center aisle or preaching sermons from popular movies or spontaneously baptizing people outside of the context of the local church.
This is not the way that Scripture teaches us to approach God. If God has been so clear in the Old Testament about how we are to worship him, we should expect him to be just as clear in the New Testament. This idea is called the regulative principle. The regulative principle says we are only allowed to worship God as God has explicitly instructed us to worship him. We should not be creative, like Gideon, we should be careful like the early Church.
What did the early Church, under the leadership of the apostles teach us about worshipping God? Well, in Acts 6, when the care of widows was becoming too big a job for the apostles, they set aside deacons to care for them so that the apostles could dedicate themselves to the ministry of the Word and prayer. So what should we expect in a Christian worship service? We should expect our elders to preach the word and pray with the congregation. This is what we saw Peter do at Pentecost. At the first gathering of the Church, as miraculous things are happening all around him, Peter stands up and preaches a sermon from Joel 2.
In Colossians 3:16-17, Paul said:
Colossians 3:16-17
16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
When the preaching of God’s word begins to have its effect on God’s people, we should expect their hearts to overflow in song. We sing because God has told us that this is an appropriate way to respond to the word of Christ as it comes to rest on your heart.
In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul gives us instructions for taking the Lord’s Supper, and then he says this in verses 27-29:
1 Corinthians 11:27-29
27 Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. 28 Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29 For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.
The clear command of this passage is not only that we should expect to take the Lord’s Supper when we come to worship, but that it is serious and requires careful consideration and deliberate preparation.
We do not have time to go through an exhaustive list of all that we are to do in corporate worship, but we can clearly see that God has not left us in the dark. He has clearly and purposefully told us how we are to worship and he expects us to approach him according to those commands. Gideon was wrong to get creative in worship and we must be careful to understand what God has commanded us to do and to do it every time we come together.
This is so important because the habits of worship are like a trellis that guides the affections of the heart. God teaches us how to worship him because God alone knows the way to train the heart of man. Everything he asks us to do, preach the Word, pray, sing hymns, songs, and spiritual songs, remember the sacrifice of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, are meant to discipline and guide our hearts to love and affection for him. If we are introducing creative ways to worship God, we are introducing habits that will not lead our hearts towards God but away from him.
Worship is meaningless without memory.
Which brings us to our third and final lesson about worship: worship is meaningless without memory. In fact, the essence of worship is an exercise of remembrance. We are remembering and reminding each other, every single Sunday morning, who God is and what he has done for us. We are prone to wander and easily forget. We need regular reminder of the Gospel so that we appreciate and cherish all that God is for us in Christ.
We can see this at the end of the our sermon text. Lets reread Judges 8:29-35:
Judges 8:29-35
29 Jerubbaal the son of Joash went and lived in his own house. 30 Now Gideon had seventy sons, his own offspring, for he had many wives. 31 And his concubine who was in Shechem also bore him a son, and he called his name Abimelech. 32 And Gideon the son of Joash died in a good old age and was buried in the tomb of Joash his father, at Ophrah of the Abiezrites.
33 As soon as Gideon died, the people of Israel turned again and whored after the Baals and made Baal-berith their god. 34 And the people of Israel did not remember the LORD their God, who had delivered them from the hand of all their enemies on every side, 35 and they did not show steadfast love to the family of Jerubbaal (that is, Gideon) in return for all the good that he had done to Israel.
How does this story about the worship of the one true God end? Because of the failure of Gideon’s leadership, Israel did not remember the Lord their God or the victory he had given them, and they returned to worshipping idols. They forgot who God was and what God had done. You cannot love what you do not know and you cannot worship someone you have forgotten.
The clear example of this in the New Testament is the reason that we take the Lord’s Supper. In that same passage from 1 Corinthians 11 that we just looked at, Paul tells us the reason that we take the Lord’s Supper. In verse 26, he says:
1 Corinthians 11:26
26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Proclaim it to whom. Proclaim it to one another, in the Church. The Lord’s Supper is a corporate act of remembrance as we physically remind ourselves that his body was ripped for us, as we are forced to consider how his blood was shed for us.
But this is also the goal with every aspect of our worship. As we read Scripture to each other, God is revealing himself to us today through his revelations that took place in the past. We are reminding ourselves of his faithfulness then so that we can trust and hope in his faithfulness in the faithfulness in the future. Memory is an essential part of corporate worship because we cannot worship someone who we have forgotten.
This means that Christian worship must engage the mind before it can engage the heart. My goal as your pastor is to raise your affections as high as I possibly can. My goal is that your love for God would be proportional to his glory and beauty. But how is a pastor supposed to do that. The heart is an elusive thing and affection without knowledge is zeal, not worship. If the love and worship of the God’s people is going to be genuine, their knowledge of what he has already done for them must be genuine. You must remember who he is and what he has done in order to love him in this moment as he deserves.
Conclusion
As we wrap up the life of Gideon, consider how jealous God is for your affections. As with the people of Israel then, he wants you to treasure him as the greatest love in your life. This is why the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The question is: do you?
In your corporate worship, are you actively participating in every element of worship? We are a congregationally singing church. Men, do you participate in the singing? Or are you too embarrassed? Do you stand there silently, not knowing that you have been commanded by God to sing hymn, songs, and spiritual songs to each other?
College students, do you check out during the sermon? You’re here for the singing but when Sam drones on and on, you just check out. Doesn’t he know you already sit through lectures every day of the week? Do you not know that true knowledge is the kindling for authentic worship?