Father Named Him Twice #T

Joash the Abiezrite had a son whom he named Gideon "Destroyer" or he who bruises and breaks.  I think of him as The Hammer.  The Midianites were a scourge to the people, destroying their crops and means of livelihood.  The Lord revealed to Gideon that the people had strayed from His ways and their worship of Baal was the reason for their suffering.  Gideon tore down his father's altar to Baal, cut down the grove, built an altar to Yahweh and sacrificed thereon.

Upon discovering the destruction of the grove and the altar of Baal the people were wroth and demanded Gideon's life.  But Joash said, "What? If Baal is god, then let him fight his own battles."  So he gave his son a new name, Zerubbaal "He Against Whom Baal Contends."

Now Gideon was led to drive the Midianites back.  More than thirty thousand men showed up to engage the enemy.  The Lord told Gideon "No.  Take fewer men lest the people think they have prevailed and forget that it is I who give you the victory over the enemy."

Now we recall the Sunday School story about Gideon that we learned in our childhood in which Gideon tests God with the meat and the fleece, how Gideon finally selected 300 warriors to back him up.  The curious picture of the volunteers drinking from the stream, the selection of those who dipped the water in their hands and lapped it like a dog and so on. (Judges 7:5-7)  Seven decades after the SS lessons it occurred to me that there lies within this vignette a parable of alertness and preparedness.  Can we be ready to serve if our faces are immersed in the stream of worldly affairs?  Can we detect the enemy closing in upon us without sight?

God, true to his word as he always is, gave Zerubbaal and  his 300 men victory over the Midianites.Then the people asked this man to be their king.  "No," he said, "neither I nor my son shall rule over you, for Yahweh is King!

The story continues into territory beyond the Sunday school lesson in which we discover that Gideon lived to a ripe old age and had seventy sons "for he had many wives." But he also had a concubine in Shechem on whom he fathered Abimelech.

Sadly Gideon was hardly cold in the grave before the people of Israel again turned away from the true God and built altars to Baal, forgetting all the good into which Gideon and led them.

Abimelech aspired to rule the people, convinced his mother's people to support him in the endeavor to gain control, hired a bunch of lowlifes to assist him and killed 70 of his half-brothers.  The people crowned Abimelech, declaring him to be king.  Then Jotham, Zerubbaal's sole surviving son stood on Mount Gerazim and shouted the parable of the trees and the vine, then ran for his life.  (Chapter 9)

(Based on Judges 6 - 9)