Gideon Made It Out of the Spoil and All Israel Went After It

Something real happened to him a decade ago and he has been living off it ever since.

The event was genuine. He is not one of the men who invents these. There was a situation that had no way through it and there is now no situation, and he did not do it, and he could give you the details and they hold up.

What has happened since is harder to name. The event became an account. The account got told, and told well, and it moved people, and after a while it developed a shape, and the shape got smoother every year the way a stone does in a river.

And then, somewhere in there, it stopped being a thing God did and became the thing he has. It is what he brings. It is his standing in a room. It is what he goes back to when he is not sure of anything, and going back to it produces a settled feeling, and the settled feeling is now the point.

There is a chapter in Judges where a man makes an object out of a real deliverance, and the sentence about what happened to it is four words long.

The right answer

Here it is, in the King James Version. The men come to Gideon after a genuine victory:

Then the men of Israel said unto Gideon, Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son's son also: for thou hast delivered us from the hand of Midian. And Gideon said unto them, I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD shall rule over you. (Judges 8:22-23)

I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD shall rule over you.

That is the correct answer and it is a good one. He refuses the offer, he refuses it for his descendants as well, and he redirects it to the right party in the same sentence.

If the chapter ended there he would be one of the great examples in the Old Testament of a man refusing a position.

You have been right about the big thing and you were never wrong about who delivered you. Judges 8:23 has Gideon refuse the throne and name God as the ruler, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a lower view of what happened who shows a man what came next.

And then, one verse later

And Gideon said unto them, I would desire a request of you, that ye would give me every man the earrings of his prey. (Judges 8:24)

He asks for the gold. And they give it, willingly, a great deal of it.

And Gideon made an ephod thereof, and put it in his city, even in Ophrah: and all Israel went thither a whoring after it: which thing became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house. (Judges 8:27)

Gideon made an ephod thereof.

An ephod is a priestly garment. It is not a foreign idol and it was not a pagan object. It is a piece of legitimate religious equipment, made out of the spoil of a real victory that God really gave, put in his own town, presumably as a memorial.

And all Israel went thither a whoring after it.

The verb is deliberately violent. Everything about the object was defensible: real event, real gold, real religious form, right city. And the whole nation ended up going to it.

Which thing became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house.

To Gideon. The man who made it. The man who had refused the throne is caught by the object he built out of the victory that got offered him the throne.

You are not disqualified by what happened next and you were never wrong that God did it. Judges 8:27 keeps the deliverance and the snare in the same chapter without denying either, and it is His Spirit who makes an honest look at what a man has built out of a real thing survivable.

What a memorial is supposed to do

The Bible is not against memorials. It commands them. And the instruction shows what the difference is.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. (Joshua 4:6-7)

What mean ye by these stones?

The stones are designed to produce a question, and the question is answered by telling what God did. The pile of rocks is not the point and nobody goes to the pile of rocks. It exists to send a person back to an event and through the event to a person.

Gideon's ephod stopped doing that. It stopped being a sign pointing somewhere and became a destination, and the tell is in the word thither: they went there.

That is the test for a man with a story. Does it send people through it, or do they arrive at it. And more painfully: does it send him through it, or does he arrive at it.

You have a memorial that is meant to point somewhere and you were never supposed to arrive at it. Joshua 4:6 builds a memorial designed to produce a question about what God did, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a sign a sign rather than a destination.

The warning about the deliverance itself

And the sentence in Deuteronomy that names the specific way this goes wrong.

And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. (Deuteronomy 8:17)

Say in thine heart. Not out loud. Nobody says this out loud. It is the quiet version.

And it is the exact drift: a man is delivered, and over years the account of the deliverance becomes something he owns, and eventually the owning slides into a sense that he is somehow the kind of man these things happen to.

And the psalm that answers it, which is worth having in the mouth:

For they got not the land in possession by their own sword, neither did their own arm save them: but thy right hand, and thine arm, and the light of thy countenance, because thou hadst a favour unto them. (Psalm 44:3)

Because thou hadst a favor unto them. That is the whole reason given, and it is located entirely on God's side.

You have a deliverance that came from His right hand and you were never the reason it happened. Psalm 44:3 says it was not their sword or their arm and gives the reason as His favor, and it is His Spirit who makes an old psalm the correction to a quiet drift.