Judges 6:24-26 So Gideon built an altar there to the Lord, and called it Jehovah Shalom. To this day it is still in Ophrah of the Abiezrites. Now it came to pass the same night that the Lord said to him, “Take your father’s young bull, the second bull of seven years old, and tear down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the wooden image that is beside it; and build an altar to the Lord your God on top of this rock in the proper arrangement, and take the second bull and offer a burnt sacrifice with the wood of the image which you shall cut down.”
When Gideon was called by God, a mighty man of valor, his first task was to tear down the idolatrous altars of Baal and Asherah at his father’s house. Though he was ready to obey this command, his obedience was mixed with fear, so he destroyed the idols at night [Judges 6:27]. When the men of the city realized it was Gideon who destroyed their idols, their allegiance to Baal and Asherah drove them to demand Gideon’s life.
But Gideon’s father Joash came to his son’s defense, rather than defending his own idolatry, saying to the men, “If Baal was destroyed by Gideon, then let Baal destroy him!” [Judges 6:31] Perhaps Gideon’s father was convicted by his son’s obedience. In any case his own love for Gideon and his courage to stand against the people of the town saved Gideon’s life and must have encouraged him and given him faith to continue.
God saw in Gideon a man of faith with the potential to overcome his fears. So the Lord called him and brought him into a challenging situation which drew Gideon’s fear into the light and gave him an opportunity to face it and overcome it. He used Gideon’s father’s courage which seems to have passed to his son after the idols were destroyed. But Gideon still needed to grow in trust to fully accomplish what God had called him to do.
Like Gideon, we are destroying the idols in our lives, and have the potential to even bring conviction to the lives of our parents, so that they too might be restored to worshiping the true God. Because of their love for us they may come to our defense and find themselves serving the Lord’s purposes and even being restored to Him. Gideon’s fear did not prevent him from obeying the Lord, and this is why he affected his father and was called a mighty man of valor.
This story of courage and restoration can inspire us in several ways. First, we must not allow our fears to prevent our obedience. Second, our obedience is likely to inspire repentance and loyalty in those close to us. And third, the Lord sees past our fears and He calls us according to His deeper knowledge of who we are as overcomers in Him.
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]I could tell you about countless difficult and drawn out circumstances over which we have tried to stand firmly in faith until they finally came to pass. Sometimes we made it and sometimes we were weak and began to doubt. But God mercifully came through for us on most of these things, despite our lack of strength to stay faith-ful.
New Testament genealogies of Yeshua Ha Mashiach (Jesus the Christ) all identify Him as the son of king David. It was universally understood from the Tenach (OT) that the messiah would be descended from David and that he would restore the Davidic monarchy to its ultimate and most universal expression, even that this king would reign and sit on the throne forever.
This weekend, the Jewish people will celebrate the festival of Purim. This holiday commemorates Israel’s amazing reversal in Persia during the reign of King Xerxes (Ahasuerus) when Queen Esther and her uncle Mordecai gained victory for the Jews and protected them from annihilation at the hands of the evil Haman.
Over two decades ago, when I moved to Israel, I had the opportunity to spend considerable time with a pastor and his wife. This pastor imparted significant wisdom to me during that period, counseling me to “be like the children of Issachar,” he directed me to this specific passage in 1 Chronicles 12.
Over the past few days, I’ve been discussing the will of God and how to walk out His will daily in our lives. The Lord’s general will involves the development of our character and the ways in which we relate to Him and to our fellow man. Much of this is the same for every believer. But each of us is unique, and each has a potential life vision unlike any other. God has an individual will for every soul that belongs to Him, an individually shaped destiny which varies according to our gifting and calling and purpose in His Body.
As God worked on creation for six days and rested on the seventh day, so our seven day week is established on that pattern. If, as the scripture declares, with the Lord one day is as 1,000 years and 1,000 years as a day, then the seven-day cycle also finds expression in a great historical “week”. As we approach the 1,000-year reign of the Messiah, this “millennium” as it is called, (described in some detail in Revelation chapter 20), is clearly understood as a time of global rest, peace, and righteousness throughout the Earth.
The word for “restitution” in this passage is the Greek word – “apokatastasis”. This is the one and only place it is found in the New Testament. The word literally means to “restore again” or “to repair”. The plan of God in sending His Son Yeshua (Jesus) was to restore that which had been broken and ruined. The Lord’s saving work is a global repair job. Each one of us has come to Him already ruined by sin. But God’s will and His promise is to restore and renew us through His Son.