Judges was compiled for an Israel that kept forgetting how it got into its own land. The book is a brutally honest catalog of cycles — apostasy, oppression, cry, deliverer, relapse. Gideon's call comes at the bottom of one of those cycles. Midianite raiders have driven Israel into caves and stripped the harvest. The original audience would have recognized themselves in Gideon: hiding, threshing wheat in a winepress, certain that the God of the exodus had moved on. The narrator wants them to hear that the Angel of the LORD still finds people in their hiding places and still calls them out.

From the writers we read together

Brennan Manning

Franciscan priest and writer (1934-2013), author of The Ragamuffin Gospel

Manning spent his life arguing that the gospel finds people in winepresses. He was a recovering alcoholic who never pretended otherwise, and his writing keeps circling back to the same scandal: the call of God does not wait until you are presentable. The Angel does not coach Gideon out of his self-assessment. He does not say, "You are stronger than you think." He says, "Go in this might of yours," and the might in question is whatever Gideon actually has — which is not much. Manning would say that is the only kind of strength God ever uses, because it is the only kind that stays honest about its source.

Gideon's protest is accurate. His clan really is the weakest; he really is the least. The Lord does not correct the data; he relocates its meaning. "I will be with you" is the entire argument. Manning pressed this point hard against a Christian culture addicted to qualification — the sense that we must first become someone before God can use us. The text says the opposite. The sending precedes the strength. The presence precedes the competence. You will likely not feel ready today. That was never the criterion.