What Will You Do In The Valley?

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.  --Psalm 23:4

I will never leave you nor forsake you.  --Hebrews 13:5 

Thomas Aquinas said, "If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever."  Life is a journey, and you must climb the mountains and you must abide in the valleys. The trick is not to dwell in the valley forever.

Today I want to look at two rather minor Bible characters (B-list saints, if you will) and see how they dealt with the valleys they found themselves in.  The first one is Gideon; the second is Jonathan.  You may remember Gideon as the man who asked God for a sign.  He put out the fleece (that is where this phrase comes from), and asked God to keep it dry for him when the morning dew wet the grass around it.  When God did that, Gideon wanted to make sure, so he put out the fleece again, asking God to make it wet with the morning dew, and leave the grass dry.  God did not shy away from Gideon's testing, but when you see the back-story, you will find that Gideon was quite shy in following God.

You might want to read Judges chapter 6 for the whole story, because I don't want to get bogged down in the details.  I do, however, want you to know where Gideon came from, and why he was so comfortable in the valley.  The story opens when Israel was enduring seven years of hardship at the hand of God.  Their enemies, the Midianites, were occupying their land, and not in a good way.  The Midianites burned the crops of the Israelites.  They would kill the Israelites' livestock.  The destruction of the Midianite invaders was compared to swarms of locusts; they invaded the land to ravage it.  After seven years of this, the Israelites finally called out to God for help.

A prophet of God started preaching a message of repentance to them.  This unnamed prophet reminded them of God's power in their history.  Had not God brought His people out of Egypt?  They were not slaves of the Egyptians, because God had delivered them out of slavery.  So why were they now subjecting themselves to Midian?  How were they placing themselves into subjection?  By worshiping the gods of the Midianites.  I want you to notice here that actions have consequences.  The people of Israel did not endear themselves to their enemies the Midianites by embracing their culture, or by appropriating their gods.  The Midianites did not look at them and say, "Any friend of Baal is a friend of ours.  If those people buy into the fertility goddess Asherah, they must be all right."  Worship of the fertility goddess included sexual promiscuity, because there were temple prostitutes that came with obedience to her.  Worship of Baal may have included human sacrifice.  These people were willing to sacrifice their children on the altar of Baal, but it did not appease the marauders from Midian.

God sent an angel to meet with Gideon.  I want us to pay attention to what he is doing.  He is threshing wheat, but not on a threshing floor.  Somehow, his family had been able to grow a crop without the invading armies knowing about it.  Now, normally, a threshing floor is positioned high on a hill or a ridge, because they relied on the wind to carry away the chaff when the grain was thrown into the air.  But Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress.  An ancient winepress was a pit dug out of a rock; it looked much like a hole in the ground.  Why was Gideon threshing wheat in a winepress?  So that the Midianites would not see him there.  He was hiding his wheat so he could have some bread.  Times were tough.  Does any of this sound familiar?

When the angel approached Gideon, he paid him a compliment that, given the surroundings and the circumstances, could have been thought of as sarcasm.  "Hail, mighty man of valor.  The Lord is with you."  Gideon must have looked around at his circumstances and rolled his eyes.  "Yeah, right," he said. "If the Lord is with us, then why is all this happening to us?"

God's message to him was direct.  "Go in the strength you have, and save Israel out of Midian's hand.  I will go with you."  God did not ask him to do something he was not capable of doing.  Gideon did not have the excuse of not being strong enough.  Nevertheless, when he did obey, he took ten friends with him.  The first order of business was to knock down the monuments used in the worship of the idols.  There was a pole, or obelisk, erected for worshippers of Asherah to dance around.  God wanted him to knock it down.  There was an altar built for sacrifices to Baal. God wanted him to take it down and replace it with a proper altar, one built to honor God, and to sacrifice a bull on it.  Summoning all his strength, and his ten friends, Gideon set out to do what the Lord commanded.  But he was afraid of confrontation, so he went at night.

Is this how we obey God sometimes?  We want to be obedient, but we don't want to make waves, so we hide under the cover of darkness, hoping nobody sees us.  We go out in our own power, and not the power of God, so we try to get our friends to cover for us.  Imagine the finger-pointing that went on when this deed was discovered in the morning.  "He did it!"  The Israelite idol worshippers wanted to take Gideon and kill him.  God spared Gideon from the death penalty that the people demanded, because Gideon's dad challenged the men.  He said, "Is not Baal strong enough to take care of himself?"  Gideon saw that God was stronger than Asherah and Baal combined.  At the same time, Gideon did not have the faith to obey God later without asking for a sign.  He stayed in the valley, because that is where he was comfortable.

By contrast, I want us to look at an incident in Jonathan's life. You may remember Jonathan was Prince of Israel, the son of King Saul.  He was also very good friends with David, whom the Lord had anointed to succeed Saul on the throne.  You may want to look at 1 Samuel 14 as we examine this incident.

Saul and his army were encamped at a town called Gibeah, while the Philistine army had set up in a mountain pass called Micmash.  Any student of military history knows that when you pick a battleground, you want to have the high ground.  That way you can come down to your enemy and overtake them.  The Philistine army was on the mountain above the cliff surrounding the pass at Micmash.  Get the picture?

Things were very bleak for the Israelite army.  1 Samuel 13:16-22 says that the Philistines sent out raiding parties to attack Israel.  In fact, none of the Israelites had a sword or a spear.  The Philistines would not even let them have a blacksmith to make weapons.  For years, the farmers had to go to the Philistines and pay them to sharpen their plows and sickles.  Only Saul and his son Jonathan had spears.

Nevertheless, Jonathan says to his aide, "Let's go over to the Philistine camp."  The two of them did not tell anyone where they were going.  They went to the mountain pass at Micmash, in the road between two cliffs.  Don't you think they were vulnerable?  The Philistines could have rolled a large rock down the cliff and squished them both.  This didn't stop Jonathan.  His plan was to show himself to the Philistines and see what their response would be.  If they said, "Wait there, we'll come and fight you in the valley," then Jonathan was willing to stand his ground.  If they said, "Come up to us and fight", then Jonathan was willing to do that, too.  "Perhaps the Lord will act in our behalf.  Nothing can hinder the Lord from saving, whether by many or by few." (1 Samuel 14:6).

Sure enough, Jonathan and his aide got the attention of the Philistines on the high ground.  I can imagine them yelling catcalls:  "Nyah, nyah, you can't catch us!  We're on the Lord's side."  The Philistines shouted down into the valley, "Come up to us and we'll teach you a lesson."  To their utter surprise, Jonathan climbed up the cliff, crawling on his hands and feet, with his aide close behind.  Once they got up to the top, they engaged the Philistines in hand-to-hand combat, and they killed about 20 of them.

The rest of the Philstines panicked, and started running.  The Bible says the ground shook--I don't know if it was an earthquake sent by God, or if the ground shook from the Philistine army beating feet to get away.  The rest of the Israelite army saw what was going on, and went to catch up with Jonathan.  When they got there, the Philistines were in such confusion that they were fighting each other.  Hebrew prisoners that had been taken captive during the Philistine raids found themselves freed, and they picked up weapons that were left behind and chased the Philistines with the rest of the army of God.

There was a Texas Ranger in the late 1800s that was so tough, it was said that he would "charge hell with a bucket of water."  That may sound fool-hardy to us.  To Jonathan, who had the same attitude, it meant that God was bigger than the valley he was in at the moment.  He was willing to climb out of that valley and engage in battle with an enemy that outnumbered him.  He was tired, outmanned, and outgunned, but with God's help, he drove the enemy out.

Friend, what will you do in your valley?  Will you be like Gideon, hesitant, afraid, and leaving yourself an out?  Or will you be like Jonathan, who put himself in harms way, vulnerable yet victorious when he went out in the name of the Lord his God?