God of Israel, I brought you up from Egypt, and brought you forth out of the house of bondage.”  What’s new?  How many times in these 7 years have you heard me say, “We don’t need any new truths.  We just need to rediscover the old ones”?  ‘Tell them’ is what God said to the prophet.  ‘Tell them—tell them the record.’

At the same time God went to work.  “There came an angel of the Lord,” not a troop of angels—the Midianites were like grasshoppers—one angel.  “There came an angel of the Lord.”  Boy, it’s nice to know what one angel can do!  I’ve said to you a few times these last years we need to get our eyes open to what the Bible says.  There’s some of the stupidest ideas running loose.  Don’t ever tell little Johnny “Now why don’t you be like an angel?”  He may wipe the whole town out.

“There came an angel of the Lord, and sat under an oak which was in Ophrah, that pertained unto Joash, the Abiezrite: and his son Gideon threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites.”  What a place to thresh wheat.

How many of you know wheat doesn’t grow in a winepress?  In those days they made wine by putting the grapes in the dug-out cavity in the ground and taking their sandals off and squishing it between their toes.  Good wine had toe-jam mixed in.  Where do you think the habit of letting wine age a while came from?  Of course my good ol’ self-righteous clerical friends wouldn’t know.  You know, water had to be awful bad if Paul would say, “Take toe-jam wine for your stomach’s sake”!  They threshed, or rather crushed, the grapes and pressed the wine in a cavity in the ground in a vineyard.  Gideon was there—not during the grape harvest—threshing a little wheat hidden in a vineyard in the lowest place he could get.  His highest hopes: Enough grain for enough bread for 1 day. 

         Now we go nowhere today unless everybody can put himself in Gideon’s place—low-down, hopeless, crushed by circumstances 7 years long, trying to get enough bread hiding in fear for 1 day.  “An angel of the Lord appeared unto him, and said unto him, The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour.”  If I didn’t think this Bible would fall apart I’d just slam it down—didn’t!  King James may be good enough for Paul in some people’s minds, not mine.  I say get yourself a King James and then correct it with me. 

That’s not what the angel said.  He never said, “The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour.”  Who ever heard of a mighty man of valor hiding in a winepress to thresh wine, I mean to thresh wheat?  Locked in a house, covered up, piling pillows on your head, afraid to face the day—that’s not a mighty man of valor.  And the original doesn’t say that.  What the original says is, “The Lord is with thee, the one who is mighty in valour.”  The reference is not to Gideon but to the one who’s with him.  The valor attaches not to Gideon but to the valorous one that’s with him—the Lord—mighty!  “The mighty one of valour, the Lord Himself, is with thee.”  Your circumstance is unchanged but ‘Hey, I’m here.’  Most people in trouble pray themselves into a praying mantis condition to get out of their position.  That’s not God’s way.

The world is full of preachers today that’ll tell you you can take some kind of spiritual pill and your problems will dissolve.  Gideon’s circumstances hadn’t changed a quarter turn.  He was still in the winepress; the Midians still numbered like grasshoppers.  Nothing had changed a quarter turn except that the Lord Himself, who was mighty in valor, was with him. 

And Gideon said unto him, “Oh my Lord, if the Lord be with us, why then is all this befallen us? and where be all his miracles