INTRODUCTION

The first time we meet Gideon, he is hiding.

Not from a battle he has lost. Not from an enemy that has personally pursued him. He is threshing wheat at the bottom of a winepress — an enclosed pit, out of the wind, out of sight — because the Midianites have been stripping Israel bare for seven consecutive years and he cannot afford for them to find his grain. He is a farmer doing the work of a fugitive. And into that winepress, without warning or preamble, comes an angel with a greeting that reads like a case of mistaken identity: The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.

Gideon's response is one of the most honest in the entire Bible: if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all the wonders our ancestors told us about? It is not a prayer. It is a protest. It is the voice of a man who has heard the stories — the Red Sea, the manna, the pillar of fire — and cannot reconcile those stories with the reality of hiding in a winepress while the Midianites eat his harvest.

God does not answer the question. Instead, He gives Gideon an assignment that is precisely calibrated to everything Gideon is least qualified for. Go in the strength you have and save Israel from Midian's hand. The man who is hiding from the enemy is being sent to lead Israel against them. The man from the weakest clan in the weakest tribe is being called a mighty warrior. The story of Gideon is, at every turn, the story of God choosing what the world overlooks and doing what the world calls impossible — not in spite of human weakness, but right through the middle of it.

If you have ever felt disqualified from the thing God seemed to be calling you toward, Gideon's story was written with you in mind.