It's incredible really, isn't it? The Lord had made it very clear that if they lived in obedience, if they honored Him, if they trusted Him, it would go well with them. If they didn't, He promised them things would not go well with them, but it took them seven years to catch on! Seven years! They probably had all kinds of excuses; they had all kinds of explanations, except the right one.

The problem they were confronting was not particularly political, and it was not particularly military, and it wasn't even primarily economic. The problem that they were confronting was quite frankly a spiritual problem! It wasn't until they caught on to that, far too late, that they began to cry to the Lord for help. He sent a prophet to them, and the prophet came, and he said to them quite straight out, "This is what the problem is: You have been living in a way that does not honor the Lord! If you will not live in a way that honors the Lord, you must live with the consequences, and that is why you are having this difficult time." That was the situation. There was an air of despondency, and an air of despair about the people of Israel at that time.

Gideon is a good example of the despondency that was abroad at the time. He knew that it was getting about time for the Midianites and their allies to come down and mess up their crops again. So, he was doing something that was really quite strange, a bit silly really! He was threshing wheat in a winepress.

Now, that probably doesn't sound like much to us, but let me explain to you. In the Middle East to this day, you will see them threshing wheat by harvesting it, and then taking it out on a big flat slab of rock, and they beat the wheat and throw it up in the air when the wind is blowing so that the chaff is blown away, and the wheat is harvested. The last place that you would do that would be in a winepress for the rather obvious reason that a winepress is exactly the opposite of an open threshing floor. For a winepress is by definition a carved-out stone in which you put the grapes, and the maidens come in and dance around on it, and press it all down, and the juice comes out, and the wine is made.

Gideon is trying to thresh his wheat in the winepress. Now, he is doing this because he is so in despair -- he is so up against it. They're having such a hard time, and he is just trying to eke out a little bit of a harvest before the Midianites come down and catch him and steal it and take it all away.

While Gideon is threshing his wheat in the winepress, the Angel of the Lord comes and speaks to him. What he says to him is really quite startling: "When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, 'The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.'"

Now if there is one thing that Gideon did not think he was at that particular moment was a mighty warrior. He was a scared farmer -- that's what he was. He was threshing his wheat in the winepress because he was frightened to death that the Midianites were going to come and steal his harvest. So the idea that he was a mighty warrior just didn't make any sense to him at all. Neither did the other part of the statement, "The Lord is with you, mighty warrior!"