On a hillside in Ophrah, hiding from raiders, a frightened farmer built an altar and gave God a name no one had used before: Yahweh Shalom, the Lord is Peace. He named it before the battle, not after.

Everyone did what was right in his own eyes

A judge was not a man in a robe hearing cases. A judge was a deliverer — one who rescued the people and then governed them. That is the shape of the whole book: rescue, then rule, then the slow slide back.

By Gideon’s day no one was left who had walked out of Egypt. Nobody living had seen the sea open. The Exodus had become a story people had heard rather than a thing they remembered, and a miracle you have only heard about is an easy thing to set down.

So they turned to the Baals.

Why Baal was tempting

Baal was a religion of materialism and sensuality. Linked with Israel he was chiefly a fertility god, a god of nature, worshipped with his consort Asherah at altars on the high places. Worship meant entering into immorality with the priests and priestesses. The rites were the religion.

But the pull was more practical than that. Israel had not been a nation of farmers. They came out of slavery into a land they did not yet know how to work, and in the early years their farms were poor while the Baal farmers’ farms were good. The neighbors had an explanation ready, and an invitation with it: this is Baal’s country, and Baal feeds the men who serve him.

Israel did not renounce Yahweh. That is the thing to notice. They added Baal alongside Him — kept the God of the covenant and hedged with the god of the harvest. That was the beginning of the end. It was not long before they forsook Yahweh altogether.

The cycle

When they walked away from the covenant — the binding promise that made them His people — the protection that came with it went too, and the surrounding tribes invaded and took what they wanted. From time to time God would raise up a judge who still remembered the truth of God and called the people back to the covenant, and deliverance came with him. As long as that judge lived, there was freedom. When he died, they often went straight back into captivity, and it began again. Back and forth, one judge after another.

The Midianites

In Gideon’s turn of the cycle the oppressor is Midian. They were nomads, and the closest picture we have for them is a roving motorcycle gang: they arrived at harvest, took whatever was worth taking, and rode off. Israel was reduced to hiding. Men threshed their grain in secret so the Midianites would not find it and steal it.

The messenger in the winepress

That is where we meet Gideon — down in a winepress, threshing wheat where wheat is never threshed, because a winepress has walls and a threshing floor does not. Above him on his father’s land stood an altar to Baal with the Asherah pole beside it. He is hiding his food from the raiders in the shadow of the god he is hiding it under.

The angel of the Lord comes and sits down under the oak there.

He greets Gideon as a valiant man of God. The Lord is with you.

“Where are you?”

Gideon argues. If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are the miracles our fathers told us about?

Two things are wrong at once, and they are the same two things that are usually wrong with us.

First, he does not see himself as God sees him. God says valiant; Gideon looks around the winepress and sees the least man in the weakest family of his tribe.

Second, he has the story backwards. God had not left them. They had left God. They were in a bad situation because they had departed from the covenant, and they were laying the blame at God’s feet — waiting for God to come and do something, asking God where God had gone.

They were asking God where God was, while God was asking, “Where are you?”

God does not argue the point. He commissions him. Go in this might of yours — have I not sent you?

The meal and the fire

Gideon knows now that he is speaking with someone out of the ordinary, so he asks him to wait while he prepares a meal. It is not an ordinary meal. A young goat and unleavened bread from an ephah of flour is an extravagance for a man hiding his grain in a winepress. This is a covenant meal — the meal you set before your closest friend. And he asks for a sign to go with it: show me that this messenger is really from God.

He gets one. The messenger tells him to lay the meat and the bread on the rock and pour out the broth, then reaches out the staff in his hand and touches it, and fire comes up out of the rock and consumes it. And the angel of the Lord is gone.

Yahweh Shalom

Now Gideon understands who it was, and he is terrified. Alas, O Lord God! For I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face. He realizes he is not in right standing, and he knows what that has always meant: to see God was to die.

The answer comes back. Peace to you. Do not fear. You shall not die.

So Gideon built an altar there and called it Yahweh Shalom — the Lord is Peace. He built it in occupied country, with Midian still on the land and his father’s Baal altar still standing, before a single battle had been fought.

More than the absence of trouble

We hear peace and think of quiet: nothing going wrong, nobody fighting. Shalom is a far bigger word than that.

That is what Gideon entered into when he built that altar — and notice what he had to set down to get there. Pride and insecurity are the same sin in different clothes, and both of them were in his answer to the angel. Wholeness cost him both.

It is the word the high priest laid on the people at the end of the great blessing: the Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace. Shalom. Numbers 6:26

The peace offering

Leviticus has an offering for it. The peace offering does not buy peace; it celebrates the peace that the other offerings have already brought you into. It is the loud one — an offering with shouting and praising, a sacrifice of praise.

And it is the one where the meat did not go to the priest. You took it home. You called in your neighbors and your friends, and while you were all feasting you recounted to them everything God had done for you.

By the days of the judges it had become a ritual. Gideon re-establishes it as a reality in his own life.

The Prince of Peace

Israel did not keep this shalom. More and more they turned to the idols that surrounded them.

So Isaiah prophesied that God would step in Himself. A child would be born, a son given, and one of His names would be Prince of Peace — Sar Shalom. Isaiah 9:6 Shalom focused down into one Person, and that Person would establish a kingdom of it. Ezekiel saw the same thing and described Him as a Shepherd gathering His sheep into a covenant of peace, where no wild beast would touch the lambs. Ezekiel 34:25

God is the giver of shalom because He is perfect peace in Himself. All the attributes of God add up to completeness. He does not have peace. He is peace.

How we get in

God calls men into this peace through covenant, and He gives it to us through the Lord Jesus Christ. The chastisement that would bring us peace fell upon Him. Isaiah 53:5 Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 5:1

The Bible does not hide the weaknesses of its men. Abraham lies. David does far worse. But it never stops at the failure — it goes on to show you how they found shalom.

When we fail, our instinct is to pay the debt ourselves. We take up all sorts of good works trying to settle an account we cannot settle. But Christ has paid it. We do not have to. By committing ourselves to Him we receive that peace, and He accepts us the way He accepted David — a man who knew perfectly well that the law said an adulterer should be stoned, and who laid hold of the forgiving and transforming grace of God instead.

So there is peace with God: the sin is never to be remembered any more.

There is peace with my neighbor, because a man who knows he is forgiven is able to forgive. What I cannot settle I can hand over to a wise and all-knowing Judge and let Him settle it.

And there is peace with my circumstances — seeing them not through my eyes but through the eyes of God. God is in control. Life does not have meaning outside of purpose found in God, but with that purpose you can find an ultimate outcome of good in any situation. Peace with my past. Peace with my present. Peace with my future.

Peace under fire

Gideon did not get to hold this quietly. He was forced to live out the peace of God in the face of serious conflict.

The first order was to tear down his father’s high place and build an altar to Yahweh in its place. He obeyed, and by morning the men of the town were at the door ready to kill him. His enemies here are his own neighbors and his own family, and he faces them in peace.

Then the peace is tested again. He raises an army and God takes it apart — thirty-two thousand reduced to three hundred, by the instruction of the covenant, until there is no possible way to credit the victory to the army. Gideon goes into battle anyway, with the peace of God upon him, and wins — because the covenant God went before him.

He had the name right before he had the victory. That is the whole point of the altar.