June 11, 2023
Jehovah-Shalom
Judges 6:11-16 & 22-24
It’s summer which usually means summer vacations. All of us have a different idea of what a peaceful vacation would look like. For some it’s a tent or RV that’s far away from anyone and for others it’s a hotel room amongst the hustle and bustle of a big city. Maybe you’d like to escape to the mountains while others find it more peaceful on the shore of a sandy beach somewhere. I think no matter our opinions on the perfect vacation destination we can all agree that we need to find some peace and rest from this world. We need to understand that the world's idea of peace is nothing compared to the peace that God promises.
Psalms 23:2
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
In the 23rd Psalm we see David once again start speaking of his experiences with God. He specifically address the peace that he found with the Lord. The imagery that David paints here is so easy to imagine. The serenity and peacefulness of that moment seems almost surreal - because it is. The peace of the moment that David speaks of does not come from the surroundings that David so eloquently describes. Rather the peace in this picturesque moment is found in the shepherd who is present with the sheep in those green pastures and still waters. David's focus is not on a location but on our Lord, Jehovah-Shalom, The Lord who is our peace.
As we said before, our idea of peace and the peace we can experience through Jehovah-Shalom are very different which was very evident in the life of a man named Gideon. Gideon was the first to give God the name Jehovah-Shalom. Before we get to that point in his life, Gideon had to learn what peace wasn’t.
Peace doesn’t come from our circumstances. - Judges 6:11-13
11 Then the angel of the Lord came and sat beneath the great tree at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash of the clan of Abiezer. Gideon son of Joash was threshing wheat at the bottom of a winepress to hide the grain from the Midianites. 12 The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, “Mighty hero, the Lord is with you!” 13 “Sir,” Gideon replied, “if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? And where are all the miracles our ancestors told us about? Didn’t they say, ‘The Lord brought us up out of Egypt’? But now the Lord has abandoned us and handed us over to the Midianites.”
Leading up to the book of Judges, Joshua had led the children of Israel into the promised land. The book accounts the events surrounding the children as they were settling into the land that was promised to them by God through Abraham. After Joshua and the generation with him died, the people started to fall away from God. It’s at that point we see a cycle start that will continue all throughout the book of Judges. This cycle starts out with the children of Israel doing what is right in their own eyes. This disobedience causes them to fall away from God. When they are away from God they are conquered by their enemies. So they cry out for God to save them and God sends them a judge. The judge brings the people back to God but when the judge dies the cycle continues from the beginning. This cycle is explained in the latter part of chapter 2 of Judges. The cycle of falling away and coming back has been going on for almost 200 years before Gideon comes upon the scene. When we start to read chapter 6 in Judges, we see that the children of Israel had been doing evil in the eyes of God. They had been handed over to the Midianites for seven years (Judges 6:1). The Midianites were cruel to the Israelites - they destroyed their crops, stole their livestock, and destroyed the land leaving the Israelites with little to no food. The Israelites would have to hide in order to produce anything of substance for their families and that’s where we find Gideon. He is hiding at the bottom of a wine press where he is threshing some wheat in order to be able to make some bread. That’s where the Lord meets him and tells him that the Lord is with him. Gideon doesn’t understand what the Lord is saying and starts to get a little angry at what he was told. Gideon points to the circumstances he and the rest of the nation were experiencing. He’s asking why all these problems have been happening, where their miracles are, and if the Lord has abandoned them. Isn’t this exactly our first response when we think about peace? We tend to think about the circumstances around us. On the pleasant side of it, we can think of the mountains or oceans where we seek rest and relaxation. We can also think about the other side of peace, the storms, the strife, and the problems that surround us. When it comes to peace we tend to focus on outward things. If peace were in the circumstances that surround us would it really be true peace, could we ever find it? Could we ever be like the sheep that David described in Psalms 23:2? In his book “A Shepherd’s Look at the 23rd Psalm” author W. Phillip Keller states that one thing sheep need in order to lie down and feel at peace is to be free of all fear. Notice that he didn’t say free of all the things that cause fear. The sheep must be free of fear themselves. Gideon didn’t have this kind of peace - a peace that was free of fear because he was fearful of everything that was going on around him now and had been going on around him for years. Even if those events were removed in an instant, Gideon would not be able to experience true peace. True peace (a peace that passes all understanding) does not come from our circumstances.
Peace doesn’t come from our abilities. - Judges 6:14-15
14 Then the Lord turned to him and said, “Go with the strength you have, and rescue Israel from the Midianites. I am sending you!” 15 “But Lord,” Gideon replied, “how can I rescue Israel? My clan is the weakest in the whole tribe of Manasseh, and I am the least in my entire family!”
After Gideon’s diatribe, the Lord responds to him with a terrifying proposal - to go in his own strength and defeat the Midianites. Gideon responds by looking at himself and realizing that he can’t do anything to bring the peace he so desperately wanted. He says that not only is his tribe the weakest amongst all of Israel, but he is the weakest among the weakest tribe. There is no way he can bring peace to Israel because he doesn’t have the ability. Can you identify with that? Are there ever situations in which you feel like you have no control over and because of that, you cannot find peace? I know that it happens in my life a lot. What about the sheep in Psalms 23? Sheep can hardly do anything at all (except for getting themselves into trouble), yet David says they can lie down and be at peace in the green pastures and still waters. David knew when he wrote the 23rd Psalm what the answer was and Gideon was about to understand the same truth as well. There was a piece from the puzzle that he was missing, that was the peace that is only found in the presence of the Shepherd - the Lord Himself!
Peace comes from the Lord alone. - Judge 6:16 & 22-24
16 The Lord said to him, “I will be with you. And you will destroy the Midianites as if you were fighting against one man.”
22 When Gideon realized that it was the angel of the Lord, he cried out, “Oh, Sovereign Lord, I’m doomed! I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face!” 23 “It is all right,” the Lord replied. “Do not be afraid. You will not die.” 24 And Gideon built an altar to the Lord there and named it Yahweh-Shalom (which means “the Lord is peace”). The altar remains in Ophrah in the land of the clan of Abiezer to this day.
Gideon had missed it twice in this conversation with the Lord. It was the third time that was a charm. In verse 12 he is told, “The Lord is with you.” In verse 14 he is told that the Lord is the one sending him, but it isn’t until verse 16 that he realizes that it was, in fact, the Lord that was going to be with him. That’s the key to the peace Gideon was seeking, it wasn’t in the circumstances that he found himself in, and it wasn’t in his ability to cause a change in those circumstances. Instead it was in the Mighty Lord Himself. The key to peace, is the presence of the Lord. Notice the name Gideon gives God is NOT “the Lord brings peace” but rather “the Lord is Peace”. This was the secret to the sheep’s peace that David spoke of. It wasn’t the absence of the things that could cause the sheep to fear but rather it was facing them in the presence of the Shepherd. Just like last week, I think we need to answer the question, “How can we experience God in this way ourselves?” To answer this we must look to Jesus - the Prince of Peace.
To Experience Jehovah-Shalom, first we must have peace with God.
Before we experience the peace OF God, we must have peace WITH God. The sin in our lives separated us from God and it caused us to become enemies with God (Col. 1:21). Nothing we can do can fix this relationship. We can have this relationship fixed and have peace with God, - only through Jesus (Romans 5:1). If we don’t make Jesus the Lord and Savior of our life we will never know real peace on this side or on the other side of eternity (Isaiah 57:20-21). To experience Jehovah-Shalom, we must experience the redemption that is only found in Jesus. If you have never trusted Jesus as your Lord, then any attempt you make at peace in your life will leave you wanting. True peace can never be found outside of a relationship with Jesus Christ.
To Experience Jehovah-Shalom, we must have a deep relationship with Jesus.
The sheep in the 23rd Psalm didn’t just lay down because a shepherd was there, they laid down because they knew their shepherd and they trusted Him. The sheep knew and trusted him because they have seen what he would and could do. The Shepherd provided protection from their enemies, He provided what they needed to live, and even though some of those things that caused them fear might be present around them, it didn’t cause them any fear because they knew their shepherd was good and would always take care of them no matter what the day would hold. The same goes for us and our Good Shepherd - Jesus. In the book of Job, Job’s friends gave some pretty horrible advice throughout the book. One of his friends did give a truth that all of us who seek peace in our lives need to heed today. In Job 22:21 Eliphaz tells Job to submit to God and know peace. The Hebrew word used for submit here means to get to know God more by trusting Him and serving Him (obedience) with your life. You can trust God or you can trust God and something else (our strength, our government, our family, etc.). In order to know true peace, we can’t find it by trusting in anything else in this world, including ourselves and our own abilities. True peace comes from trusting in God alone. Isaiah backs this truth up as well in Isaiah 26:3 & 12 where he tells us that God will keep in perfect peace, as well as those whose trust is in God, and whose eyes are fixed on Him. Jesus Himself tells us in John 16:33 that He has told us all of this (His death, burial, and resurrection, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and about the Father) so that we will have peace. Notice He says that with this peace there are still trials and sorrows, but despite those circumstances, we will still have peace because Jesus has overcome all of them. It’s a peace that passes all understanding and only comes from trusting, following, and knowing Jesus deeply.
There is still a piece of the 23rd Psalm that we haven’t addressed and that’s the symbolism of the green pasture and the still waters. Both of these things are the sustenance that the sheep need for survival and are only made possible by the effort of the shepherd. The location where David shepherded was a lot like the environment we find here in New Mexico. He knew (just like we do) that green pastures with good food didn’t happen by accident (had to seed, water, harvest, and move sheep from field to field to make sure the field could grow back). Not only that, he also knew sheep needed the still waters to hydrate. This occurred because the shepherd would dam up the streams they would find in that same environment. Otherwise the sheep wouldn’t come and drink from the water they so desperately needed. The shepherd put forth all this work because it was what the sheep needed to survive. When the shepherd put forth the work and was present with the sheep only then would the sheep have the peace and nutrition they needed to survive. It was through peace that only the shepherd could bring that the sheep could enjoy the good things that he had prepared for His flock. It seems that David was speaking of literal sheep. He was speaking about himself and the understanding that all the goodness that he needed in life came from the Good Shepherd. We see in scripture that it’s in Jesus that we get the spiritual nourishment that we need to survive. Scripture tells us Jesus is our bread of life (John 6:25), and our living water (John 4:14). It’s not until we know Him as our peace, our Jehovah-Shalom, that we will ever be able to enjoy all the riches He has so painstakingly provided us as His sheep, through His death, burial, and resurrection.
