Judges 6:6-16

Living Bible

^6-7 So Israel was reduced to abject poverty because of the Midianites. Then at last the people of Israel began to cry out to the Lord for help.

⁸ However, the Lord’s reply through the prophet he sent to them was this: “The Lord God of Israel brought you out of slavery in Egypt, ⁹ and rescued you from the Egyptians and from all who were cruel to you, and drove out your enemies before you, and gave you their land. ¹⁰ He told you he is the Lord your God, and you must not worship the gods of the Amorites who live around you on every side. But you have not listened to him.”

¹¹ But one day the Angel of the Lord came and sat beneath the oak tree at Ophrah, on the farm of Joash the Abiezrite. Joash’s son, Gideon, had been threshing wheat by hand in the bottom of a grape press—a pit where grapes were pressed to make wine—for he was hiding from the Midianites.

¹² The Angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, “Mighty soldier, the Lord is with you!”

¹³ “Stranger,” Gideon replied, “if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? And where are all the miracles our ancestors have told us about—such as when God brought them out of Egypt? Now the Lord has thrown us away and has let the Midianites completely ruin us.”

¹⁴ Then the Lord turned to him and said, “I will make you strong! Go and save Israel from the Midianites! I am sending you!”

¹⁵ But Gideon replied, “Sir, how can I save Israel? My family is the poorest in the whole tribe of Manasseh, and I am the least thought of in the entire family!”

¹⁶ Whereupon the Lord said to him, “But I, Jehovah,^[a] will be with you! And you shall quickly destroy the Midianite hordes!”