Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Yesterday we learned about Israel's first four judges, and they were all pretty good by

God standards, especially the last one, Deborah.

Forty years after Deborah, the Israelites

fall into sin again and are oppressed by the Midianites, who are their distant relatives

through Kutura. That's the woman Abraham married after Sarah died. The Israelites were so oppressed

and afraid that they hid in caves to escape the Midianites. And the Midianites also ate all their

food supply. not cool.

After seven years, as things went from bad to worse,

the Israelites cried out to God.

Maybe they expected him to send a judge again,

a military leader to rescue them like he had in the past.

But God doesn't owe them that,

and he knows they need something different at this point.

He sends a prophet, someone to speak truth and call out their sin. We have no idea how they responded to this when it happened, because the text immediately takes us to the next scene. Cut to a man named Gideon, hard at work, beating out wheat and a wine press, which is an unusual place to do that kind of thing,

by the way. It's kind of like when you put the Girl Scout cookies in your sock drawer so the kids can't find them. Much like you, Gideon was trying to hide the wheat from the Midianite food stealers.

Meanwhile, the angel of the Lord shows up, and this appears to be God the Son. God the Father

also seems to show up here, disembodied.

It's kind of a confusing text to navigate, but it seems likely that God the Father and God

the Son are both on the scene. God the Son tells Gideon that God is with him.

Gideon's response is something we've probably all thought before. He basically says,

oh really, God is with me? That's funny because my life is a disaster. I actually feel pretty

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