Expositions of Holy Scripture: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and First Book of Samuel, Second Samuel, First Kings, and Second Kings chapters I to VIIMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and First Book of Samuel, Second Samuel, First Kings, and Second Kings chapters I to VII
The wet fleece on the dry ground was not only a revelation of God's
power, but may be taken as a pattern of what God's soldiers must ever
be. A prophet long after Gideon said: 'The remnant of Jacob shall be in
the midst of many peoples as dew from the Lord,' bringing to others the
grace which they have received that they may diffuse it, and turning
the dry and thirsty land where no water is into fertility, and the
'parched ground' into a 'pool.'
We have said that the main point of Gideon's petition was that the
fleece should be made unlike the threshing-floor, and that that
unlikeness, which could obviously not be naturally brought about, was
to be to him the sure token that God was at work to produce it. The
strongest demonstration that the Church can give the world of its
really being God's Church is its unlikeness to the world. If it is wet
with divine dew when all the threshing-floor is dry, and if, when all
the floor is drenched with poisonous miasma, it is dry from the
diffused and clinging malaria, the world will take knowledge of it, and
some souls be set to ask how this unlikeness comes. When Haman has to
say: 'There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among
the peoples ... and their laws are diverse from those of every people,'
he may meditate murder, but 'many from among the people of the land'
will join their ranks. Gideon may or may not have thought of the fleece
as a symbol of his little host, but we may learn from it the old
lesson, 'Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the
renewing of your minds.'
'FIT, THOUGH FEW'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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