The Bible is a book inspired by God that records the lives of real people, historical events that really happened, but many of those real stories serve a larger purpose. They serve as object lessons in the plan of salvation. As the apostle Paul wrote,

These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come (1 Corinthians 10:11 NIV84).

One of those real historical people is Gideon, who led the Israelites to defeat the Midianites (Judges 6–7). The context of Gideon’s calling is that the generation that Joshua led into the Promised Land has died. That generation failed to dispossess the pagan inhabitants, and their descendants have since intermarried and made other social and economic relationships with them. This led to the worship of pagan gods such as Baal. In fact, Gideon’s own father, Joash, had an altar to Baal set up in Ophrah.

What was happening is that God had led the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt through His miraculous power to establish them as a free people in the Promised Land—not just free politically, but free spiritually, to have their minds freed from the lies about Him and their hearts freed from fear and selfishness, to write His living law of truth, love, and trust upon their hearts and minds.

But hearts and minds cannot be freed from fear, selfishness, lies, and rebellion by the use of might and power, nor by imposed law and law enforcement. In order to free a mind from lies, the individual must evaluate the divergent views and choose for themselves what they will believe, either the lie or the truth. This is why Paul said in Romans 14:5 that every person must be fully persuaded in their own mind.

God has the power to reach inside any person and forcibly change what they think or know, but if He did this, He would destroy their individuality, erase and replace them with either another person or a robot. Of course, if God did such a thing, He would not be our God of truth, love, and freedom. If God were to do that, He would be the untrustworthy abuser of power that Satan has alleged Him to be.

Minds are freed from lies only when each individual chooses to believe the truth, but that truth also leads them to a new decision point—one designed to unlock the door and free their heart from fear and selfishness. After a person recognizes truth and cognitively chooses to believe it, then to be fully free, they must choose, in governance of self, to apply it to the operations of their life—their motives, identity, values, and what they will practice. Ultimately, who will they trust with their internal sense of security, safety, and emotional wellbeing; in other words, who will they trust with their hearts?

When we have seen enough truth to know that God is trustworthy and that Satan has lied, then we will be brought to points in our lives that will require us to choose, not whether we believe God is trustworthy—because the mind has already seen the truth and knows He is—but whether we will actually trust Him with ourselves, our hearts, our futures, what we find we experience the most security from. Will we choose to say yes to God and follow His leading when that choice requires us to give up some unhealthy and destructive comfort measure? Will we say yes to God and trust Him with how things turn out, or will we try to control the future, how things turn out, and what others think? Will we follow what we know God is leading us to do and say so no to fear, no to peer pressure, and no to old habits, trusting Him for the power to succeed? This type of decision-making goes beyond cognitive knowledge to experiential application of what we believe to be true—to living faith, to experiential trust.

And this type of decision-making is possible only when the truth has won us to trust and we have opened our heart and been reborn with a new animating, motivating energy, the Spirit of power and love and sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7), the Spirit of Christ. When we are following the truth, when we are choosing to trust Jesus, He will bring us to various points in our life where we will be faced with a choice—to do what we know is right, what we know Jesus is leading us to do. When we do this, it often results in some emotional turmoil, anxiety, fear, uncertainty, or pain in cutting away from our hearts some unhealthy attachment. In other words, following Jesus often results in fear and insecurity that we must struggle against. But this is exactly the point of the decision; Jesus wants us free from that old spirit of fear and selfishness, so He leads us to these very places. Just like with Gideon.

Gideon, when called by God, experienced this struggle. He cognitively believed in God; he knew God was leading. But before he could succeed, he had to overcome some things in his own life. So God took him through a series of events that required Gideon to put his belief into action, to exercise that belief in battling against his own feelings of fear, insecurity, and doubt.

Before God could bless Gideon to drive out the Midianites, Gideon had to destroy the altar of Baal at Ophrah, build an altar to Yahweh, and offer a sacrifice to God. God cannot empower us to fulfill His larger calling in our lives until we first choose to cut out of our own lives the “idols” of this world. We must destroy in our own lives the gods of this world that have been set up in our homes. (I don’t mean physical artwork; I mean the things we esteem more than God and seek to comfort ourselves with instead of Him.)

After Gideon rejected Baal and began to worship God (acted out through the destruction of the altar to Baal and building and sacrificing on an altar to Yahweh), he was then directed to confront the Midianites, but this instruction brought to light Gideon’s struggle with his own fears. Thus, Gideon asked for the miracle of the fleeces. Gideon asked for the miracle not because his faith was great, but because his faith was weak and he needed miraculous encouragement to overcome his inherent fears. Yes, he believed in God. Yes, he committed himself to God. Yes, he wanted to be of service to God. And yes, he still had his fear-based spirit inherited from Adam that tempted him to doubt, and he rightly went to God asking for His intervention to help him overcome it.

We will often, in our own experience, after our surrender to Jesus, after our conversion, after our commitment to Jesus, after our understanding of God’s calling, see obstacles, problems, and threats on the horizon that frighten us, and these fears can cause us to doubt. It is then that we must do as Gideon did and go to God, asking Him for whatever He knows we need to hear, see, read, and understand in order to overcome the fear and move forward in His plan. In this very process of struggling in union with God against our own fears and insecurities, we are being changed, our faith is being strengthened, and the spirit of fear is losing its hold over us; our identity/heart is being circumcised by the Spirit of truth and love, cutting away the attachments to this world that falsely made us feel secure, and establishing our hearts in a genuine saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

Another lesson from these events is God’s call for each of us to be priests in His service —the priesthood of believers. In Gideon’s time, only the Levitical priests, those from the tribe of Levi, descended from Aaron, were authorized to build altars and make sacrifices to Yahweh, yet God instructed Gideon, who was of the tribe of Manasseh, to build an altar to the Lord and sacrifice.

This is a powerful object lesson for the people of God today. Individual salvation cannot be accomplished through others. We must individually, like Gideon, present ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to the Lord (Romans 12:1). We must have our hearts cleansed, sacrifice our old selves, tear down the altars to our Baals, and be reborn with the Spirit of Christ. (For more, see our Penal Substitution: Modern Baal Worship.) This requires rejecting the lie that God’s laws function like human law and returning to worshiping God as Creator, which requires understanding that all of God’s laws are design laws. Then we can go into effective spiritual warfare using the divine weapons of God to demolish every argument and pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God (2 Corinthians 10:3–5) and, thereby, advance the eternal gospel and cooperate with Jesus so we can all enter our heavenly promised land.

I encourage you, if you haven’t already done so, to examine the evidence of God’s trustworthiness, choose to open your heart to Him, and invite Him in. And then, as you understand His calling in your life, where He is leading, and you are tempted with fears and insecurities, go to God and ask Him to give you whatever He knows you need to help you in that moment, and then choose to act upon the truth and trust God with how things will turn out. In so doing, you will grow from victory to victory, and the old spirit of fear and doubt will lose its power over you, and God will work through you to shine His eternal gospel into the world, and we will soon celebrate together with Jesus in our heavenly promised land.