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 in 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,

...