Gideon’s triumph of faith in the previous chapter stirs the soul: though God reduces his army to 300, he knows God is with him, and he’s victorious. And yet the book of Judges ends with the nation of Israel having descended below even the depravity of Sodom and Gomorrah. How does a nation get there from here?
Judges 8 begins (1-3) with ugly envy - the Ephraimites covet Gideon’s glory and complain that they didn’t get to fight with him. It’s always easy to complain like this after the blood has been spilled. But Gideon calms them with effective diplomacy, assuring them with pragmatic flattery that they are still better than him.
The men of Succoth are no better, unwilling to help him win a battle that they will clearly benefit from (4-9). So Gideon promises that when he returns, he will “flay” their leaders. This is no idle promise.
Gideon presses on and is victorious over the much larger Midianite force (10-12). Then he returns and keeps his promise to the leaders of Sucooth. It is both glorious and grubby.
In response to Gideon’s victories, the rest of Israel requests that Gideon rule over them, if not as king, as a sort of “super-Judge.” Gideon declines, saying that the LORD will rule over them (23). This seems good and godly, almost George Washington-esque. Yet in the next breath, Gideon “requests” the donation of golden earrings from across the land, as a sort of one-time tribute. Gideon gonna get paid.
He then takes the gold and fashions it into a heavy, golden ephod - the torso garment of a priest (or king). The result is that the ephod itself becomes the object of Israel’s worship and a “snare” to Gideon’s own family (27).
Nevertheless, through Gideon’s military victories, God gives the land 40 years of rest from invasion (28). Yet in those years, Gideon multiplied wives (70!), and the son who would reign after him would not even come from a wife but from a concubine. Abimelech would be a wicked, violent king. And after Gideon’s death, it was an easy jump from worshiping Gideon’s ephod to Baal-worship - the violent sex-cult religion of the nations that God so detested.
And from here, it is an easy slide to Sodom 2.0.
What lessons can we learn?
There are many parallels to this chapter and the United States since World War II. Backed against the wall, the U.S. won that war and became the wealthiest nation in history. Yet since then we have descended into one madness after another, drenching our soil in the blood of millions of aborted babies and celebrating sodomy and sexual insanity.
Unless the great men of the nation do not turn the hearts of the people to the God Who is there, even the greatest military victory will be only temporary.
Furthermore, Paul seems to echo the word “snare” in Judges 8:27 in 1 Timothy 6:9. The golden ephod became a “snare” to Gideon’s family, and Paul warns that the desire to be rich is trap (or “snare”). Indeed it is: the greatest source of division and strife today in families is driven by generational envy and the coveting of wealth, especially through inheritance. It is a snare for many a family.
Just as in Gideon’s day, so today: we need a better King. And we have One, risen from the dead, Jesus of Nazareth. Thus we need wholesale revival and repentance back to Him. And we need rulers and governmental structures that submit to his rule. For unless the worship of a people turns to God, all their military victories and resultant wealth will be for not, and their culture will drift and descend back into the abyss.