Who Am I?ናሙና

We are not alone in our journey of identity. Two great men of God explored this question with God, and their stories are incredibly instructive.

One of these men is Gideon, a character we find hiding in Judges 6. For context, the Midianites had plagued Israel for seven years. The Midianites were a fierce, nomadic people, and at the time, they would swoop in and raid Israel’s harvest again and again and AGAIN.

Because of the Midianites, the Israelites began to forget who they were. They went from being God’s chosen people, led by God Himself, to people who had started hiding in dens and caves for fear of the Midianites.

Their hiding is instructive. Our circumstances can quickly cause us to forget who we are in Christ.

For example, a young lady can go through a bad breakup and suddenly forget that she is special, one of God’s special people, according to 1 Peter 2:9.

We must filter our circumstances through God’s Word and consistently bring our fears and concerns to God before those circumstances have us hiding in caves like the Israelites were in Judges 6.

Fearful that his grain would be raided, Gideon was threshing it in a winepress rather than up on a hillside where farmers would typically separate the wheat from the chaff. He wanted to be discreet. He tried to fly under the radar. He did not want to stand out.

But then, in Judges 6:11, the Angel of the Lord, an Old Testament appearance of Jesus Christ (known as a theophany or a Christophany), changes all of that.

The Angel of the Lord calls out to Gideon, saying, “The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor.”

I can just picture this terrified Gideon, looking around the winepress where he is hiding, saying, “What? Who? Me?”

God is calling Gideon a man of valor, which is defined as “great courage in the face of danger.” Why?

God calls us based on who He is making us to be, not on who we are at any one moment. God describes the future as the present because He resides outside constructs like the future and the present.

In other words, God sees what we can’t, so we would do well to trust how He defines our identity and who He is molding us to be.