The movie “A Bug’s Life” could well have been based on Gideon and the situation in which his people found themselves. They were surrounded by an army — “as numerous as locusts” — of Midianites, descendants of Ishmael and today known as Arabs (Judges 6:3-5 & 7-12; Genesis 37:28, 36 & 39:1). Their camels had crescent ornaments around their necks (Judges 8:21-26). Seem familiar?
Gideon had a poor self-image and thought of himself as “the least of the least” (Judges 6:14-16). He and the 300 soldiers he led faced an army of 135,000 — odds of 450/1 — but the LORD enabled him to defeat them.
This too seems familiar. The Midianite kings referred to Gideon as “the son of a king” (Judges 8:18). In the end the self-described “least of the least” became a prince! Although tired, the victorious army pursued the remaining 15,000 enemy soldiers who were fleeing the scene of battle.
A good effort for a man who’d had a poor self-image. What had changed the victim into the victor? Look it up in your Bible. (Here’s a clue though: one enemy soldier had a nightmare about Gideon and spoke of his own army as defeated the night before the battle began. The LORD had told Gideon, God’s reluctant hero, that he would defeat the enemy “as one man” — such was the unity of purpose in the ranks of his band of 300 soldiers
This can mean that either Gideon’s men would be so unified they would fight “as one man”; or that the one man’s nightmare was the same as everyone else’s in the enemy army. There’s a lesson in this when the media speaks about the hopelessness of the tiny nation of Israel surrounded by millions of hostiles. Israel plus God is a majority!
A bug’s life? Only for those as numerous as grasshoppers whose goal in life is to destroy Israel. “The last thing that goes through the mind of a bug when it hits the windscreen of a car is the rest of its body.” Splat is the end of that! As the anti-Israel Balaam prophesied in Numbers 24:9: “He (Israel) couched, he lay down as a lion: who shall stir him up? Blessed is he that blesses you, and cursed is he that curses you.”
A timely warning not only to those nations of old who thought they could invade and conquer Israel; and also to those nearby nations today who may think they can invade the nation state of Israel with impunity. God’s protective covenant with Abraham, the forefather of the Jews, remains in place, and the modern army of Israel appears to have few reluctant heroes.