The Invincible Order Of The Barley Bread Eaters

• Left no sustenance—6:4

• Came as grasshoppers—6:5

• Israel was greatly impoverished—6:6

-All of these attacks literally wilted the morale and shriveled their spirits. Hope was gone and they were filled with a fear and foreboding that never let true rest come to their bodies or minds.

-Then God determines to find a hero among the people and pulls out a very unlikely man who was a farmer.

B. The Man—Gideon

-When you look at this passage in Judges 7 and all of the other times that surround the life of Gideon, you have every one of these components at work—sneering, swaggering, trash-talking, and fear.

-But God needed a man to do His will. He needed to pull someone from within their own ranks and shape him to be a leader.

-When the angel of the Lord finally found him, he found him hiding in a winepress. So fearful was Gideon of the Midianites that he was sneaking around just trying to get the wheat for flour so he could have a loaf of bread.

1. An Illustration—Hopelessness

Following the Korean War, Dr. William E. Mayer, who later became the top psychiatrist of the Army studied 1000 American POW’s from the North Korean camp. Extreme psychological warfare was practiced there. The captivity was not cruel—no bamboo shoots pushed under finger nails, no beatings, nor water-boarding, or any other dark physical punishment had to be endured. They were given adequate food, shelter, and water.

There wasn’t barbed wire and there were very few armed guards watching the American POW’s. None of the soldiers ever tried to escape. In fact, they would turn on each other and at times form close relationships with the North Korean captors.

When the POW’s were finally released they were offered phones by the International Red Cross to call loved ones and family member but the majority of them never called anyone. When they got home almost none of the POW’s engaged in close friendships. Dr. Mayer described each man as living in a mental “solitary confinement cell without steel and concrete.”

Dr. Mayer described a disease in the POW camp—a disease of extreme hopelessness. Sometimes soldiers would go to their cells and look around forlornly and decide there was no use in attempting to live. They would sit down in a corner, pull a blanket over their head and within two days they would be dead.

The soldiers called it “give-up-itis.” The doctors called it mirasmus meaning a lack of resistance, passivity. If soldiers would have been hit, spit on, or slapped; it would have made them angry. Anger would have then motivated them to survive. But in the absence of motivation, they simply gave up and died. The death rate was 38%. This is the highest of any in US military history. They died because they gave up.

The North Koreans practiced mental techniques that denied the men emotional support that comes from interpersonal relationships. Four techniques were used:

Informing—They were offered cigarettes to prisoners when they snitched on each other. But no one was punished, the enemy simply wanted to break relationships and turn men against each other.