“What Will You Leave Behind?”

Judges 8: 22, 24, 27: “Then the men of Israel said to Gideon, ‘Rule over us, both you and your son, also your son’s son, for you have delivered us from the hand of Midian.’ Yet Gideon said to them, I would request of you, that each of you give me an earring of gold from your spoil. And Gideon made it into an ephod, and placed it in his city, Ophrah, and all Israel played the harlot with it there, so that it became a snarl to Gideon and his household.” After all the good Gideon had done, after forty years of judging his people, what did he leave behind for them? An idol – and that’s what his successors followed. We must be sure that we leave behind no unclean thing to mislead our descendants, lest they, too, go astray.