G
G
Gamaliel (Acts 5:33–42)
Gamaliel had been set in his high seat by the God of Israel in order that he might watch for the coming Messiah and might announce His advent to the people of Israel.
AW-BC, p. 568
And we all make Gamaliel’s tremendous and irreparable mistake when we approach Jesus Christ and His cause and His Kingdom on the side of policy, and when we handle Him as a matter open to argument and debate. He is not a matter of argument and debate; He is an ambassador of reconciliation. We are simply not permitted to sit in judgment on Almighty God and on His message of mercy to us.
AW-BC, p. 568
He was held in repute by the people; but the people were blind, and they loved to be led by blind leaders. And Gamaliel was one of them.
AW-BC, p. 569
Gideon
If we only cry, “The sword of the Lord!” we shall be guilty of an idle presumption…. This is the cry of every lie-a-bed…. Nor must it be “The sword of Gideon” alone, for that were idolatrous reliance on an arm of the flesh. We can do nothing of ourselves.
CHS, 10:167
How difficult it was for [Gideon] to fight the enemy at these odds. If I had been there, I’d have befouled my breeches for fright.
Martin Luther
I see, and you must see, men every day who are as brave and as bold as Gideon, and as full of anger and revenge against all the wrongs and all the miseries of their fellow-men; men and women who take their lives in their hands to do battle with ignorance and vice and all the other evils that the land lies under; and, all the time, they go on repeating Gideon’s fatal mistake; till, at the end of their lives, they leave all these wrongs and miseries very much as they found them: nothing better, but rather worse. And all because they set up an ephod of their own devising in the place of the ephod and the altar and the sacrifice and the intercession that God has set up for those and all other evils.
AW-BC, p. 87