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I have a Patriot 12 antenna mounted to a 10 foot metal mast which is mounted to the eve on the peaked part of my roof which is all wooden construction. I am running from the metal mast very large diameter wire to a piece of rebar drove in the ground 7 feet. What if anything am I getting from doing this and is 7 feet deep enough to get a ground?

7 ft should be fine, running re-bar for a ground rod might be hurting your grounding but still should work for lighting protection. I run a similar setup on my house. I ran a heavy wire from my mast to the ground rod for the house (copper clad steel rod).

Now add a half dozen more of those ground rods in a fairly wide area. Connect them together and then to your house's ground system and you'll have a half way decent safety ground system.
- 'Doc

The wire I am running as my ground wire is actually the multi stranded guy wire galvanized that they use on telephone poles when the stress on the pole is uneven. And to reply to more grounding rods I had a Hell of a time just to get that one in 7 feet! There must be a better way!

What gauge of copper wire would you recommend?

"What gauge of copper wire would you recommend?"

Whatever the NEC recommends.
- 'Doc

Read through my writeup on grounding and read the links from Nautel, Broadcast Electronics, and Polyphaser. There is more to lightning and ground protection than just pounding rods into the ground. Done improperly you could be creating more of a problem than leaving things floating.

http://members.rennlist.org/warren/grounding.pdf

I'm running 6 gauge from the antenna mount bolts to a 8 foot copper clad ground rod driven 1 foot under the ground and another from the base of my tower to the same ground rod so my ground rod is actually 9 foot deep and ground wires are buried back to tower base. As for a pain to put in the ground I did mine while the ground was frozen here and used a 3 pound maul......It took about a case of beer