When Gideon tore down the altar of Baal and cut down the Asherah pole under cover of darkness, the story could have ended with a quiet act of obedience. But it didn’t. What happened the next morning tells us more about the nature of false religion, the cost of true reform, and the impotence of idols than almost any other passage in the book of Judges.
The town reacts as one man.
Verse 28 tells us that when the men of the city arose early, they saw the altar of Baal in ruins, the wooden image cut down, and the second bull offered on a newly built altar to Jehovah. Their response was immediate and unified. They made diligent enquiry, and it took them no time at all to trace the act back to Gideon. This was not a mild inconvenience. This was, to them, an outrage of the highest order. They were scandalised, inflamed, and united as one people. And note carefully what they said. They didn’t say, “Who has torn down the altar of Jehovah?” They said, “Who has torn down the altar of Baal?” That was their god. That was their nerve centre.
A revealing parallel with Sodom.
Where else in Scripture do we have a whole city assembling at one man’s house to demand that someone be brought out? Sodom. In Genesis 19, the men of Sodom came as one body to Lot’s door, demanding that the angelic visitors be handed over. Here in Judges 6, the men of Ophrah come to Joash’s house demanding that Gideon be brought out to die. The parallel is striking and damning. Israel, the covenant people, behaving with the collective fervour of Sodom, but for what? For the honour of a false god. They wanted blood for the crime of obedience to the law of the true God.
Was it actually a crime?
This is the piercing question. According to the law of God, the destruction of idolatrous sites was not a crime. It was a command. Deuteronomy is clear. Smash their altars. Cut down their Asherah poles. Grind them to powder. Don’t even enquire about how they worshipped. So the so called crime that provoked the town to a murderous rage was, in fact, exact obedience to what God had mandated centuries earlier. This is a good barometer of a person. What is their attitude towards the law of God, as it is written down? Not as they imagine it, not as tradition has softened it, but as it actually reads?
The civil magistrate and God’s authority.
Gideon was not a vigilante. He was being deputised by God, empowered as a civil officer, and elected as a judge. He had legitimate authority to do what he did. And this matters for us because the Bible is not a libertarian document. It does not teach that the state is inherently evil or that all authority is oppressive. The civil magistrate is a real office, instituted by God, and God does grant real authority to His officers. Gideon acted under divine commission, and that commission is the basis of his right to act.
Syncretism always demotes Jehovah.
These people still worshipped Jehovah, at least nominally. But who was really close? Who really provided? They reckoned it was Baal. Baal and Asherah were the gods who protected their fertility and their military strength. This is the nature of syncretism. Whenever you mix the worship of the true God with a rival commitment, whether that rival is Baal or secular humanism or the welfare state, the true God always gets demoted. He’s either Lord of all or He’s not Lord at all. There is no stable mixture. The foreign element always rises to the top.
Joash’s turning point.
Then comes the unexpected reversal. Joash, Gideon’s father, the keeper of the Baal site, steps forward and says, “Would you plead for Baal? Would you save him? Let the one who would plead for him be put to death by morning. If he is a god, let him plead for himself.” This is either a genuine moment of clarity or a shrewd piece of rhetoric. Either way, it exposes the truth at the heart of the entire episode. The bigger picture of what Gideon did is not merely the destruction of an altar. It was a demonstration of Baal’s impotence. Baal cannot defend himself. Baal cannot avenge his own honour. And the only power that any false god has, whether ancient or modern, is the power of devotion that is given to it by people.
The state makes nothing.
The parallel to the modern godless state is worth drawing out. Where is the power of the demonic, and where is the power of the state? It is not the power to create. It is the power to destroy and to take. The godless state makes nothing. It takes what man has made, syphons it to its apparatus, and redistributes what remains. The religious con that sustains it has to be broken, not merely critiqued in print, but demonstrated to be powerless. That is the point Gideon reached, and it is the point we must reach in our own day.
God protects His man in strange circumstances.
Who protected Gideon from the mob? His own father, the very man who had maintained the altar of Baal. If Joash had not been the keeper of that site, Gideon would have died. But God, in His providence, had engineered the circumstances so that His man was protected by the most unlikely person. God is able to take a man from the very core of the cult and still make of him someone who knows God’s Word, fears God, and obeys God even when the whole town wants his head.