Here’s an uncomfortable truth from Judges 6: when God wanted to save a nation, he didn’t appear to the most vocal critic or the best-informed analyst. He appeared to a man threshing wheat in a wine press. A worker.
Christ Enters the Pagan Temple
The angel of the Lord, the pre-incarnate Christ, came to Ophrah and sat under a terebinth tree. That’s not a minor detail,the terebinth was a central tree in Canaanite worship – the groves, the high places – this was one of them.
So Christ walks into the very heart of pagan worship and sits down. Not as a visitor, as a king on his throne. He’s saying: this belongs to me, you can’t keep me out.
That should reshape how we look at every dark corner of our culture, there is no domain that is ‘secular.’ There is no part of the world that Christ doesn’t claim as his own. In Him, through him, and unto him are all things, including the material from which every idol is made.
If you’ve ever looked at the state of things and thought, “There’s no hope for this,” Judges 6:11 is your corrective. The Lord sat down in the heart of darkness and issued a commission from there. Don’t you give in to hopelessness.
The Worker, Not the Commenter
Now, Gideon. What was he doing when the Lord appeared? He wasn’t identifying all the evils of the Midianites online, he wasn’t deep in conspiracy theories, he wasn’t building a following based on outrage.
He was threshing wheat in a wine press. That’s hard, suboptimal, thankless work. Normally you’d thresh wheat in an open field where the wind does half the job. But the Midianites had made that impossible, so Gideon was doing the work under the worst possible conditions, getting half the result for the same effort.
Sound familiar? If you’re a young man in your twenties or thirties right now, you know what it’s like to work harder than your father did and get less – the conditions are suboptimal, the rewards are smaller, and the Bible doesn’t pretend otherwise.
But here’s the thing, it was to this man, the worker in difficult circumstances, that God appeared. Not the idle, not the merely opinionated, the worker.
If you want God to use you, you need to be doing the work already in front of you. The family responsibilities, the business, the daily grind. God doesn’t commission idle men.
“You Mighty Man of Valour”
And then the angel of the Lord speaks. Does he rebuke Gideon? Condemn him? List the nation’s failures?
No. He says: “The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valour.”
The Hebrew word for valour — hayil — means power, competence, strength, wealth, bravery. Godliness is competence. The godly man is a man of power, because the Holy Spirit gives power.
The church has spent too long telling men they’re weak. Weak, weak, weak, always weak. But God’s first word to the man he was about to use to save a nation was not about weakness. It was about identity. This is who you are. You are mighty. Not because of some inner battery pack or mystical exoskeleton, but because the Lord is with you.
Everything Gideon did after this, every bold act, every victory, was rooted in this God-given identity. If you want to do more, you have to be more. And being more starts with believing what God says you are, not what the culture or even the church has told you.
Based on the God’s World, God’s Way podcast series through Judges 6. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Listen on Cr101Radio.com. Share with a man who needs to hear this.