God’s World, God’s Way — Judges 6
The Dominion Mandate and Anti-Christian Civilisation
The Dominion Mandate and Anti-Christian Civilisation
The story of Christian civilisation is to take wilderness and turn it into farmland.
The story of anti-Christian civilisation is to take farmland and let it go to waste — to destroy it.
We see this throughout history. Anti-Christian civilisations are not productive.
The Midianites would descend with all their livestock in innumerable numbers — like mosquitoes sucking the livelihood out of the nation.
Today we see the same dynamic. Bureaucrats and regulations draining the life out of our nations. Tremendous financial corruption where the taxpayer is robbed and the money is diverted to evil causes.
It is a grim picture. A really grim picture.
The great thing is that the Lord does not seek to pretty it up and say, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine in the end.”
We are not meant to overlook it or pretend it isn’t there. That is a Hindu way of thinking — that this life doesn’t really matter because it’s only the material realm.
God is saying: this is awful. This is something to be concerned about.
The Israelites were greatly impoverished, and God highlights this impoverishment as an evil thing — a result of sin.
There is an undercurrent in Christian thought that says poverty is good, that poverty is piety, and that riches are suspect. But the Lord’s assessment is different. A slack hand makes poor, whereas a diligent hand makes rich.
It is not that every poor person is evil — but poverty streams in on the back of disobedience to God.
We praise God for His scriptures, which give us an honest picture you will not get in many modern churches.
The Accurate Diagnosis
When the people finally cried to the Lord, what did He do?
He gave them a prescription — an accurate diagnosis. He sent a prophet to say, “This is what you’ve done. This is why you’re in a pickle.”
God, in His mercy, gives His people an accurate diagnosis of the situation.
There are a lot of false diagnoses going around today. People blame this group or that group. The World Economic Forum, the politicians, the shadowy elites.
But that is like having an earache and thinking you need to get your toenails clipped. It is a false approach — dealing with the fruit of the problem, not the root.
God reminded them: “I delivered you from the hands of the Egyptians.”
God is in the deliverance business. He is very experienced in national deliverance.
Part of our historical amnesia is forgetting just how experienced God is at this. He rescued Israel from Egypt — the superpower of the ancient world. He drew them back from exile in Babylon and Assyria. He takes dire situations where you would think all is irredeemably lost, and He restores them. He took the small remnant under Ezra and Nehemiah and rebuilt the nation to unprecedented levels.
And think about the parallels. When Judah was carried off to Babylon, the situation looked terminal. The temple was destroyed, the monarchy was gone, the covenant people were scattered among pagans in a foreign land. Nobody looking at the rubble of Jerusalem in 586 BC would have said, “This is recoverable.”
And yet God brought them back. Not immediately — it took seventy years. A whole generation grew up in exile. But when the time came, God stirred the heart of a pagan king — Cyrus — to issue a decree, and the remnant returned.
They came back to a wasteland: the walls were broken, the city was a ruin, the surrounding nations mocked them. BUT with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other, they rebuilt.
Under Ezra, they restored the law. Under Nehemiah, they restored the walls. Under the later prophets, they restored worship. And within a few generations, the nation was not only functional — it was flourishing.
That is what God does – He makes the impossible possible through men of faith and action.
Now, it is easy to tell ourselves that England is done, or Scotland is done, or the West is finished. But we are sending our brains the wrong signals. We must see things through the eyes of faith, not through the eyes of despair.
The nation is His, it is covenanted to God. And the God who brought Judah back from Babylon, who rebuilt a nation from a handful of exiles with nothing but faith and obedience — that God has not retired.
We need hope to motivate ourselves to action. We dig into scripture, build ourselves up with faith, and then we are able to accomplish something that our “Old Adam” brains says is impossible.
The Angel of the Lord at Ophrah
The prophet gave the diagnosis: “I am the Lord your God; you shall not fear the gods of the Amorites in whose land you live, but you have not obeyed me.”
The first commandment was broken — and the whole edifice of true religion fell once that foundation was knocked out from under it.
Then the Angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak in Ophrah.
This is the pre-incarnate Lord Jesus Christ, sitting like a king in session.
The oak — a terebinth tree — has cultic significance. When you find the word “groves” mentioned in scripture, those groves would have been of this particular tree.
The Lord came down, and we are asked to cast our minds back to Abraham — how the Lord came to Abraham at the oak of Mamre. This is a deliberate connection to Abraham.
We should note just how important Gideon is in the whole scheme of scripture. Look at the other people to whom the Lord appeared: Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and later Saint Paul. It is not just everyone to whom the Lord Jesus appears. This is indicating something special. Take note.
And He came to a site where the Baal altar and the Asherah pole were visible. He marched right in — kicking down the door of the Canaanite religion — and claimed the land for Himself.
All of the world belongs to Jesus, even the most defiled places – they are not forever tainted with sin. One day they will be transformed and renewed.
God Suits the Man to the Task
Joash, Gideon’s father, was the main ruler in the area.
We find this later when the men of the town threaten to kill Gideon, and Joash stands up and says, “If Baal is a god, let him contend for himself. I will kill the person who kills Gideon.” This indicates Joash was the boss — the ruler.
Now, if you have many people working for you, you are not going to put just anybody in a tractor. You are not going to entrust just anybody with hauling tens of thousands of dollars of finished produce to market. You need to suit the person to the role.
The Lord has everybody on earth on His rolodex. He knows all their skills and abilities because, in His providence, He has given everybody their backgrounds. He is matching the person to the job.
The job is liberation.
He didn’t choose a clergyman. He didn’t choose a slick-tongued PR man or an influencer. If the job is to rule, then you need someone with a background in ruling.
Gideon later took ten of his men to do the job. He was a man used to commanding others. His father had raised him from knee-high, and he had seen how his father dealt with responsibility and leadership.
And this is a pattern we see throughout history when God raises up deliverers.
Think of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell did not come from nowhere. His family had been landowners and local rulers for generations — men of substance who understood governance, property, and authority. His family had adopted the Cromwell name from Thomas Cromwell — Henry VIII’s chief minister — who was Oliver’s great-great-great-uncle, and had been landowners and local rulers in Huntingdonshire for generations. Oliver himself served as a justice of the peace, a member of Parliament, and a man responsible for the welfare of his tenants and community long before he ever commanded an army.
When the crisis came, God did not reach for a monk or a poet, He reached for a man who had been raised in a household where ruling was the family business — just as Gideon had been raised in the household of Joash.
The parallel is striking. God suits the man to the task. He prepares men through their backgrounds, their families, their daily responsibilities — and when the moment arrives, the preparation meets the commission.
The True Meaning of Valour
Gideon’s name means “whacker” or “cleaver.” Well, “to hew down” or “to cut off,” if we want to be more acurate. This was his characteristic — chopping, cleaving, hew down.
He was beating out wheat with a flail. This is not a soft-handed academic. He is not a man who sits about thinking holy thoughts. He is a man with a strong arm and a strong back, sweating, concentrating on his work.
He was beating out wheat in the winepress. Some commentators think he must have been a coward — doing this in a winepress instead of out on a hilltop. But he was wise enough not to give his crop away. If the Midianites had seen him, it would have been hoovered up. He was doing a difficult job under suboptimal conditions. That is not cowardice — that is competence.
The Lord said to him: “The Lord is with you, O valiant warrior.”
Does the Lord lie? One commentary even said God was “flattering” him. But the scriptures have just told us what Gideon was doing: a very difficult job in the best of times, in a suboptimal setting, to protect his livelihood from the Midianites.
Not all valour is martial valour. A woman can be valorous. A man going about the ordinary execution of his daily tasks with faithfulness — that is valour.
God’s standards are not the world’s standards. If He says this activity is an exhibition of might and valour, we must say “Amen.”
Might is doing your job. Valour is doing your job in difficult circumstances, under the threat of uncertainty.
It is not pushing other people around. It is not just beating people up and shooting people like with the action heroes of the past generation, or today’s role playing games, it is doing your job in difficult circumstances, not knowing if you will get to keep the fruit of your labour.
And if that is God’s standard, then think about what that means for you.
The man who gets up at six o’clock in the morning, commutes an hour each way, works a job where half his income is stripped away in taxes before he even sees it — income tax, national insurance, VAT, council tax — and comes home to a culture that despises everything he stands for.
The man who is trying to raise a family on one income in an economy designed for two. The man who tithes, who gives, who saves where he can, who teaches his children the scriptures in the evening after a day that has wrung him dry. The man who does all of this without recognition, without applause, without anyone telling him he is doing something significant.
By the world’s standards, that man is invisible. By God’s standards, that man is a mighty man of valour.
You don’t need a battlefield to exhibit courage. You need a winepress. You need difficult conditions, uncertain outcomes, and the faithfulness to keep swinging anyway.
God sees it. And God honours it.
A Covenantal Framework
Gideon replied: “O my Lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?”
Notice the shift. The Lord said “you” — singular. Gideon said “us.”
Even if the nation is under judgement and the Lord has abandoned the nation, the Lord can still be with you personally. Your lot does not have to be the same as the people around you.
But Gideon was not thinking of himself. He loved the nation. He was thinking of the disrespect other nations had for Israel because of God’s judgement.
There is nothing wrong with loving your nation, even though it has sinned. In fact, it was a qualification God was seeking. Not only strength, hard work, responsibility, and leadership — but also love for his nation.
He didn’t mention Baal once. He didn’t mention Asherah once. He was talking about the Lord.
There may have been syncretism all around him, but there was no hint of mixture in Gideon in this passage. He had been taught the oracles of God through the Passover meal. Although his father appears to have been a syncretist and guardian of the Baal temple, Gideon was far more loyal to Jehovah.
He had a covenantal framework: “The Lord has forsaken us and delivered us into the hand of the Midianites.”
He was not blaming the Midianites. He had a clear eye.
We must have this same framework to be useful to God — seeing that nations are subject to the blessing of God on the one hand and the chastisement of God on the other, according to whether their deeds are good or evil.
Go in This Might of Yours
Then the Lord turned to him and said: “Go in this might of yours, and you shall save Israel from the hand of the Midianites.”
He turns to this man who loves his nation, who knows the covenant, who is a leader of men.
There is no condemnation. No nitpicking. He knows the man’s heart.
“Go in this might of yours” — this is a demonstrative pronoun. “This” points to something immediate.
Which might?
The might of someone who loved his country. Who knew the covenant. Who was responsible, competent, leading men, working under difficult circumstances. A man with a strong back and a strong arm.
His first job in national deliverance was not to make a speech or post something on Facebook. It was literally a job any farmer would know how to do: take a big pole, chop it down; take a big rock, demolish it; build something new from the pieces.
God recruits people who are competent in the area they need to be. Don’t be wishing your expertise was elsewhere. God knows exactly what He is doing.
Who saved Israel from the Midianites — God or Gideon?
The answer is “yes!”
God uses people. He uses particular people for a particular job. We are His fellow workmen. The whole point of God’s work is to restore men to the task of dominion.
The “let go and let God” mentality is the work of Satan. It breeds incompetence. B.B. Warfield tore into this Keswick movement attitude — and rightly so.
God does not “let go” of anything. He commissions people. He uses particular people with a particular background to do a particular thing, all under the rubric of the dominion mandate.
We should be encouraged that He sees our work in the winepress. He sees the difficult labour in suboptimal conditions. He judges differently from the world’s standards. He has made you for a particular task.
That is a comfort.