The lesson of history, as well as Scripture, is that violence is necessary to eradicate evil. It took the violent death of Jesus “to destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14), and it’s taken the violent death of many of Jesus’ followers since to prove in their lack of fear of dying that “Jesus truly did destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8).
But the Israelites only recognized the need to eradicate evil when they were hit hard by it – when evil easily deceived them into rejecting God and God then “gave them into the hands” of brutal invaders, Judges 6:1-6.
To which God responded with a reminder, that “I snatched you from the power of Egypt and from the hand of all your oppressors” (7-9), to get the point across that eradicating evil in their lives was what he’d got them out of Egypt for, and they would have remained free from the power of evil if they’d “listened to him” (10).
But they didn’t listen, the result being God initiating and supporting violence, not only against the Israelites by outsiders, but also in the Israelites using violence to drive out the invaders.
And such was the case here in Judges 6, because in God’s response to Israel crying out to him for help, an “angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon” – an ordinary farmer chap “threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites” (11) – and the angel telling Gideon, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior’” (12).
Gideon ignored the “mighty warrior” bit, however, because he figured it was God’s job to get them out of the mess they were in, just like he’d rescued them out of Egypt. So he asked why, if God was truly “with” them, he hadn’t rescued them from the Midianites too (13). To which “the Lord replied, ‘Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand’” (14).
God could have eradicated the Midianites all on his own – just like he’d eradicated the Egyptians on his own – but instead he initiated and supported Gideon being a “mighty warrior” using his own strength too, so that Gideon, in the savage, feral act of killing in a violent world, would also get the point that the only way to deal with evil was to totally crush it. But God demanding “Such massive slaughter – why?”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 