In Judges 6:16, God told Gideon, “I will be with you, and you will strike down the Midianites as if they were but one man.” It was a massive slaughter too. According to the numbers given in Judges 8:10, 135,000 Midianite men were cut down in vicious fighting, including their top leaders and kings – the kings killed by Gideon himself (21). What possible purpose, though, did God have in such a horrible scene?
There’s a hint in where God directed Gideon’s violence first of all. It wasn’t against people. In Judges 6:25 God told Gideon to “Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it.” God gets right at the heart of the problem, illustrated by Gideon’s own father who’d built an altar to the Canaanite god Baal and made that his “lord,” not God. Which never would have happened had the Israelites got rid of the Canaanite religion as God had commanded back in Judges 2:2. But instead, Judges 1:28, “When Israel became strong, they pressed the Canaanites into forced labour but never drove them out completely.”
Which resulted in the Israelites being constantly stuck with the Canaanites “being thorns in their sides,” and the Canaanite religion being an endless “snare” to them, Judges 2:3. And that spelt trouble, because the appeal of Baal and Asherah was sex, as seen in Numbers 25:1-3, when Israelite men “began to indulge in sexual immorality with Moabite women, who invited them to the sacrifices of their gods.” And that made God fiercely angry (3-4), seeing the people he deeply loved and cared for being so easily seduced by demonic charm (17-18).
So God got Gideon to strike at the very heart of what had got the Israelites into their horrible mess in the first place, to get the point across in vivid and brutal terms that if they didn’t get serious about eradicating every vestige of the Canaanite religion it would become an endless source of temptation and deception distracting them from God’s purpose for them, of curing the world of all its ills as he promised he would through Abraham and his descendants (Judges 2:1).
The solution, then, was to get rid of the distraction so they wouldn’t be led into temptation (as Jesus phrased it in Matthew 6:13). But the Israelites were never able to do that, so where’s that leave the rest of us? Well, that takes us back to the tribe of Asher and “The little old lady from Asher” who had the answer….(next blog)
