Treason in the Pulpit, Treason in the Pew
Judges 8:4-12
What do you do when the men who should be cheering you on — the men whose grandfathers built the churches around you, who still keep the family Bibles on the shelf and call themselves cultural Christians — side with the very people who are destroying your nation? What do you do when the Christian heartland of the West has decided that the Midianites are clearly winning, and time after time cheers on God’s enemies in the name of practicality or justice, while mocking the very men who are paving the path toward real freedom?
Today’s passage is about exactly that. Gideon, exhausted, half awake from fatigue, leading 300 men in pursuit of 15,000, walks into two towns at the very heart of Israel — two towns of unique covenantal privilege, two towns whose names mark the very birth of the nation — and both towns refuse to give him even bread. Both towns side with Zeba and Zalmunna, the losers, against the Lord’s anointed winner.
Recap: The Soft Answer and the Peak of Gideon
Last time, we watched Gideon at his absolute peak when the men of Ephraim turned up to start a row — the dominant tribe who had sat out seven years of plunder, demanding to know why they had not been included sooner. Gideon, with every human right to defend himself, gave a soft answer. He magnified what they did, shrunk what he did, and the wrath subsided. A soft answer turns away wrath. When a man’s ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies be at peace with him. But these aren’t suggestions — these are promises of God.
Psalm 83: The Inspired Commentary
Before we touch a single verse of Judges 8, we need to go to Psalm 83 — because Scripture is its own best commentary, and Psalm 83 is the Holy Spirit’s own commentary on the Gideon campaign.
Verse 1: do not keep silent, O God. Do not hold your peace, and do not be still. For your enemies make a tumult, and those who hate you have lifted up their head. Whose enemies? The Lord’s enemies. When the wicked move against the people of God, the Bible’s own diagnosis is that their hatred is primarily hatred of God. But what can they do against God himself? When they had the Lord on earth, they killed him. Don’t let’s forget that. The apostate church on one hand and the power state on the other crucified Christ. But now the God-man Christ Jesus reigns, omnipotent, unassailable. The only way for their hatred of God to find a target is to lash out at the people who bear his name.
Psalm 83:3 — they have taken crafty counsel against your people, and consulted together against your sheltered ones. Where else does Scripture talk about the nations taking counsel together? At the very beginning of Psalm 2: why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing, the kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed? Psalm 2 gives us the kings of the earth conspiring against Christ. Psalm 83 is the nations conspiring against the people of Christ. The same conspiracy, the same hatred, the same root.
Then Psalm 83:4 tells us the strategy of the enemy: let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more. Not let us kill as many as we can. Not let us steal their stuff. Let us cut them off from being a nation. Why? Because nationhood is God’s design.
Why Nations Matter
Where do nations come from? Genesis 11 — the Tower of Babel. Mankind united in one global project, one language, one rebellion. And the Lord scattered them, confounded their language, and produced nations — plural, distinct, and bounded. Deuteronomy 32:8: when the Most High divided their inheritance to the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the boundaries of the peoples. Nations are not an accident and certainly not an evil to be overcome. Nations are God’s gracious post-Babel design to limit the reach of evil and forever confound the one-world conspiracy. A wicked nation is a localised wickedness. A wicked global government is universal wickedness.
So when the enemies of God say in their hearts, let us cut them off from being a nation, they beat in sync with the builders of the Tower of Babel. The WEF, the technocratic globalist project, the agenda to dissolve borders, currencies, and nations into one managed planetary system — that’s not new. That’s Babel in modern dress. And the Lord’s answer in our day is the same as his answer in Gideon’s day. By the way, spoiler alert: all the towers of Babel fail and fall, because God the Father has enthroned Jesus as King of all the nations.
Zeba and Zalmunna: Names as Message
Psalm 83 invokes the Gideon campaign by name — make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb, yes, all their princes like Zeba and Zalmunna. This is the inspired commentary telling us that Gideon’s campaign is the paradigm for how God deals with confederations of nations in revolt against his rule.
And the names of the kings are themselves a message from the Lord. Zeba is the Hebrew word zevak — the standard word used hundreds of times in Leviticus for the animal designated for slaughter on the altar. That’s his name: designated for slaughter. And Zalmunna means shade withdrawn, covering removed. In the ancient Near East, the shade of a king — his covering, his protection — was everything. When a king held you under his shade, you were safe. So Zalmunna’s very name declares: the protection is removed. The covering is gone. The men of Succoth and Penuel sided with two kings whose very names declared they were going to lose.
Succoth and Penuel: Betrayal from the Birthplace
What does Succoth mean? Booths or shelters. Where do we first find this word in the Bible? Genesis 33:17 — and Jacob journeyed to Succoth, built himself a house and made booths for his livestock. Therefore the name of the place is called Succoth. This is the town named by Jacob himself, at the moment he settled down in covenant prosperity in the land — the first time, named Israel, that he crossed the Jordan. In covenantal terms, every privilege an Israelite could have. And these men, with all that heritage, refused bread to the man God raised up to deliver them.
But it gets worse. He then went up to Penuel. What does Penuel mean? It means the face of God. Genesis 32:30 — so Jacob called the name of that place Penuel, for I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved. This is the place where Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord all night. This is the place where his hip was put out of joint. This is the place where the nation itself got its name. And the men of Penuel — the inheritors of that founding moment, who walk past the place of Jacob’s wrestling every day — refuse bread to Gideon and his 300. This is treason within the covenant.
Could they plead ignorance? No. The trumpet had been blown across all Manasseh, Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali. The story of the altar of Baal, the defeat of 135,000 by 300, would have been the talk of the entire region. Gideon and his 300 were walking into Succoth covered in the blood, sweat, and dust of victory, with the kings of Midian fleeing ahead of them in panic — men whose very names meant they were going to lose. The men of Succoth knew. They had every reason to believe this was God’s chosen man in God’s chosen hour, and they refused him bread. That’s not ignorance. That’s self-conscious unbelief. Wilful apostasy. The choosing of the enemy’s side with eyes wide open.
The Men of Succoth in Our Day
The men of Succoth and Penuel are walking around in our nations in vast numbers. They are the church-attending Christian who votes for parties and policies that are destroying the country — not from ignorance, not as the lesser of two evils, but because they are of one mind with the destroyers. They love Net Zero. They cheer for open borders and the dissolution of the nations God made and loves. They are the believer who knows the gospel inside out but has decided that the kingdom of God is a private, spiritual affair — and the public square belongs to whoever is currently winning, no matter how evil they are.
Gideon’s Response and the Question of Justice
Gideon promised judgement, and he delivered it. He took the elders of Succoth and with thorns of the wilderness and briars, he taught them — the word actually means threshed them. And he tore down the tower of Penuel and killed the men of the city.
Modern readers get squeamish at this. That seems harsh. That’s not loving. That’s not Jesus. I want to push back. These were not neutral civilians caught in a crossfire. These were Israelites under explicit covenant obligation to give support to their deliverer. Their refusal was, in covenantal terms, treason — during wartime. Romans 13 tells us the magistrate does not bear the sword in vain, for he is God’s minister, an avenger who executes wrath on him who practises evil. What is it, in the time of greatest need, to withhold even a crust of bread from God’s own deliverer — if not evil? Gideon, as God’s appointed civil magistrate, executed lawful judgement on traitors.
The sentimentality in the modern Western Christian that finds this hard to swallow is not biblical. It’s a residue of soft Victorian liberalism dressed up in Christian garb. The Christ of the Gospels made a whip and cleared the temple. The Christ of Revelation has a sword coming out of his mouth and treads the winepress of the wrath of God. The Lord Jesus is not soft on covenantal traitors.
Take Heart
Not everything is bleak. The Lord’s man, with 300 exhausted servants, still takes the kings and their 15,000. Covenant arithmetic still holds today. The Lord still raises up Gideons. The Lord still uses the few, the obscure, the dogged to break the back of global rebellion. By God’s grace, may you and I be part of that dogged, faithful few.