The Generation With Nothing Left to Lose
Judges 6:25-27
Last time we walked through one of the richest passages in the entire Gideon narrative. We saw Gideon test his call — not in faithless presumption like the Pharisees, but in the responsible discernment that Scripture commands. We watched him prepare a lavish offering from the product of his own secret labour in the middle of a famine. We saw the Lord wait patiently while that offering was prepared, and then we saw fire rise from the rock and consume everything. Fire consuming an offering is one of the most consistent signs of divine acceptance in the entire Old Testament. And we said that Gideon’s response was to build an altar and name it Jehovah Shalom — the Lord is peace, not the Lord gives peace, but the Lord is peace. He himself is the substance of it. The altar was not the destination; it was the launchpad.
Today we arrive at the first mission — and it’s not what you would expect.
God Does Not Start with the External Enemy
Now it came to pass the same night that the Lord said to him, Take your father’s young bull, the second bull of seven years old, and tear down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the wooden image that is beside it, and build an altar to the Lord your God on top of this rock in the proper arrangement, and take the second bull and offer a burnt sacrifice with the wood of the image which you shall cut down.
Stop and think about this. Gideon had been commissioned to save Israel from the hand of Midian. The Midianites are the great external enemy. They have been ravaging the land for seven years. The natural expectation is that God would now say: right, gather your men, sharpen your swords, march east, and plunge a dagger into the heart of Midian. But that’s not what happens. Not even close.
The very first mission God gives his newly commissioned judge is not an assault on a foreign enemy. It’s an assault on a local idol. And not just any local idol — the altar of Baal and the Asherah pole that belonged to his own father, Joash, in his own household.
Now this is a principle we must grasp if we want to understand how God actually works reformation in any generation. The external enemies are real. In our day, the forces arrayed against Christian civilisation are also very real. But God does not start the reformation with the external enemy. He starts with the internal problem. He starts at home. The reason is simple: the Midianites were there because Israel had turned to other gods. The external judgement was a fruit of an internal spiritual failure. So God, being God, deals with the root cause. He does not begin by pruning the branches — he goes straight to the root.
The Altar of Baal in Your Own Household
There are a lot of people on the internet who are extremely worked up about the external enemies. They can name every injustice, catalogue every outrage, and produce folders full of evidence about what the Midianites of our day are doing. And none of that evidence is wrong. But God isn’t impressed by it. Because God already knows about the Midianites — he sent them. What he wants to know is whether his own people are prepared to deal with their own idolatry. And this is always the harder task.
It’s much easier to point to the foreigner, the bureaucrat, the politician, the globalist than it is to look at the altar of Baal in your own household. So where is that altar? Not a literal idol in the living room. But what are the systems, the dependencies, the unquestioned arrangements in your own life that function as trust in another god?
Is it the state school your children attend, where they are catechised five days a week in a worldview fundamentally hostile to Scripture? That’s an Asherah pole if ever there was one. Is it total dependence on a state health system you would never dream of questioning, even when it fails you and those closest to you? Is it the entertainment that flows through the screens in your household, colonising the imaginations of your children with the gods of this age?
Thor Is Baal with Blonde Hair
The second commandment — Exodus 20:4 — forbids making any graven image or likeness. What likeness was Baal made unto? We know from archaeological evidence and ancient Near Eastern sources that Baal was depicted primarily as a bull or bull calf — and that’s exactly what Aaron made at Sinai. But Baal is also depicted in human form as a young, muscular, royal warrior holding a bolt of lightning aloft, wearing a horned helmet.
Muscular. Young. Royal. Holding something in his hand. Commanding lightning. A helmet with horns. Does that description ring a bell? It should. That’s Thor. The muscular royal warrior god, son of the king of the gods, wielding the instrument of the storm. Thor is Baal with a Scandinavian accent and blonde hair. And the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made Baal worship the most successful entertainment franchise in the history of the world.
I’m not saying that watching a Marvel film is the unforgivable sin — I’ve watched them myself, and I’m not proud of it. But ask yourself: what is missing in your life that you feel compelled to fill it with that? What is the emptiness in your imagination that only a pagan warrior can fill? Because the imagination is territory. Like everything else, it belongs to our God. The entertainment industry — Disney, Marvel, the whole apparatus — colonises and occupies the imagination of men, women, and most disturbingly, children. The inner world of how many young men is populated not by the heroes of Scripture — Gideon, David, Samson, Daniel, the Lord Jesus himself — but by Thor and Captain America?
And the interesting thing about Gideon is that he is the real version of what Baal only pretended to be. So God took the image that paganism had counterfeited — this super warrior — and redeemed it in a real godly man of flesh and blood, who worked with his hands and feared his God. This is what God offers you. Not escaping to fantasy, but the real adventure of being the man he made you to be in your actual life, in your actual calling. But it requires tearing down the counterfeit first.
God’s Eminent Domain
Verse 26 says to build an altar to the Lord your God on top of this rock in the proper arrangement. Note: on top of this rock — the very rock from which fire had consumed Gideon’s offering. God is claiming that ground. He is exercising his eminent domain, his ultimate ownership over all things — including property that had been misused.
And this points directly to the nature of the state in our day. Only a God claims eminent domain. Only a God says: I own it all; you merely hold it at my pleasure, and I can take it back whenever I see fit. Who exercises that claim today? The state. The state says: these are my roads, my schools, my hospitals — you use them by my permission and under my terms. That is a divine, religious claim. And when the state makes that claim in opposition to the God of Scripture, it’s operating as Baal.
Acting at Night: Wisdom Is Not Cowardice
Gideon took ten men from among his servants and did as the Lord had said to him. But because he feared his father’s household and the men of the city too much to do it by day, he did it by night. Many commentators tut at Gideon for this — oh, what a coward, what a lack of faith. But what have these commentators risked? What have they torn down, and at what cost?
Gideon knew his people. Three verses later, in verse 30, the men of the city said: bring out your son that he may die. He knew he would have been killed had he done it by daytime — and he was right. God didn’t condemn him for doing it at night. When we receive an instruction from the Lord, we don’t leave hold of our senses. Abraham concealed the truth from Pharaoh because he knew Pharaoh would have killed him for his wife. Jacob fled from Laban under cover of night because Laban would have enslaved him forever. The Lord Jesus himself tells the disciples to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves — Matthew 10:16. Wisdom and courage are not opposites. Foolish recklessness that gets you killed isn’t courage — it’s vanity.
Gideon did it the same night. He didn’t delay. He didn’t say, six months time, when I feel more ready. He acted immediately and wisely. Notice also that even from the first exercise of his calling, it was never a one-man job. He took ten men — just ten, but ten is more than one. And those ten men were willing to go on a mission that could have gotten every one of them killed.
The Pattern of Reformation
Here’s the pattern as we have it so far. God calls a man. The man tests the call and finds it genuine. He offers a fellowship offering and receives assurance of God’s acceptance. He builds an altar and names it The Lord Is Peace. Then God sends him — not to the external enemy, but to the altar in his own house. Before he is told to tear down, he builds. God uses builders, not tear-downers. He consecrates himself totally through the burnt offering. He acts immediately, wisely, and with a small team of committed men. And the very instruments of false worship become fuel for true worship.
That’s the pattern for reformation. It doesn’t begin in Parliament, with a manifesto, or on social media. It begins in your heart — studying the word of God, devoting yourself to God, meditating on it. It begins in your house, with the idols that are closest to you, the ones you can see from your kitchen window, the ones that bear your father’s name. And it requires courage. Not the theatrical courage of the action movie, but the quiet, steady, hand-trembling courage of a man who knows what his neighbours will do to him — and does the right thing anyway.
Next week, we’ll see what happened when the men of the city woke up and found the altar of Baal in ruins. What happens next is going to teach us something extraordinary about the nature of idolatry, the power of a public demonstration, and the unlikely source from which God provided protection for his man.