Judges 6 Reveals Why Your Generation Is Suffering

Why is your generation poorer than your parents? Why does it feel like the whole system is rigged against you — the housing market, the tax burden, the bureaucracy, the waves of chaos rolling through your nation? You can see the enemies, but what if they’re not the real problem? What if the Bible names the actual cause and the actual solution? And it’s nothing like what you’ve been told.

Today we’re in Judges chapter 6. I’m Nathan Conkey and this is God’s World, God’s Way, sponsored by cr101radio.com in association with Grace Community School and Nicene Covenant Church. Visit cr101radio.com where you’ll find free Christian audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts for the Christian who can’t accept the easy answers.

Nations Sin, Nations Suffer

Judges 6 opens with this: Then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord. This wasn’t an individual who did evil — it was a nation. We can’t think that God is only concerned with individuals, with me and my personal heart. No. God tells us in his word that he is concerned with nations as nations, and nations can do evil just as individual people can.

The second half of verse 1 follows immediately: So the Lord delivered them into the hand of Midian for seven years. It doesn’t say Midian rolled in because they felt like it. It says the Lord delivered them. God was actively punishing them, chastising them for their national evil.

We are facing real problems today — in the UK, in Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Europe, New Zealand, the United States. We look for causes. But if God is God and is still concerned with nations, then we must say that it is the Lord who has delivered us into these problems. The ultimate root cause is the failure of the covenant people as a nation. Our noses are pressed so far into the screen of our mobile phones that we can’t lift our heads to God and see that it is him at work.

All we see is the immediate problem — Midian, Midian, Midian. Or in our day: the WEF, the government, the people who don’t look like us. No. The ultimate cause is the failure of the Christian nation. We are part of that problem.

God Sets a Limit

But notice this: Midian ruled for seven years — not indefinitely. No matter how grave things are, God has always appointed a limit. We are losing, perhaps, our position in society, our religion, our identity. It doesn’t feel good to lose. But it has an end.

The verse before Judges 6 says simply: So the land had rest for forty years. A full generation of peace. The generation that Gideon would emerge from had it much worse than the previous one. They had to hide in caves, in dens, in mountain strongholds. They couldn’t live in the comfortable places. They had no prospects. You could not get married without the prosperity required. A house was a dream — just as it is now for so many of the younger generation.

And it is with the boomers the same way. They caused the problem through their inaction, their unconcern, their indifference to Christian faithfulness in the public realm. And we eat the consequences. But if we blame the former generation, we are ultimately blaming God for the time into which he chose to place us. That is a hard thing to deal with. There is no power in blame. We have instances of blaming in scripture — Adam blamed Eve and implicitly blamed God — and where did it lead? To perdition.

The Real Extent of the Problem

Verse 3 tells us it wasn’t just one problem — it was three. The Midianites were the main force, but the Amalekites were also there, and the children of the east. The Amalekites were the quintessential God-haters, who attacked the weakest of God’s people first. Today, we see children attacked in schools with gender ideology, with propaganda, with those who would seduce them. Who are the Amalekites of our day? Those who are self-consciously calculated in their hatred of everything tinted with the scent of Christianity.

And what was the result? Verse 4: They would encamp against them and destroy the produce of the earth as far as Gaza, and leave no sustenance for Israel — neither sheep nor ox nor donkey. This is not spiritual feeling. This is a full-scale war against agricultural productivity. The sheep — pastoral farming. The ox — the tractor of its day. The donkey — the pickup truck of its day. The wholesale infrastructure of agriculture was being destroyed.

Think of British farming today. Things are growing. But who gets the harvest? The farmer sees very little. An overwhelming share is eaten by taxation — fuel duty, excise, progressive tax that punishes efficiency, the inheritance tax. Is it morally better for a government to destroy the produce of the earth than for a foreign foe to do it? I submit it is probably not.

Then verse 5: they came in as numerous as locusts, both they and their camels, without number, and they would enter the land to destroy it. Multitudes of bureaucrats, siphoning off productivity. Rewilding schemes that take land out of production forever. Solar farms on agricultural land. Net zero policies dressed up as saving the planet — which is simply paganism. There is a real war in our day, as in their day, against the productivity of the land.

So Israel was greatly impoverished. Verse 6. And this matters. The Bible is not saying poverty is a virtue. It is saying poverty is a result of the curse of God upon a disobedient nation. God sees how crushing it is to be impoverished. Unlike the churches — who say material things don’t matter, usually from the comfort of a good salary — God values prosperity and knows what it costs to lack it.

The Hope: They Cried to the Lord

But at the end of verse 6, there is tremendous hope: they cried to the Lord. Things became so bad that they cried to the Lord. And this is God’s way. He knows exactly how much pressure to apply, even to the most stubborn and hardened of people. He knew to set the dial to nine, maybe nine and a half, and then the people began to cry.

Are we not seeing the beginnings of this today? People who never would have before are turning to God. The Quiet Revival — people walking into Christian bookshops and asking for Bibles, often people outside the church. Just because the churches appear silent and indifferent doesn’t mean God is not working.

But part of that crying is to recognise: my works cannot fix this. My memes, my posts about how bad the Midianites are — that is not helping. You cannot help the way the Lord can help. Put down the memes and cry to God. We as Christians have a priestly duty to intercede, as Nehemiah interceded for his nation.

The God We Need

There is one more thing. If we cry out to the Lord, we must recalibrate our idea of who the Lord is. If we think of Jesus Christ as only our personal Saviour — and he must be — but only that, then we do not have the right-sized God for national problems. If God is only able to solve person-sized problems, why would you cry to him for a nation?

But Christ is presently King of Kings. He is over these nations. He is over these multinationals. He is over these conspiratorial groups. He is over people of whatever religion. Psalm 2 says: Kiss the Son, lest he be angry with you. Psalm 110 says: Ask of me and I will give you the nations as your inheritance. Peter in Acts declares this fulfilled in the ministry of Christ. The nations are his. They are as dust on the balance to him.

We must address that God in prayer. Not the escalator-to-heaven God. Not the God who is only concerned with our feelings. The God who owns the nations. It is to that God we must cry out — and it is vital that we do.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact me at questions@godsworldgodsway.com. God bless you.