An Unlikely Hero - Rise of the Bramble Men
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger, and Bryan Broome has returned. Huzzah! And there was much rejoicing.
To bring you up-to-speed, Bryan, we have been talking about Gideon, how he had grown up in the world of Baal and Ashtaroth, where magical means ruled the day and ruled the thought processes. They were talking about the forces of nature, people manipulating the forces of nature. In fact, there was an altar to Baal on Gideon’s father’s property, so that’s who he is.
Then he is called by God to defeat the Midianites and he asks the Lord for a sign – not angel feathers, not golden sparkles, but he asks God for a sign to show his involvement in the everyday things, that God has the power and the involvement in each little thing to be a sovereign personal God. He’s not just another force of nature to manipulate. And God graciously gives him that sign with the fleece, and that’s what we talked about last week. Does that make sense, Bryan?
Yes, it makes sense because we’re talking about the difference between Yahweh and the pagan gods who are manipulable. Jehovah is not, because he’s the one that upholds the universe.
Including fleeces and the dew that falls each morning on the righteous and the unrighteous. So today we’re moving on. What happens at the battle?
Before we get to the battle, God doesn’t want Israel trusting in their own strength, so he does a winnowing process. Gideon has an army of about 32,000 men, which is barely a quarter of the size of Midian’s army, and yet God tells him he’s got too many soldiers, and that if they defeated Midian as it was they would take all the credit.
First of all they follow biblical law, which says that you’re not supposed to have any cowards in your army, so they’re told that anybody who’s afraid can go home, and 22,000 men went home. Not a lot of faith going on here. But God still wasn’t satisfied. He set up a special test and had Gideon bring his army to some water, and some people knelt down and splattered their face in the water and drank, and others brought the water to their mouths with their hands.
I’ve heard speculation about what the difference is. The text doesn’t actually say, and for our purposes we can just go on and say that when Gideon was done he only had 300 people left and God said, “Cool! Now we can do stuff.” God is like that. God gives Gideon a battle plan, and here I will read a little bit of it.
And he divided the three hundred men into three companies and he put a trumpet in every man’s hand, with empty pitchers, and lamps within the pitchers.
So they’ve got burning lamps, and they’re covered by pitchers so they won’t be extinguished, but no one can see them at a distance, and everybody has a trumpet.
Gideon says, “Do what I do. When I blow with the trumpet, and everyone who is with me, then all of you blow the trumpets on every side of the camp and yell out, ‘The sword of the Lord and of Gideon.’” That’s the first part. So they wait until the middle of the night and they spread out. In the middle watch, when they had but newly set the next watch, then Gideon gives the signal.
This is practically what’s happening. Midianite Bob is just coming in from a long night of standing guard with nothing at all happening, and he’s messing around in the tent, dropping his armor and getting ready for a nice long night’s sleep, when suddenly outside he hears a lot of commotion because the new picket guards are yelling, “Invasion! Threat! Army around us!” because what they have seen suddenly are lights burning all around them in a circle.
Obviously every light represents a large company of soldiers, so they suddenly realize their encampment is surrounded and they begin yelling and screaming, “We’re surrounded! We’re in trouble!” and everybody in the camp starts yelling this, so the people in the tents – Bob’s friend Ned, who has been sleeping all this time, wakes up and hears, “We’re surrounded! The enemy is here!” and he looks and sees someone moving around in his tent. Being groggy, Ned fumbles around for his sword and stabs Bob through the gut, thinking that he is an Israelite. Bob returns the favor, swinging toward his head, and this is happening throughout the whole camp.
People are thrown off because there are people moving in the camp, because the guard just got off duty and it’s the middle of the night so no one can see anything, so suddenly they’re all fighting each other. God tipped the scales. It says that God set every man’s sword against his fellow, so the battle began amongst themselves while Israel sort of stood there and thought, “Huh.”
So lights and trumpets and shouts – a very faint replica of the glory cloud entrusted to God’s own people. At this point they hadn’t done anything except yell, call on God, and break some pottery.
I was talking to both of you earlier about this. There was I think a Lieutenant Colonel in the army during the Korean War and he wrote one of the first books on psychological warfare. His name was Paul Linebarger. Some people may know him by his pen name, Cordwainer Smith, under which he wrote a number of, to my mind, rather bizarre science fiction novels, but when you read them there is a hint of his Christianity in the background.
Anyway, Paul Linebarger, in writing about psychological warfare, borrowed this chapter from Gideon and said, “Look, let’s see how this fits in.” He pointed out that, first of all, you pick the time. Time is very important here. You pick the time when one group of soldiers is brand-new and they haven’t settled in yet. The other guards are going back to their tents, taking off their armor, and making a small amount of noise, trying not to wake up their friends.
Then you deceive the enemy with all of these trumpets and lights, which they assume must represent large numbers of men, when in fact they represent just a couple guys each. You get your enemy worked up and confused. You wake up the soldiers who are asleep in their tents, and they see people coming back and they see dark figures moving around the tents, so they draw their swords and swing. The returning guards try to protect themselves.
The battle is carried out of the tent into the area between the tents, and everybody suddenly realizes the battle is going on all around them and they can’t tell who’s who. Anybody running at you is probably an enemy, so I need to kill them, too.
He makes a big deal out of all this. He’s a Christian using the Bible in a very esoteric field of human study, but he thought this was important enough to include in his major book on the subject, for whatever that’s worth.
He’s a Christian writing about psychological warfare? That’s an interesting concept in itself. Christians can participate in psychological warfare, or at least they do.
They do, or at least did, and also write sci-fi, which is a topic probably for next week. Anyway, the Midianites run.
The host fled to Bethshittah in Zererath and to the border of Abelmeholah, unto Tabbath. And the men of Israel gathered themselves out of Naphtali and out of Asher and out of all Manasseh and pursued after the Midianites.
So all the people who got sent home now realize, “Hey, we should be in this. This looks like we’re going to win,” so they follow.
Just in passing, Gideon sends messengers to Ephraim and says, “Come take the waters of Bethbarah and Jordan.” Basically, take the places where these Midianites are going to try to cross the Jordan.
Ephraim was descended from Joseph, and we all remember Joseph. He was the obedient son, the cool son, the godly son who had dreams and prophecies, and he’s the guy who seems to be the hero of the last few chapters of Genesis.
Yeah, that. We kind of assume that he’s going to be the one who carries the promise because…
He’s the good son. Interestingly enough, God is not as interested in that as he is in something else. That’s a story for another time. Anyway, the promise goes to Judah. The Ephraimites from that point on, although Joseph got a double portion, double inheritance – his sons Ephraim and Manasseh splitting it, so two tribes for one – they are not granted the leadership, and Ephraim from here on rankles at that.
They kind of think they should be leading, and this carries all the way into the book of Kings, where Jeroboam I comes from Ephraim, and the division between Judah and the other tribes takes place within one of the Ephraimite towns. This is where we see it beginning.
The men of Ephraim had not put themselves out there. They hadn’t acted like leaders, but they do go to the fords and they capture the two princes of the Midianites, Oreb and Zeeb, and take off their heads. But in chapter 8 of Judges, they then turn on Gideon and say, “Why didn’t you call us to fight?”
Now, the obvious response would be, “I did, and you didn’t come,” but Gideon decides – and it’s sort of built into his character, as we’ve seen it so far – he’s not aggressive, and rather than try that line he tries another. He says, “What have I done now in comparison with you? I mean sure, we’ve taken out some field soldiers, but you’ve got the cream of the crop. You’ve got the best grapes in the vineyard.” His line is, “Is not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abiezer?” that is, of his own home.
“Yeah, you only got a few, but the stuff you gleaned was so precious compared to the garbage we got. You should be really proud of yourselves!” and apparently they were like, “Hey, yeah, he’s right. We ought to be proud of ourselves,” and they start high-5’ing each other and that satisfies them apparently for now. But we’re going to see them again in the days of Japhthah, where they’re not so easily mollified.
Gideon continues to pursue, and we’ll skip some of the details. He gets not a lot of help from people along the way, and he deals with that later, but eventually he catches up with the kings. The Ephraimites took out some of the princes, but there are still two kings. They’re named Zebah and Zalmunna, and he takes them captive. Then this is what happens.
Then he said unto Zebah and Zalmunna, “What manner of men were they whom ye slew at Tabor?” and they answered, “As thou art, so were they. Each one resembled the children of a king.”
Exactly, but then that doesn’t get the response. They played the card wrong on the wrong hand because Gideon says, “They were my brethren.” We haven’t any hint of this before, but apparently he’s telling the truth. “Even the sons of my mother,” so they were the family on the mom’s side.
Oh wait. This is a life and death battle against Baalism, against the Midianites, against the enemies of Jehovah. What do you mean you would not have slain them because of a purely personal family issue? That doesn’t sound good, but it goes further.
From what we’re going to see, his son had not been very active in the battle, if at all. He hadn’t really swung a sword or done anything like that, and yet Gideon is pushing him forward to kill kings, so again there seems to be a little bit of family pride. “I want my son to be known as the man who killed these kings.” Gideon doesn’t care about himself so much, but it’s important that his boy be known to be a man and a king-killer and conqueror and all that stuff. Unfortunately for Gideon –
Then Zebah and Zalmunna decide to give more advice, because they’re like that.
Rise though and fall upon us, for as the man is, so is his strength (strength referring to his firstborn).
I do not understand their thought processes here. Maybe one of you has an idea, because of course Gideon then does, he kills them. Did they just want to be killed by their conqueror? Did they think they’re going to cow him into not doing it? I don’t know.
But for our basic theme tonight we should again notice that here is Gideon and it looks like he’s sidling up to the concept of a monarchy, of being an elected king of some sort or maybe starting a dynasty. He wants his boy to be important. He’s concerned about what’s happened to his family. But when push comes to shove and the men of Israel come and say –
Rule thou over us, both thou and thy son and thy son’s son also, for thou hast delivered us from the hand of Midian.
There’s an important principle here. The one who saves you is the one who rules over you. The thing is Gideon wasn’t the savior, Yahweh was the savior. God was their savior. God should rule over them, and Gideon gets that. Gideon said –
I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you. The Lord shall rule over you.
So if the story ended there, this would be great. There was a little bit of confusion there at the end, but Gideon has made the right decision. He does not reach for the throne or the crown. No dynasty.
It kind of reminds me of what we were talking about another time, about vengeance belonging to the Lord, and he’s appointed an institution on earth for vengeance. In the Old Testament there was this whole system of the kinsman redeemer and the avenger of blood. He had a job to do.
We kind of see Gideon delegating this where he does not really have permission to delegate. If we skip over to Romans 13 and think of that in the context of vengeance as it is at the end of Romans 12 and what follows it, that’s not a good start to government. The whole point of the government is to perform this task, and Gideon is shying away from it.
And it’s to perform it with an even hand, without preference, something the Mosaic law emphasized many, many times. You don’t honor the poor, you don’t honor the rich. There is to be equality of justice.
There’s something we’ll run into Kings as we go along. When you defeat the enemy who has been trying to destroy you, you don’t at the end say, “Well, we’re both kings, you know. Let’s just be good buds now and hang out together, and forget the rabble because kings are different.” No.
Yes, you do, and you eliminate it. You execute the justice of God because it’s not a personal matter. Quite a few people look at the idea of say capital punishment or military expeditions and say, “That’s unkind. That’s unloving.” The whole point is it’s not supposed to be personal, though it can become personal, but in a sense it’s supposed to be very emotionally neutral in that, “God has given me this job. I’m not doing this because I hate this guy. And therefore, by the same token, I don’t get to spare him because I like him or because blood makes me feel icky or because I can’t handle violence.”
God has a job for the state, for the civil magistrate, and sometimes that involves pulling out a sword and running it through somebody, and the judge is to do this without showing preference for one over another. If the man is guilty of a capital crime he is to be executed. If he’s not, he’s not.
If someone is threatening the life of a dear one and the police officer or soldier has no other alternative, no simple alternative like, “Hey, stop or I’ll blow your brains out,” then he’s to pull the trigger. He’s not to do it because of hatred, whether personal hatred or ethnic hatred or bigotry of any sort. It is a matter of justice.
When we start flexing that on either end – either bringing down the wrath of the civil government on those who don’t deserve it because we don’t like them, or sparing the wrath of the civil government because, “Oh, but don’t you think they meant well, and shouldn’t we love our neighbor?” – you’re setting the civil government up to be something it’s not meant to be, and you will not get what you think you’re going to get.
You will get something very, very dangerous, because now you’ve released it from the bonds of God’s law and set it free to run in terms of human emotion, human preference, and human bigotry, and that should be frightening.
The story takes another turn here. Just when it sounds like it’s safe, Gideon has a request. He asks that all the soldiers give the golden earrings that they’ve taken from the soldiers that they’ve killed or corralled.
It said they were Ishmaelites. They had inter-married apparently with the Ishmaelites, and the Ishmaelites being descended from a bond woman continue the practice of wearing earrings. The males wore earrings, which was not a common custom in Israel. That was reserved for slaves. It showed that your ear was chained to the voice of your master. It had symbolic meaning. But the Ishamelites did, and apparently some of the Midianites did that as well, so they all had these golden earrings and Gideon says, “Let me have those. You want to do me something special? Forget a monarchy. Just give me that part of the spoil. I’ll take that.”
And they answered, “We will willingly give them,” and they spread a garment and did cast therein every man the earrings of his prey. And the weight of the golden earrings that he requested was 1,700 shekels of gold…
…besides all the other stuff he got. Well, that’s not bad. David later on designates certain parts of the spoil as his, but this is what he does with it.
An ephod is a cloak. It’s the name that’s given to the High Priest’s uniform, his dress. It includes a robe and a vest over it, in which jewels representing the twelve tribes were there. It also contained the mysterious Urim and Thummim, which somehow gave yes and no answers directly from God. So he’s making a replica of this, but it’s all in gold, and he sets it up in his city. This is what the text says –
All Israel went thither a whoring after it, which thing became a snare unto Gideon and to his house.
Apparently, it’s possible that it became an idol. More likely, since he made the ephod and not a golden calf or something else, the real ephod was used to communicate with God. It seems like he was making his own golden version of this, almost as good – in some ways better, because it’s shiny and glittery and contains a great deal of physical wealth commemorating the battle. So apparently people came there thinking they would get yes and no answers from God. In other words, to backtrack to the whole fleece issue, it became a means of divination.
Whereas Gideon had not used the fleece for divination – he already knew God’s will – this is divination. This is taking something sacred, replicating it on your own terms, and then insisting that because you’ve made it right, because it looks like the real thing, because it has religious overtones, God obviously will respond.
Remember, this whole thing was a battle over who is truly God – Jehovah or Baal? The Creator or the forces of nature? And God had proved himself by miracle and special providence and all kinds of things to be the one who rules the natural order, who rules creation. The battle had proved that, and now they turn right around and bring God down to the level of someone who can be manipulated by magic, who will buy into their magic.
Yeah, mostly in this TV show that probably only aired for one year, because I can’t find it anywhere, but it was called The Angry Beavers and they had the Mystical 7-ball, but I think there’s also an 8-ball in Toy Story.
Yeah, we thought it was the greatest thing. We didn’t have cable so we never got to see it unless we were catching a snippet of it at somebody else’s house, so it was like the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I don’t remember much about it, but it was very humorous, the things that I do remember.
The weird thing here is I had never ever heard of it, except earlier this week I saw reference to it. I had no idea what it was, and I still have no idea what it was because your explanations are rather vague.
Isn’t it so crazy how that happens, where it’s like the minute you find out about something it will show up.
All over the place, yeah. The one I love is when you’re reading a book and watching TV or listening to radio, and you read a word that is not common, and at the same time the person on the television says the same word. “Okay, that was weird.”
Now, as Christians we understand this. God has got a sense of humor. It’s not a random event. God controls it. What it means in the great cosmic scheme of things, we don’t know. God has a purpose and it may just be to make us smile or to remind us, “Hi, I’m here.”
Yeah. But anyway, Magic 8-balls were a thing when I was a kid. They looked like 8 balls. They had some kind of liquid inside and, as you turned them, the things inside would spin around and each time up would float another message that all amounted to yes or no. Sometimes it was things like, “It is certain,” or “Try again,” or “Ask me later,” or “Most certainly,” or discouraging things like, “You wish.”
That’s kind of what these people were doing to God. Or you can think of rolling dice or tarot cards or i-Ching sticks or reading birds’ livers. I was reading something, and I don’t remember where it was now, but it was just a whole list of all of the things that the pagan world used. Oh, it was a commentary on Nahum.
I’ve been reading theology lately, that would be it. It was just a list of things that the pagan world consulted to see what God was going to do next. I found a new one, actually, in reading the commentaries on Nahum – cloud formation. I’d never heard that one before. There were people whose special office was to watch clouds, note how they formed, and make predictions about the future in terms of it.
But the other thing we need to remember in this context is that we think the Christian worldview has settled on the West enough that we think of time as a fixed stream running forward, and the person with the crystal ball or whatever is looking down a more or less settled timeline where things are set, and simply seeing the future.
The pagan world saw the seeing as determining, generating, creating. This is why when Balaam was hired to prophecy against Israel, the word that’s used repeatedly is divination. We would say fortune-telling. Fortune-telling is just going to tell you God has plans for his people. It’s not what you want, but it was more than that. By seeing the future you can actually manipulate the powers of nature and speak it into existence. You can generate the future.
In this regard it’s not too far from some of the early post-Christian scientists who thought, “If we know all the starting factors and all the conditions and all the natural laws, we can predict the future and we can then set about manipulating the future in our present.”
And here we can go to the Foundation series by Asimov, which is coming out as a movie and I have no hopes at all for it, although I hear Dune is really good.
So this is what’s going on, and not only does Israel generally get caught up in this, we’re told it was a snare to Gideon and to his house. It’s hard to put this together because we know the writer of Hebrews lists Gideon among the champions of faith, and the things he’s done so far are by faith when the Spirit came upon him. He fought the Lord’s battle. His nickname means the guy who brings down Baal, more or less, “let Baal plead.”
Yet he falls in some way into this great sin, and we don’t know if there was ever repentance. We look at Solomon and we see his horrible sins, and yet we have the book of Ecclesiastes that sort of hints that at the end of his life he got turned around.
But it doesn’t even end there. The country does have rest for 40 years, and Gideon goes home. He doesn’t make a big spectacle of himself, except he has threescore and ten sons of his body begotten, for he had many wives.
I’m wondering here. Solomon had 1,000 wives, and as far as we can tell he only had one son, because there’s nobody else listed. Gideon sounds like he was deliberately setting out to have children. Just because you have lots of wives doesn’t mean – ask the Mormons and the Apostolic Mormon cults, the fundamentalists. They have lots of wives and they don’t generally produce 70 sons in your brood, so this on the face of it seems a little bit weird.
The next thing is that one of his wives who was a concubine, an unendowered wife, was from the Canaanite town of Shechem.
What? Is this just the games you play with your lover? The daydreams, the fantasies? “What will we call him, dear?”
Yeah. Again it smacks of this idea of dynasty building. Before that goes very far, Gideon dies. This is at the end of chapter 8 and we’re told –
As soon as Gideon was dead, the children of Israel turned again and went a whoring after Baalim and made Baalberith their god.
Berith is the word for covenant, so they’re taking covenant, the biblical concept which is very eminently personal, and they’re binding it into Baalism, nature worship. This has got to be a weird hybrid of something, but notice the word Baal comes first, so it’s some kind of syncretistic religion that’s drawing on both, or at least drawing on Yahweh worship somehow, if only with words. It says –
The children of Israel remembered not the Lord their God, who had delivered them out of the hands of all their enemies on every side. Neither shewed they kindness to the house of Jerubbaal, namely Gideon, according to all the goodness which he had shewed in Israel.
Chapter 9 brings us to a story that we often skip over because it’s not about any of the judges and it seeks kind of a sidelight, and there’s nobody in this story we really like very much. I don’t know how many times I was taught this story as a kid, probably once, but what happens – and this builds the theme here – this young man Abimelech, who is the son of Gideon by this concubine, and she’s from Shechem, that is from a Canaanite community, he goes to Shechem and to his mother’s family and communes with them and says this –
Speak, I pray you, in the ears of all the men of Shechem, whether is better for you, either that all the sons of Jerubbaal, which are threescore and ten persons, reign over you, or that one reign over you? Remember also that I am your bone and your flesh.
A history of wanting to submit to a good leader, who then takes advantage of them.
This is also where Jeroboam will bring Israel to defy Rehoboam when the kingdom divides, so it goes all the way back to the patriarchs and all the way forward through a lot of things, but notice the play here. He goes to his mom’s family, who are to one degree or another Canaanites or intermarried with Canaanites, and first of all what he says. “Is it better for you that all of Gideon’s sons reign over you, that is 70 people, or just one?”
Notice the assumption here, that Gideon’s sons are going to reign over you, but do you really want 70 rulers? Isn’t a monarchy imminently preferable to a very large aristocracy or oligarchy? He’s arguing forms of government and he’s arguing it on personal prejudice, because he says, “Remember also that I am your bone and your flesh.”
These people are compromised Israelites. Let’s have Canaanitism. Let’s have Baalism, pure and straight up. “You want a Canaanite? I’ve got Canaanite blood. Wouldn’t that be much better than having these guys?”
And his mother’s brethren spake of him in the ears of all the men of Shechem all these words, and their hearts inclined to follow Abimelech, for they said, “He is our brother.” And they gave him threescore and ten pieces of silver out of the house of Baalberith (the temple of this god of theirs), wherewith Abimelech hired vain and light persons, which followed him.
So he’s in the pay of this false god and he’s hiring a bunch of sycophants.
Yeah, you got it, because that works. What we’re seeing here is God drawing a mocking picture of how politics works once God is taken out of the picture. What do you do? You want a lot of yes-men. You want a lot of glamour. You want a lot of outward approval. You want the existing powers to back you. Remember that Baal is a silent god. He’s not really going to come and tell you what to do. You can be his mouthpiece, so that’s good.
And he went unto his father’s house at Ophrah and slew his brethren the sons of Jerubbaal (Gideon), being threescore and ten persons, upon one stone.
So he commits mass murder or human sacrifice, depending on how you look at it. He told them, “You just want one ruler, right?”
“Good. I’ll go kill everyone else,” and does. But one young man escapes. His name is Jotham and he breaks in with a story. We’re going to talk about that story next time. It’s a fantasy story about trees that talk and engage in politics and worship God.
The gist of the story is the trees go out to make a king, and they come to one fruitful plant after another. They go to the olive and they go to the grapevine and the fig tree I think. At each point they say, “Come and reign over us,” and all the trees say, “What? Why should I leave my fruitful occupation and go and rule over you? In other words, God has appointed me a mission here, a calling in life. I’ve got better things to do than be your king. Go away.” So one by one, the trees get rejected. No one wants to be their king because all the cool people have stuff to do. They have jobs. They have things that are productive.
Finally they come to the bramble bush. Now, I’ve never met a bramble bush. When I was a kid, in our backyard both at home and at the school, we had these large blackberry bushes which were pretty brambly. They were sticky and it was hard to get through them, but at least at a certain time of the year you could go out and get blackberries and make blackberry jelly or whatever from them, so once during the year they were very nice. The rest of the time they were just a mess and they were impossible to get rid of. You really had to burn them down, and then they’d still come back.
These are something else. These are things that are just sticky and thorny and they serve no purpose that we understand, in terms of agriculture and such. They just grow and take over. They’re low to the ground.
Then said all the trees unto the bramble, “Come thou and reign over us.” And the bramble said unto the trees, “If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow…
Brambles don’t have much of a shadow. You have to lower yourself lower than the bramble to get in the shadow, so the bramble asking them to trust his shadow is kind of like, “Go crawl around on the ground so I feel good about myself.”
…and if not, let fire come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon.
“And if you won’t do that, then let me be the source of the fire that takes you all down.” That makes more sense with the rest of the story. Abimelech is a bramble man. He’s worthless. He’s got nothing going.
Exactly. He wants power for the sake of power. These people are coming and asking him to be king, and what Jotham is telling them in his little fairytale is, “This is not going to come out the way you think it is. He’s going to be the source of fire that burns down all of this. He’s going to take you all down with him, because that’s what these guys do. So I’ve warned you, but…” and he runs off. As I said, we’ll talk more about this story later.
The outcome is, of course, exactly that. I don’t think we need to walk through it, but eventually the trust between Abimelech and the Canaanites breaks down, a battle starts, and Abimelech is able to press a military advantage, what little he has, but in the end he does something really stupid. He goes up to a wall and this nameless woman drops a stone on his head, which kills him but not instantly. He has enough breath left to say to his armor bearer, “Run me through so people will not say a woman killed me,” and then he dies at the hand of his armor bearer.
The only other time Abimelech is mentioned in the entire Bible is when David is communicating back and forth with Joab, and Joab reports Uriah’s death and says, “It’s because we went too near the wall.” David said, “Why did you go so near the wall? Don’t you remember Abimelech, the son of Gideon, how he went too near the wall and a woman dropped a stone and broke his head? What were you thinking?” So even his last valiant gesture completely failed. No one cared that a woman dropped a stone on his head and crushed his skull – messianic overtones there.
That brings us back then to this idea of bramble men. Dr. Rushdoony in his book Bread Upon the Waters, a little collection of articles he wrote for farm newspapers back in the ‘60s I think, he has a little chapter called Bramble Men and this is just one line –
“The producer produces and the bramble man seeks power by hurting, restraining, or killing the producer.”
We’ve got a lot of bramble men going on right now – a lot of bramble people running the federal, state, and county governments – and the solution is not to go assassinate them, something I have to remind my students of from time to time. It’s easy to be caught up in the extremes of conservatism and patriotism. “You’re not taking me down. You’re going down with me.” The whole point is that the good trees are not destructive. They’re productive. They produce.
They have better things to do. Sometimes this is frustrating for Christian activists. Sometimes God’s people do need to stand up and be counted and pass a political measure or vote for a candidate or some such things, but that’s not how the kingdom comes. Those things have their place here and there, now and then, but most of us who are productive have lives.
We’re busy – for instance, in your case – having babies, getting married, starting careers, finding your calling before God, and then working real hard for 40, 50, or 60 hours a week to do something for the kingdom of God. Then you come home and do something like a podcast, with the hopes that we will bless other people with the things that we know and that we’ve learned.
We really don’t have time to go out to political protests. Put a petition in front of me and I’ll sign it, but I’m not going to be the one who goes out there and spends lots and lots of energy initiating it. I’m sure God calls some people to that, but most people have jobs, callings, careers, lives, families, church, Bible studies, and that’s the focus of this thing – that bramble people want to bring down the productive and do what brambles do – ensnare them, catch them up in their process and their way of doing things. Snag them.
If you ever walk through a bunch of brambles or blackberries, everything gets caught. Everything gets scratched. It’s not something you really want to do. It’s better if we were just to set them aside and burn them, or let them be set aside to die, but unfortunately brambles have a way of growing, unless at some point you start snipping. But again, that’s side work.
A farmer’s main work is not going out and snipping brambles. He doesn’t go out and cut down and burn all the brambles and say, “Well, we’re set for harvest now.” It’s a side job. It’s something you do along the way as you have to. The main thing is planting the seed, growing the crops, and harvesting it, and so it is for Christians generally. Our main work is to labor with patience in the thing that God has given us, and some political activists have a problem with that. They don’t get it. “You share my values! Why aren’t you out there?”
“I don’t get off until 3, 6, 10 or whatever. Then I have to take my kids to this and to that, and there’s the doctor’s appointment, and then I need to get home and make supper because I’ve got 5 kids,” and that kind of thing.
“But this is more important! Can’t they starve? Can’t you stop at McDonald’s along the way?”
Yes. There’s a character in Charles Dickens’ book Bleak House named Mrs. Jellyby, who is very concerned about the orphans in Africa, so she goes about raising money for the orphans in Africa. This is, of course, in the Victorian era and she’s wearing these huge hoop skirts that swirl about her. They’re twice as big as anybody else’s hoop skirts, and it’s kind of a picture of where her focus is.
It’s so far from herself that her children are sort of stuffed in her pockets and she’s completely forgotten about them. They’re just sort of hanging on the best they can. They’re sort of shriveled and sad because she’s so busy thinking about Africa that she’s not seeing her own children. Her focus is out at the rim of her skirt and not in her own pockets.
And the children really are hungry and lacking decent clothing and lacking in education.
Because she loves the heathen so much. Of course, the ironic thing is what little snips we get about the heathen from her are completely wrong. She’s completely out of touch with what’s really going on in Africa and who these people really are, but she has her pet ideas and she devotes so much energy to this, and yet her primary responsibilities she loses.
It’s a sad picture, and unfortunately there are people within the church and certainly within conservative circles who are like that. They have trouble understanding, “No, God wants us to be busy building, not busy attacking.” There’s a time to attack, but it’s not very often and we mostly have stuff to do. I think that’s a good bottom line for tonight.
That leads me to a good recommendation. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before. I feel like it must be impossible for me to not to have, but Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life, which is largely an acknowledgement of this idea that if you want to make the world a better place, clean up your room, stand up straight with your shoulders back, figure out yourself. Set yourself in order before you start criticizing the world.
He argues in really interesting ways from the Bible, while really trying hard not to say anything that sounds actually Christian. He’s one of these celebrities that I’m praying for. He seems really close to becoming a Christian, and I know he’s got good Christian friends around him.
Yes, Jordan Peterson is a very intriguing personality that I really do love and respect, and I do hope he comes to a saving knowledge. I feel like the biggest obstacle in that is the fact that he is Jungian, so scripture is not special revelation from a God that is entirely outside of nature and creation itself, and self-existent and all good and all the things that we confess. It’s, “These are all the things that have lasted long because there’s something in them in our evolutionary make-up that makes them resonant with reality, and that’s why it’s important.”
It is and I’m very glad for the Spirit’s ability to overcome any obstacle.
What I’m going to recommend is the book that my wife and I – which is an amazing thing I get to say now – have been going through for our morning devotions, and we actually started it before we became husband and wife. It is phenomenal. It’s called The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism. It’s written by Ben Myers. I have a feeling he’s Anglican, just by the way that he talks about things.
He takes the Apostles’ Creed line-by-line and explores what first practically and literally that phrase in the creed means, but then also what it implies about reality and the Christian worldview. He quotes very heavily from church fathers as well to kind of bolster his claims as something that is historical as opposed to ahistorical. We just finished it two days ago and it’s phenomenal. It’s really good. I would recommend it to anyone.
It works really great as a devotional book that you can read alongside your scripture readings for the morning or the evening, and there’s a couple other books in this series. We just started a second one, which is The Ten Commandments. Peter Leithart actually wrote that one. I’m normally very wary about anything Peter Leithart says, but so far this has been very good. I would say for that one just have discernment shields up. There’s another one, and I forget who wrote the other one, but there’s also a short one on the Lord’s prayer as well.
There’s probably more than those three. Those are just the three that Emily owns.
That’s a nice tip of the hat to the Heidelberg Catechism, which analyzes the faith in terms of those things.
Also in terms of guilt that’s a nod to the law of God, but then it begins with the creed. What do Christians believe anyway? What is true faith all about? What is it we believe? Then it goes to thankfulness, then it comes back to the law of God as a means of thankfulness, and then to prayer, particularly using the Lord’s prayer as the model.
My recommendation, as I sit here looking at your faces, is I’m going to recommend marriage. Marriage is a good thing. I see it reflected in both of you now and it is not a warm and fuzzy feeling, but it is goal of eternity. It is the fruit of the Spirit working in your lives. It’s a hard thing and there will be many challenges for both of you in your relationships. That does not make it a bad thing or something you ever give up on, but it is something that God will use to sanctify you and to forward his kingdom.
And now you have partners who can help you and stand beside you and hold you up and be there when you’re sick, and with whom you will, God willing, produce many fruitful children who will take some of who you are and some from their teachers and their pastors and their friends and their relatives, and will forward that into the next generation. Therefore, marriage is to be taken very seriously, as you and your spouses have both taken it.
I know too many who want the fruit of a marriage. They want the sexual experience or the companionship or someone to value them, but in missing the heart of God’s will for marriage they’re setting themselves up for a lot of trouble.
So to all my former students – should you get married? Unless God says no, he’s already said yes, so what are you waiting on? God does not say that you have to be hopelessly head over heels in love with the person you marry, although you should like them…a lot.
It’s a good idea, but more you should share a common faith in Jesus Christ. You should both love Jesus. If that’s there, a lot of things are possible. If that’s not there, as one of my former students once said, “How could I love somebody who hates my best friend?” when your best friend is God. So marriage – it brings us together in a lot of ways.
I’ll take this opportunity then to make explicit something you implied already, and that is that David (our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband) and I are expecting our first child in a few months here, which I don’t think we’ve mentioned on the podcast before. We’ve just kind of been chill about it.
Every part of life is harder right now because of pregnancy, so whatever can stay the same, if we can make it stay the same that’s good, so the podcast has just kept on trucking. But we’re very excited and we will keep you posted, listeners.
Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thank you to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We really appreciate it. We hope you’re edified by these conversations, as we are in having them.
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I’m glad you mentioned that, because I know at least one or two of our financial supporters. It’s not that they have a ton of money, but they think this is important so thank you very much for what you’ve done for us and for the people who listen.
If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website: anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. We also theoretically have show notes there, though I have fallen behind in writing the show notes. We’re working on that. Thank you for bearing with us over these crazy past several months.