“The LORD is with you, O valiant warrior” Judges 6:12

The Life of the Warrior

Valiant Warrior – If Jesus should find you working in the field or in the market, would he call you a valiant warrior?  Would he call you someone of great valor?  You might say, “No, I’m just an ordinary person.  I’m not a Gideon.  I’m not a special leader or a general or a soldier.”  But you would be wrong.  And once you know a little about these two Hebrew words, you’ll see why.

The two root words here are gibbor (mighty) and hayil (to be firm, strong).  The combination might have described a kind of elite class of men in the Old Testament.  But notice that each of the words is separately associated with power and strength.  It’s like saying, “the mighty mighty” or the “powerfully powerful”.  And where does this double dose of strength come from?  Well, says the Angel of the Lord, it comes from the fact that God is with you.  It has nothing to do with you.  It’s all about whom you’re with.

When Jesus says, “without me you can do nothing” (John 15:5), do you suppose that he was thinking about that conversation with Gideon, centuries before his incarnation?  Unless God is with you, you can never be a mighty warrior.  But when He is with you, you operate in a completely different realm.  You and Gideon stand on the same ground.  It’s not your strength or power than matters any more.  It is the might of the Lord of hosts that flows through you.

The life of a warrior is not limited to Achilles, Ajax, Napoleon, Patton or Schwarzopf.  The life of the warrior is found wherever God is present in a person.  Gideon was simply the forerunner.  His story is the story of God’s incredible strength in the least likely of human efforts.  The Angel of the Lord knew something incredibly important:  the life of the warrior is a life of spiritual proximity, not human potential.  Drawing close to God is the only way of the true warrior.  God and me:  a double dose of mighty strength.