How to topple tyrants
By Matt Watson
Tyrants are not all-powerful. History shows us they get toppled and defeated regularly. Julius Caesar was stabbed by his closest advisors. Everyone had finally had it with Nero and he was semi-forced to kill himself. Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hole. Muammar Gaddafi was found in a drainage pipe. Adoni-bezek had his thumbs and big toes cut off.
Adoni-bezek was a Canaanite tyrant in the time of the Judges between the exodus and the monarchy of Israel. He says in Judges 1:7 that during his reign he had cut off the thumbs and big toes of 70 kings, and had them begging for scraps at his table. Consequently, that is what happens to him. He says, “As I have done, so God has repaid me.”
This wasn’t retribution or vengeance done by the people. It was justice done by God through his people. And that means that God’s justice, including toppling evil regimes, is a provision to his people. If he has established kings and emperors, as Romans 13 says, then they are subject to him. If they abuse the people entrusted to them, God will repay them in kind.
If It Smells Like A Duck ...
Some titles are rather serious words to throw around and ought to be applied conservatively. "Tyrant" is one. "Heretic" is another. While we shouldn't be casual about applying these terms to people, like Gideon's men, we should keep on the lookout for it (Jdg 7:6).
For example, is San Antonio ruled by a tyrant? Hardly. Yet, our mayor and city council passed a budget for 2024 with a line item that provides funds to help people travel out of state for abortions to commit murder. Normally, that is considered a felony, but since it's babies in the womb it's considered healthcare. Rather than focusing on San Antonio, half a million dollars of taxpayer funds will go to killing the most vulnerable in our city. Which will almost certainly be represented by our minority neighbors. That's starting to smell like the rotten corpse of tyranny.
And in case you didn't click on that last link, according to the Texas Tribune, in 2019, 8 out of every 1000 Hispanic women, and 18 out of every 1000 black women had an abortion in Texas. These communities have been lied to that abortions are healthcare. Instead, what the left calls the most vulnerable communities are encouraged to kill the most vulnerable in their communities.
How To Reclaim the Culture
If you want to fight the tide of culture, you must make it. Don't sit and watch; get up and do. How do you create culture? Worship God, get married, and make babies.
“And Caleb said, ‘He who attacks Kiriath-sepher and captures it, I will give him Achsah my daughter for a wife.’ And Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother, captured it. And he gave him Achsah his daughter for a wife. When she came to him, she urged him to ask her father for a field. And she dismounted from her donkey, and Caleb said to her, ‘What do you want?’ She said to him, ‘Give me a blessing. Since you have set me in the land of the Negeb, give me also springs of water.’ And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the lower springs.”
To possess the land, they needed to have people for the land. To have people for the land, they needed to procreate. Caleb married off his daughter to Othniel, the victor of the campaign to take his family's portion of the promised land. After his daughter married Othniel, she asked Caleb for water rights for their land. That allowed them to cultivate it for crops and graze it with animals, which allowed them to provide for themselves and start a family. Caleb's family was promised land, they took that promise in faith, and then they possessed it by faith through procreating in faith.
This is obedience to the dominion mandate in Genesis 1:28, also called the First Commission: "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." It was also the the fulfillment of the promise made by God to Abraham's family, which was a specific promise to the nation of Israel at that time. That is not a universal promise for God's people today, at least not in the same way. But the dominion mandate to be fruitful and multiply still stands, especially in context of the Great Commission.
However, today men and women are marrying later and having fewer kids. The average age for marrying in 2022 was 31 years old. In 1980 the number of adults married by 21 was a third of the adult population in the US. In 2023 it was 6%. The share of adults who married by 25 in 1980 was two-thirds of the population, whereas now it is 22%.
Could there be a connection between the direction of our culture and the rate at which Christians are marrying and having babies?
“Yet the signs of the decay [of Gondor] had then already appeared; for the high men of the South married late, and their children were few.”
One objection is, "What if I am called to singleness?" Another is, "What if we can't have a baby?" These are exceptions to the rule, yet not a rule unto themselves. Throwing out the dominion mandate because some people are called to be eunuchs for the kingdom of God or who face infertility issues is the same logic that says since there are occasionally people born intersex, we should redefine what gender and sex mean for society. Let's not use an exception to the rule as an excuse to disregard the rule, nor exchange one burden for another.
Michael Foster says that "sex is the engine of dominion." We've made the Great Commission an exclusively spiritual command, and have failed to realize that it also includes physically making disciples by having babies and teaching those babies to obey the Lord. That is how to create culture and prepare the next generation: through family worship.
How do we fight tyrants and respond in faith to God's promises? By obeying God, getting married, and having babies. If you want to topple kingdoms, if you want to overthrow tyrants, focus on marriage and family. Worshiping God as a culture starts in the home.
This article was originally published by Matthew Watson with Awake! Put on strength!, and is used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.