Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Jeremiah 20:11
“The Lord is with me as a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble; they will not overcome me. They will be greatly shamed, for they will not succeed. Their eternal dishonor will never be forgotten.”
Unsurprisingly, Scripture explores the reality of divine omnipotence by using many different names and metaphors for God. After all, power can be expressed in many different, complementary ways, and the Lord’s power is so rich that simply calling Him “Almighty” would not do justice to all the ways that our Maker exerts His strength.
One metaphor that the Bible commonly uses to express God’s power is that of a warrior. Scripture frequently calls God a warrior or describes Him using warrior imagery. In today’s passage, for instance, we read that the Lord is a “dread warrior” or, as the King James Version puts it, a “mighty terrible one” (Jer. 20:11). This portrays the Lord as an awe-inspiring fighter, a skilled warrior mighty in battle against His foes and the foes of His people. So expertly does He wage war against His enemies that His foes are filled with fear at the mention of His name. Indeed, there is much in God that makes Him “terrible” in the sense of inspiring terror in those who refuse to serve Him. Yet what inspires terror in those who are enemies of God the dread and mighty warrior serves as a consolation for those who trust and love Him. Matthew Henry comments: “Even that in God which is terrible is really comfortable to his servants that trust in him, for it shall be turned against those that seek to terrify his people. God’s being a mighty God bespeaks him a terrible God to all those that take up arms against him or any one that, like Jeremiah, was commissioned by him.”
Scripture gives us many vivid pictures of the Lord as a mighty warrior. Isaiah 59:14–20 describes God’s preparing Himself to war against His enemies and cause others to fear Him by looking to how the Lord dresses Himself for battle in His own divine armor, including His breastplate of righteousness and His helmet of salvation. God always goes into battle well prepared and fully able to deal with any eventuality. That the Lord puts on the same kind of armor that we are to wear in spiritual battle implies that the armor we wear is really God Himself, that we are to fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil in His power and not in our own strength (see Eph. 6:10–20).
God is a King who does not merely order His people to fight but leads us into battle Himself. He does not stay out of the fray but goes before His people to engage the enemy (Deut. 1:29–31).
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
One of the best summaries of God’s work as our mighty warrior actually occurs in Westminster Shorter Catechism 26 as it describes Christ’s kingly office. The catechism states that “Christ executes the office of a king, in subduing us to himself, in ruling and defending us, and in restraining and conquering all his and our enemies.” We have much reason to rejoice in the great King who cannot fail in this work.
For further study
- Exodus 15:3
- Deuteronomy 20:1–4
- Nehemiah 4:20
- Revelation 19:11–21
The bible in a year
- Judges 10–11
- Luke 9:1–36