What does Tribe teach about surrounded by enemies?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on being surrounded by enemies starts with Psalm 22, a song David wrote a thousand years before Jesus was born. Brian walked the congregation through what that psalm meant for anyone who has ever felt completely hemmed in, with no way out and no help coming. The key image is verse 12, the fierce bulls of Bashan. To any reader who knew their Bible, Bashan was not a neutral word. It was a region tied to King Og, a giant of the Rephaim, to Mount Hermon whose name in Hebrew means a place set aside for destruction, and to a long history of darkness behind the physical circumstances David was describing. Brian's point was that the bulls closing in on David were not only natural pressure but something darker behind them, and that David was seeing, prophetically, a moment a thousand years away that he could not fully understand.
That moment was the cross. Jesus walked deliberately into the old region of Bashan, to Caesarea Philippi, a place of pagan worship built over ground soaked in child sacrifice. Brian said Jesus went there to pick a fight, making himself known to the powers of hell on their own ground before heading south to Jerusalem. What followed in Jerusalem looked, to every human observer, like total defeat. But Brian taught that the cross was not what the powers of darkness thought it was. As he put it, "the cross was not the triumph of darkness, but the judgment of it." The bulls came out into the open because they believed they had won, and that was the moment they locked horns with the one who would defeat them. The resurrection was the proof they had lost.
For anyone sitting with that feeling right now, Brian named it plainly. "Maybe you find yourself surrounded by fierce bulls of Bashan with no way out, no help, no hope, no rescue." The teaching at Tribe is that Jesus faced exactly those bulls, and that his victory is not something to admire from a distance but something available to anyone willing to receive it. The fight has already been won by someone who went to the darkest ground on purpose and came back.
Taught from Psalm 22:1-24 · Deuteronomy 3:1-11 · 1 Corinthians 15:55-57 · Colossians 2:14 · Matthew 10
“The cross was not the triumph of darkness, but the judgment of it.”
From Easter Sunday at Tribe
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 15:55-57
55 “Death, where is your sting? Hades, where is your victory?”
56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- April 6, 2026 Easter Sunday at Tribe Brian Hunter preaches on Psalm 22 at Easter, tracing the "bulls of Bashan" from David's cry to the cross, and what Christ's resurrection means for anyone feeling surrounded and trapped.
- April 5, 2026 The Bulls of Bashan Brian Hunter walks through Psalm 22 on Easter Sunday, tracing David's ancient words about bulls of Bashan to the cross and what Jesus's victory means for your life today.