What does Tribe teach about feeling surrounded?
Drawn from the message 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 feeling surrounded starts with the recognition that this experience is not just emotional or circumstantial. When Brian walked the congregation through Psalm 22 on Easter Sunday, he pointed out that David wrote about being encircled by 'fierce bulls of Bashan' a thousand years before Jesus was born, and that the imagery carries a weight most modern readers miss. Bashan was a real geography, northern Israel at the base of Mount Hermon, and to any biblically literate reader it signaled something darker than ordinary danger. The region was associated with King Og, a giant of the Rephaim, and with the kind of supernatural corruption that follows when boundaries are broken. The pressure David describes, and that Jesus would later face, is not only circumstances closing in. There is something behind the circumstances.
Brian showed that Jesus did not avoid that territory. He led his disciples directly to Caesarea Philippi, deep in the old region of Bashan, a place of pagan worship and child sacrifice, and went there deliberately. The Transfiguration, in Brian's reading, was Jesus making clear to both his disciples and the powers of darkness exactly who they were dealing with. Jesus walked into the place of greatest spiritual hostility on purpose, which means the person feeling surrounded today is not in territory Jesus has not already entered.
The sermon moved toward the cross as the place where what felt like a victory for the forces surrounding Jesus turned out to be the opposite. Drawing on Colossians 2:14 and 1 Corinthians 15:55-57, Brian brought the congregation to the moment where death itself is swallowed up. The invitation at the end of the message was straightforward: stop fighting your own bulls of Bashan alone, and receive the life Jesus offers.
Taught from Psalm 22:1-24 · Colossians 2:14 · 1 Corinthians 15:55-57 · Deuteronomy 3:1-11 · Matthew 10
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 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.