The transcript of A Sermon on Judges 3:12-31 has been lightly edited.
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If you have them, please take your Bibles and turn with me now to the book of Judges. Today we are continuing our walk through the Judges and we are going to be in chapter 3 beginning in verse 12 and we’ll finish out chapter 3.
When we lived in Orlando, there was a Christian radio station that we listened to frequently and their tagline at the time was “Z88.3, safe for the little ears.” I always thought it was odd because if you remember C.S. Lewis in the Chronicles of Narnia when the children are asking about Aslan, is he safe? Mr. Otter responds with, “No, he’s not safe, but he’s not good.”
The gospel is not necessarily safe for the little ears and the part of the gospel we are going to look at today in Judges chapter 3 is definitely not safe for the little ears. But we will handle it well, we will handle it gently and we will point out where we need to, the morose humor of this particular passage and we will see how God communicates his truth even through passages that are not necessarily safe for the little ears.
With that in mind, let us pick up the account of the nation of Israel as we see it in Judges chapter 3 beginning in verse 12.
“And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. And the Lord strengthened Eglon the king of Moab against Israel because they had done what was evil in the sight of the Lord. He gathered to himself the Ammonites and the Amalekites and went and defeated Israel and they took possession of the city of Palms. And the people of Israel served Eglon the king of Moab 18 years. Then the people of Israel cried out to the Lord and the Lord raised up for them a deliverer Ahud the son of Gerah the Benjamite, a left-handed man. The people of Israel sent tribute by him to Eglon the king of Moab and Ahud made for himself a sword with two edges, a cubit in length and he bound it on his right thigh under his clothes and he presented the tribute to Eglon king of Moab. Now Eglon was a very fat man and when Ahud had finished presenting the tribute he sent away the people who carried the tribute. But he himself turned back at the idols near Gilgal and said, I have a secret message for you O king. And he commanded silence and all his attendants went out from his presence. And Ahud came to him as he was sitting alone in the cool roof chamber and Ahud said, I have a message from God for you. And he arose from his seat and Ahud reached with his left hand and took the sword from his right thigh and thrust it into his belly and the hilt also went in after the blade and the fat closed over the blade for he did not pull the sword out of his belly and the dung came out. Then Ahud went out into the porch and closed the doors of the roof chamber behind them and locked them. When he had gone the servants came and when they saw that the doors of the roof chamber were locked they thought surely he is relieving himself in the closet of the cool chamber and they waited until they were embarrassed. But when he still did not open the doors of the roof chamber they took the key and opened them and there lay their Lord dead on the floor. Ahud escaped while they delayed and he passed beyond the idols and escaped to Seirah. When he arrived he sounded the trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim then the people of Israel went down with him from the hill country and he was their leader and he said to them follow after me for the Lord has given your enemies the Moabites into your hands. So they went down after him and seized the fords of the Jordan against the Moabites and did not allow anyone to pass over and they killed at that time about 10,000 of the Moabites all strong able-bodied men not a man escaped. So Moab was seduced that day under the hand of Israel and the land had rest for 80 years. After him was Shamgar the son of Anath who killed 600 of the Philistines with an ox goad and he also saved Israel.
Let’s pray. Father God above this is your word and I am merely your messenger. By the power of your Spirit open my mouth so that your people may hear the truth that you would have for them and by the power of that same spirit open the eyes and the ears of your people so that we might be changed so that we might be more grateful and worshipful for the gospel that you have given to us and so that we might live lives of holiness that you have given to us. We pray this in Jesus name amen.
INTRODUCTION
In crime dramas especially those on tv or movies about murder mysteries or psychological thrillers there always seems to be a twist.
I think when I was growing up and you could only watch the shows once a week you you didn’t always see the twist coming. But now in these days of streaming and being able to watch four, five, six, twenty episodes of a crime drama in a day it almost becomes predictable the twist that is going to come.
There’s a predictability to the murder mystery to the thriller but there’s also always an unpredictable part of it that makes the story. If you think about Perry Mason he was always the best they would be there in the courtroom the witness would be upon the stand, and the defendant who everybody absolutely knew was guilty would be sitting in the box and all of a sudden with a twist of words and a rhetorical flair Perry Mason would get the person on the stand to finally confess in a twist.
There’s expected; there’s predictable. But there’s always the unexpected and the unpredictable that makes the murder mystery gripping.
The book of judges is very much the same way. There is the expected and the predictable that we will see throughout every single judge that we look at. It’s the cycle that we’ve already talked about that is summarized in chapter two in the beginning of chapter three and will show itself through every single judge that that is shown to us.
There is the rescue and the rest that God out of his grace gives to the nation of Israel. Then there is that repeated statement that “Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” They forget God and they serve the other idols. Then God sends somebody to oppress them; then they cry out to God or a couple times they don’t cry out to God. And then God rescues them and most of the time gives them rest. The last few judges that period of rest disappears and it’s almost as if rescue is followed just quickly by rebellion and idolatry.
That’s the predictable part, that cycle of grace that cycle of the judges. But the unpredictable, the unexpected part of the book of judges is how God works and who God chooses to work through. When we looked at Othniel last week Othniel is presented to us as a righteous and heroic character. He is heroic in chapter one and there is no issue with his righteousness presented to us in chapter three. Yet God will call – we’ll see today and we’ll see as we move throughout the rest of the judges that God calls questionable people to be the rescuer.
What I want us to mainly see today is this interaction between God’s sovereignty and human action, and we will see that God’s activity in human action brings to us complete salvation.
GOD’S SOVEREIGNTY IN HUMAN ACTION
So first we see within the characters, within the main people of this account, we see God’s sovereignty and human action working side by side. Othniel has died and after 40 years of rest the people of Israel do evil again in the sight of the Lord and the Lord because of Israel’s idolatry calls Eglon the king of Moab to be his tool of discipline his instrument of judgment upon the nation of Israel. Not to completely wipe them out and separate himself from them but in order to draw them to repentance. Discipline comes upon us so that we might be drawn to repentance to find the joy that holiness gives us as we learned today in Sunday school.
But it says here specifically that the Lord strengthened Eglon the king of Moab. That word “strengthened” is a word that means the Lord gave Eglon power to complete what God was using him to do. So God is sovereign over Eglon even this king that is going to subjugate and torture the people of Israel for 18 years.
But Eglon isn’t merely just a puppet on God’s strings. We see what Eglon does in order to carry out what God has called him to do. He gathers a coalition of the Ammonites and the Amalekites. Moab, Ammon, and Amalek are all either nomadic tribes or in the case of Moab and Ammon they live east of the Jordan River. They gather together and they come in they defeat Israel. God is using sovereignly using the Moabites the Amalekites to discipline the people of Israel.
We see this interaction between God’s activity and human activity working together to to bring about God’s purpose. We see it as well in Ehud. God raises up for Israel when they cry out he raises up for them a deliverer and once again this raising up is a call and an empowering that God gives to Ehud to be the deliverer of the nation of Israel after their 18 years of slavery and oppression.
Real quick before we move on here, notice that Israel’s getting a little bit more patient in their affliction. It took them eight years to cry out in the account of Othniel. They make it 18 years before they cry out here under Eglon.
Does Ehud just act as a puppet on a string? No he makes plans; he develops a scheme in order to find himself in the presence of Eglon, Eglon the very fat we are told. Now this is where Ehud gets a little bit questionable because he acts more like a Canaanite assassin than he does a deliverer raised up by God. Ehud is described as of the tribe of Gera the Benjamin Benjaminite a left-handed man. Benjamin means “son of my right hand.” So there’s a little bit of irony there between uh Benjaminite and the designation that he is a left-handed man. It’s almost like the author is saying “Ehud the left-handed right-handed man.”
Now left-handed man here is a word that can be translated a couple different ways. It can either show a weakness in the right hand. That’s literally what it means, “weakness in the right hand” or a “binding of the right hand.” Later on in the book of judges we’ll see 600 Benjaminites who are left-handed, and likely what happened what that means is that they are ambidextrous. There’s some archaeological evidence that men as they were training for battle would bind their right hand behind their back so that they would strengthen in their left hand.
You ever heard somebody say “I could beat you with my hand tied one hand tied behind my back?” It’s kind of the picture there that just in case that that dominant right hand gets damaged they can pick up their sword with the left hand. Or, as Ehud does, they can do trickery by holding their sword in their left hand and defeating that that battle stance that has the shield in the left and the sword on the right and they’re coming in from the other direction. Or it could mean that he had a deformity in his right hand that forced him to use his left hand in battle. It could go either way; we’re not sure.
Depending upon the commentator or the preacher that you look at they kind of go 50-50. But the point of this pointing out that he’s a left-handed man should signal us to the fact that he’s going to do something devious; not because left-handed people are devious or at least i hope that’s not the reason, but because it’s it’s it’s putting us in a frame of mind to think “Okay, I’m expecting a right-handed man but there’s a left-handed person.”
So something is going to be different and what is different is Ehud’s plans. He builds himself a dagger that’s about 18 inches long he straps it to his right thigh. (The reason you do that if you’re carrying a sword it’s easier to draw it across the body and so a right-handed person would put it on their left side to draw across the body right hand yeah and then the left-handed person would put it on the right side.)
So he’s hiding it on his right side and then he goes and he takes this tribute. Tribute is a word that’s translated elsewhere as “grain offering,” so it’s likely food and oil and the fat of the land that they are taking. It’s protection money they are paying Eglon to not be mean to them, any meaner than he already was.
They take the tribute and Ehud goes, delivers the tribute with a group of people, then he leaves and he comes back. He turns around at Gilgal. Now at Gilgal there used to be a stack of stones that commemorated the 12 tribes crossing the Jordan River on dry land, but now apparently has a bunch of carved idols there being a reminder of the Canaanite gods rather than a reminder of the one true God.
And he goes back to Eglon and we’ll pick that part of the story up here in a few minutes. So let’s let’s fast forward just a little bit to Shamgar.
Shamgar is what we call a minor judge. Shamgar is one of the six judges that we only have a verse or two about. We don’t know very much about them.
We have six major judges. Major and minor, whether we’re talking about major prophets versus minor prophets or major judges versus minor judges, just means that we know less about the minor judges than we do the major judges.
Shamgar, who was most likely a non-Israelite, he has a non-Israelite name; he is the son of a non-Israelite. It says he killed 600 of the Philistines with an ox goad.
Anybody know what an ox goad is? It’s an eight foot long stick with a metal pointy end on one end and kind of a shovel shaped end on the other end to clean off a plow. It’s a farmer’s tool. And so with this pointy stick, Shamgar kills 600 people and we’re told that he saved Israel. He acted, maybe not knowingly since he was a foreigner, but God used his actions to save Israel.
And I think through all of this, we need to look and to consider this mysterious interplay between the sovereignty of God and man’s action or man’s responsibility.
Is God sovereign over absolutely everything? Yes. How do we know? The scripture teaches us that this is so. Is man responsible for their actions? Yes. How do we know? Because the scripture teaches.
Now the scripture does an interesting thing when it puts the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man together, sometimes in the very same verse. It doesn’t do what we try to do. It doesn’t explain it.
It just presents it as two valid truths that are true at the same time. Now that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about it, but it does mean that we should be humble when we think about it. How am I responsible for what I do if God is sovereign over everything that I do?
All analogies break down, but the best that I can think of is going back to the murder mystery. Every murder mystery that you see on TV, every Agatha Christie book that you read or similar book that you read has an author. Is the author in control over all the characters within the book? Absolutely. However, within the universe of that book, are the characters responsible for their actions? Also, yes, absolutely.
It’s the same thing with us. God is in sovereign control over everything within the world, within the universe, but we are also responsible for our actions. And so we see God in his sovereignty taking human choices and human actions, even questionable and sinful ones, and using them to bring about his good and his glory.
So God’s sovereignty and human action interact in that way.
SIN MAKES US STUPID
Well, the second thing that we see here, and I always told my boys not to use this particular word, but I’m going to go ahead and use it today. The second point is sin makes us stupid.
Let’s think about this. Eglon here, let’s go back to Ehud and Eglon. Ehud is calm, he has delivered his tribute to Eglon.
Eglon’s awesome. There’s a lot of dark humor in this particular story. I don’t have time to point it all out, but Eglon, the name literally means “little bull or calf”, and he was very fat, almost as if he was a calf that had been fattened for the slaughter. And that’s a little bit of the humor that we see here.
Ehud leaves after giving his tribute. He leaves the rest of the group at Gilgal, and he goes back and he tells the king, “I have a secret message for you.” He piques the king’s interest, and the king tells everybody to be quiet because he wants to hear the secret message. And his attendants do the exact wrong thing. Not only are they quiet, they leave the room.
How smart is it for a king to be left alone in a room with the enemy? Not too smart at all. It borderlines on stupid.
So Eglon, seated on his throne on a raised platform, Ehud’s probably down here on a lower portion. He’s kneeling on the ground. He repeats what he says, but he adds something special to it. He says, “I have a secret message from God for you.”
Now Eglon’s really excited. In all of his girth and all of his weight, he stands up out of his throne. He walks to the edge of the raised platform, presenting this giant belly right there, primed for the taking for Ehud.
And what’s he do? He reaches under his garment. He pulls out the dagger. He sticks it in, and it stays. And nothing but dung comes out.
Now Ehud escapes. We don’t know how. Did he walk out the front door and then lock the door behind him? Did he pull an Andy Dufresne from Shawshank Redemption and go out through, let’s just say, the drainage system? We don’t know how he escaped, but we know that he did escape.
And then the servants come back, and they don’t hear anything, and they try the door, and they think it’s locked. And instead of thinking, wait a minute, we left an enemy alone with the king, they say to themselves, well, maybe he’s in the bathroom. We’ll just give him a few more minutes.
And of course, they open the door. They find Eglon dead.
Now, why do I say that sin makes us stupid? For 18 years, Eglon had been receiving the tribute of the fat of the land from the Israelites. He had been stealing from the Israelites. And what do you think Eglon did with all that food that he got from the Israelites? Apparently, he ate it.
We get numb to taking things from the world the more of it that we take. I used to watch the show Scrubs, and there was a character in Scrubs called Dr. Kelso. He was the chief of medicine.
He had not practiced medicine for 10 or 15 years. He was in an office all the time, and he and one of the other doctors got into a discussion about whether or not patients still respected doctors. When Dr. Kelso came up, he said, parents would throw their daughters at me hoping they would marry a doctor. I could go to a barber shop and sit down, and when I’d offer to pay for my haircut, the barber would say, no, sir, doctor, it’s on the house today.
And so he does rounds, and he finds out that patients don’t respect doctors as much as they did when he was actively practicing medicine. And he so wants that respect.
He so wants that power that at the end of the episode, you see Dr. Kelso seated at the barber shop in the barber’s chair, and the barber pulls the thing off of the front of him and, you know, flips it kind of like barbers do, and he says, that’ll be $15. And Dr. Kelso goes, no, son, I don’t think so. Not today.
I’m a doctor. And the barber looks at him and says, I’m a barber. That’ll be $15.
And the next scene is Dr. Kelso running down the sidewalk being chased by the barber because he stole a haircut. It’s what sin and idolatry makes us do. The more we dally with sin, the more we interact with sin, we put our guard down to it, and we let it influence and shape our lives.
And like Eglon and like the attendants, we become stupid to sin and we become stupid to Satan’s attacks and his wiles, and we just let them go. And so we must beware. We must watch out and make sure that we are always repentant, always confessing, always seeking the holiness that God calls us to so that we might always be sharp against Satan’s advances.
Don’t put yourself in servitude to an enemy that is so predictable as sin is.
GOD GIVES COMPLETE SALVATION
And then lastly, what I want us to see is that through all of this, even as much stuff that goes wrong, even as much sin as is used in order to get from point A to point B, God brings complete salvation. Verse 26,
“Ehud escaped while they had delayed, and he passed beyond the idols and escaped to SeIrah. When he arrived, he sounded the trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim. Then the people of Israel went down with him from the hill country, and he was their leader. And he said to them, follow after me, for the Lord has given your enemies, the Moabites, into your hand. So they went down after him and seized the fords of the Jordan against the Moabites and did not allow anyone to pass over. And they killed at that time about 10,000 of the Moabites, all strong, all able-bodied men. Not a man escaped. So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel.”
You know, after Othniel, we would almost expect to jump straight from God. The Lord raised up for them a deliverer, Ehud, the son of Gera, the Benjaminite, a left-handed man, and jumped all the way to verse 28.
And he said to them, follow after me, for the Lord has given your enemies, the Moabites, into your hands.
But of course, that’s not how it happens for us. We were given far more information, but it leads to this. It leads to this truth right here. Ahud takes the people of Ephraim, the people of Israel. They set up at the fords of the Jordan.
If any reinforcements are coming, they’ve got to come from the east and cross the Jordan. If Eglon’s troops are going to retreat, they have to move east and cross the Jordan also. And so Ahud sets up at a strategic point in the battle.
He’s got both directions covered. Nobody’s going to flank him from the rear. Nobody’s going to escape him from the front. And they destroy about 10,000, and we’re told what 10,000 means at the end of the verse. It says that not a man escaped. They defeated 10,000 strong able-bodied men.
God gave complete salvation to the Israelites at this point through the leadership of Ahud. Daniel Bloch says that “When Yahweh delivers, he delivers.” He doesn’t do it half-heartedly.
Yahweh delivers. And we see that through Ahud, the land has 80 years of rest, double what it had before. We’ll see this trend reverse as we go through the rest of the judges. But God gave two generations worth of rest, giving opportunity for the Israelites to reform for two generations, to put their trust, to put their hope in God and in God alone.
And when we pick up next week, we’ll see that just like after Othniel died, the Israelites went back to their idolatry, we’ll begin to see next week that after these 80 years are over, the Israelites once again forget God and do what is evil in the sight of God. So when God gives us times of rest, we need to make sure that we don’t miss them.
CONCLUSION
One of those passages I talked about earlier, where God’s activity and God’s sovereignty and human activity are placed side by side, we find in Acts chapter 2, beginning in verse 22.
“Men of Israel, hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know. This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death because it was not possible for him to be held by it.”
You and I have a far more complete salvation than the Israelites did under the hand of Ehud. Because God’s sovereignty over Jesus’ life was exercised by the Israelite leaders arresting, convicting, and wrongly killing Jesus.
The sinful acts of the religious leaders leads to a complete salvation for you and me. On the cross, Jesus did not say, okay God, I’ve done enough to get them over the line, it’s their responsibility to get all the way to the finish line. Jesus didn’t say on the cross, I’ve done enough to get them 95% of the way to heaven, it’s up to them to finish the last 5%.
He didn’t even say, I did enough to get them 99.9% of the way, it’s up to them to cover the last one tenth of one percent. What did he say? He said, “It is finished.”
The sovereignty of God, the definite plan and foreknowledge of God worked itself out at the cross so that you and I might have a complete salvation.
Jesus was not questionable in his means, he was the perfect man who kept God’s law perfectly and when push came to shove, he said, “Your will not my will be done.” And just like God brought a complete salvation for the Israelites through Ehud, he brought a more complete salvation for you and me through Jesus.
Brothers and sisters, he has given us a perfect rest. Let us take that rest and use it for his glory and his honor.
Let’s pray. God, we do thank you for Jesus and his work and we ask that as we partake of the Lord’s that you would bring us closer to you. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
As you go this week, take this blessing upon you.
“To those who have been called, who are loved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance.”
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen. Come Lord Jesus.
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