Good morning. Welcome. Thank you for being here.
Open up right where we left off last week. Open up to Judges Chapter 3. At my daughter's school, Wednesday mornings are a late start morning because all of their research shows that if you kind of have a hump day and take a little bit of a change of pace and rhythm midweek, it helps everybody for their learning and all that kind of stuff. I think it's inconvenient.
They think it's awesome. But, you know, so says the research. So we are in week.
week five of this eight-week series and we're a little bit on a late start Wednesday today. Like this actually should be somewhat digestible, shorter to read this week and then we'll just dive right back in the deep end for the rest of our study with bigger chunks starting next week. Everybody can exhale a little bit. We will read together, but you won't be flipping 50 pages and all of those things.
So enjoy, because it will not last long. Okay? Thank you for being here.
We're going to pray, and we are going to jump right in. Father, we look to you this morning and our hearts are so heavy, our minds are overwhelmed with just the effects of this hurricane. Lord, many in this room I'm sure have friends and family that are completely dislocated.
Lord, people have lost people, which is ultimately what matters, Lord. So much property damage, so much confusion, so many businesses, so much destruction. And Lord, we know from our view of your heart, even in this crazy Old Testament. book Lord that you don't just save souls that Lord you hate misery and so Lord we pray that you would come in great mercy in unimaginable mercy to meet this unimaginable misery and suffering and Lord it gives us a window into suffering around the world in Israel and in Gaza and Ukraine Lord in Uganda and in Sudan and so many other places Lord that we sit here comfortably on this hilltop and Lord I pray that you would remind us that not only is your heart with the brokenhearted, Lord, that our heart and our hands and our resources need to be as well.
So, Lord, we pray that you would have mercy. Lord, we pray that you would do your work, not only externally, but internally in us this morning through all the promises that you have attached to this word. We've been studying your promises, and Lord, you've promised that your word will not return void and that, Lord, we will not leave as we came in.
And so, Lord, we pray not only for information, but for transformation. Because, Lord, ultimately what you came to do is redeem us and make us like you until we're with you. And so we lean forward into that together this morning because of your invitation, by your grace and for your glory.
Amen. Judges chapter 3. So last week we started in on Judges, and we did not do an intro study of Judges. We just began studying Judges, and it does an intro of itself in chapters 1, 2, and the first few verses.
chapter 3 and what we saw there is this immediately kind of downward slide that at first seems very subtle and undetectable when you just read the facts in the geography in chapter 1 but it's already there that you turn over from the high point of the end of Joshua and they're in strategic general control of the land and Joshua is allotted the land according to the will of the Lord and is now sending out the tribe with the same promises okay that the Lord will give them the rest of the land to go and take their inheritance. The word is always inheritance. And when you flip over to Judges chapter one, it looks like that's what's going to happen.
It looks so promising. And Judah goes up and they begin to take the land and we're reminded of Caleb and all this stuff. And then you get these little subtle hints in chapter one that they couldn't do that because there were chariots there.
Now you understand it doesn't say they fought and were defeated by chariots. They saw chariots and decided not to try. Even though Joshua Yahshua had already told them, you're going to face chariots of iron, and they are no problem. Later in the book of Judges, they defeat 900 chariots of iron.
Then you start letting this one man go, and you begin treating with them and covenanting with them and negotiating with them. And then you've got that whole flip from a few Canaanites were oppressed and lived among the Israelites. Then they forced them into labor. Then the whole script was flipped. Then the Israelites were living among the Canaanites, and then they were oppressed, et cetera.
And the Lord comes and says, what have you done? And he enunciates for us in those first verses of chapter 2 his own dilemma. I promised...
That I would put you in this land. I promised that I would bless you. I promised that I would use you as a blessing.
I promised I would not give you this land to a stiff-necked and disobedient people. And so you've got, after this slide of incomplete conquest, then to intermarriage that we're told. And again, that's not inter-ethnic marriage or interracial marriage.
It's interfaith marriage. That you've got people worshipping completely different gods in the marriage. And so from intermarriage, then to their own idolatry. And so you've got this assimilation.
unto apostasy slide going all the way through. And the Lord enunciates for us the dilemma. It's like, okay, is God going to give up on his people?
And the answer is, but he promised steadfast love and faithfulness. And yet, is he going to give in to a disobedient and wicked people? Okay, what about his holiness?
And what about his justice? What about the fact that he cannot compromise? And you've got this tension. You've got this tension.
that then drives the book forward cyclically, okay, in these cycles. And it's not like, wow, I read the book of Judges, and I picked up that there were cycles. He tells us before the book ever starts, this is how this is going to go. It's like the ultimate spoiler in the whole Bible.
This is exactly what's going to happen for the rest of this book, is that you are going to have all of this disobedience, okay, and idolatry, and then they're going to be oppressed by whomever they're chasing. and then they're going to be miserable and cry out in their distress, and the Lord in his compassion, not his gullibility, and the Lord in his compassion is going to raise up a variety of deliverers and deliver them out of their distress, and then when that deliverer dies, then it just starts all over again, and hence the cycle. So he has already told us that, and we see that tension that drives the whole thing forward.
And then in chapter 3, we begin to see how this plays out. First, through this very, very brief account, which we're not really looking at because there's not much to look at, of Othniel, and then the crazier story of Ehud. So read with me, beginning in verse 7, quickly about Othniel. The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. They forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Ashtoreth.
Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of Cushon Rishatham. Y'all impressed? Of Cushon Rishatham, king of Mesopotamia, and the people of Israel served Cushon Rishatham for eight years.
But when the people of Israel cried out to the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer for the people of Israel who saved him, Othniel, the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother. The spirit of the Lord was upon him. He judged Israel.
He went out to war. the Lord gave Cushonrishatham, king of Mesopotamia, into his hand, and his hand prevailed over Cushonrishatham. So the land had rest for 40 years.
Then Othniel, the son of Kenaz, died. Now, if you sit down, one commentator pointed this out, and it's so true. If you sit down to learn a new card game, you usually do what?
Instead of just explaining all the things, you play a practice round. Everybody lay your cards down, and so we can see this practice round, so we all know what's going on. Othniel is almost like the practice round in the book of Judges.
It is straightforward, fill in the blank with some names of the exact cycle that the Lord described in general. So you've now got the blank of the oppressor, of the king, of how long, of the deliverer, of how long there was peace, all that kind of stuff. And so it becomes this pattern passage for us with these almost one-dimensionally clear characters. We already have met Othniel. He is Caleb's nephew and his son-in-law.
That's just how they did things, you know. And his nephew and his son-in-law, he is a righteous man, and he is married to Caleb's daughter. He is married to an Israelite.
He is not married to a Canaanite. And so he's this kind of logical, righteous man. And on the other side of that equation is Cushon Rishithaim. And Cushon Rishithaim means cushion of the double wickedness.
Now, I'm assuming he got titled this later and his mom did not name him that, okay? I mean, if you think back, like, Dances with Wolves, like, he gets renamed Dances with Wolves. And remember his wife, what was her name?
Stands with a Fist, right? And so, I mean, I was thinking this morning I wanted to name one of my girls. Responds with a Tood, okay? And so you want to name them how they are and what they do. And so you've got this good guy, okay, this righteous deliverer, kind of, and not perfect, but righteous deliverer.
on one side and cushion on the other side, cushion of the double wickedness, kind of righteous and all bad. And so the good guy, the Lord raises up to defeat the bad guy, to rescue the people from their misery, and the land has rest. And so that's the pattern passage, the practice round of the game of cards.
And that's the only... normal round that we have in this whole book because then everything gets a little bit crazier and you kind of go from some standard fill in the blank to what? Mad Libs.
I mean, it literally is like reading the rest of the cycles. You can see the cycle, but the rest of it is like somebody played Mad Libs and truly came up with the craziest people and histories and stories and weapons and victories imaginable. Okay. And that begins with.
our next account. So begin reading with me. 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.
They took possession of the city of Palms, that's Jericho. 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, Ehud, the son of Gerod the Benjamite, a left-handed man.
The people of Israel sent tribute by him to Eglon, the king of Moab. And Ehud made for himself a sword or a dagger with two edges, a cubit in length. That's about 18 inches long. A cubit in length.
He bound it on his right thigh under his clothes. And Ehud presented the tribute to Eglon, the king of Moab. Now, Eglon was a very fat man.
And when Ehud... Ehud had finished presenting the tribute. He sent away the people who carried the tribute, but he himself turned back at the idols or the sculptured stones near Gilgal and said, I have a secret message for you, O king.
And he commanded, the king commanded, silence. And all his attendants went out from his presence. And Ehud came to him as he was sitting alone in his cool roof chamber.
And Ehud said, I have a message from God for you. And the king arose from his seat, and Ehud reached with his left hand, took the sword from his right, 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. Mad libs.
Okay. Then Ehud went out into the porch and closed the doors of the roof chamber behind him and locked them. When Ehud had gone, the servants came and when they saw that the doors of the roof chamber were locked, they thought, surely he's relieving himself in the closet of the cool chamber. And they waited until they were in. 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. Ehud escaped while they delayed and he passed beyond the idols and escaped to Sarah. 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.
They seized the fords of the 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 subdued that day under the hand of Israel and the land had rest for 80 years. Okay, here we go. This does say something.
I think it actually says a lot and it is a bridge for us in so many ways. between what we were told is absolutely true in those first few chapters of Judges and the way that we see this play out. And in the first place, because it's the place that every cycle starts, okay, and is the disease and is a disease of Israel's hardness. So often the word that is used for their own hearts in the book of Judges is the same word used for Pharaoh's heart in Exodus, that he hardened his heart against the Lord.
So look at verse 12. And again, You just start underlining again in the book of Judges. And again, the Israelites did evil in the sight of the Lord. In other words, get used to it.
There was a pro athlete who had made a big comeback, and he was being interviewed. And his quote was, my career was sputtering until I did a 360 and got headed in the right direction. Okay?
Israel is always doing not a 180, they're doing a what? A 360. And they're always heading in the same direction. And so it's again and again and again.
First, what... is the cause of this disease? What is the cause? And it was spelled out for us last week and it is repeated here, but we can never start any place else but at the absolute root of what is going on. Chapter 3, verse 7. forgot God.
I mean, from that phrase, you know how things are going to go. Okay? You know how things are going to go for them.
They forgot God. What? No blame is placed on their circumstances in that phrase.
No blame is placed on their culture. Those things are their context. They are not their cause.
Our contexts never cause us. They can shape us. Okay? They can be a danger or a liability, but they are never the cause of us.
And so the word here is carefully chosen. It echoes the word abandoned in the previous chapters. Okay?
Because forgot is completely internal. Nothing is being done to them from the outside. Everything about this is from the inside out, as it started with our first parents in the garden.
It is all coming from... the inside out. Now, obviously, this is not a literal memory failure. If it were, they would not have what?
Cried out to the Lord, right? So there's not a literal memory failure going on here. There is a complete disregard and ignoring, okay, and ignoring in that way.
It does not mean that they do not know who the Lord is, and hear me, it does not mean that they do not think what they know about him is true. This is not about doubt. or wondering if something is true.
It does not mean that they do not know that it's true. It's because these things are not real to them. Now, I sat down and had a headache because every time I read Jonathan Edwards, I get a headache.
He's so wonderful. He's probably the most important American theologian that has ever lived. He is so dense, and his language is so beautiful and curly, okay?
And so it takes a long time to get through every sentence, but there is a very important sermon that he preached. called A Divine and Supernatural Light. And let me uncurl it for you for just a minute.
Basically what Edwards says in that, and he is the diagnostician in so many ways of our hearts, is that it is not enough to admire or even be inspired by the divine excellencies, as he says, of the things in the Word of God. It is not enough even to be convicted of the truth of them. he has this language that we must have a sense or an experience of the reality of them. The way he says it is this, that there is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet and having an experience of the reality of its sweetness. A man may have the former, which is the rational judgment, a man may have the former even if he has never tasted honey, but he cannot have the latter unless he himself has tasted the honey.
Everything that Edwards points out in this sermon and really throughout his writing is that all of our lives are not a matter of notional knowledge of what we know or intellectually understand. It is a matter of what he calls the inclinations or the wills of our hearts, of what has become real to us. And so the source of all of our forgetting, the source of all of our forgetting.
is that the things that we know are true have never become or have failed to now be real to us. And we know this because there's not anyone in this room that has not heard of the wisdom of God. And yet we stay completely stressed out and completely anxious because that wisdom of God is not real to us.
We've all heard of the presence, of the holy presence. of God. We know that intellectually, and yet we live blatantly immoral, self-serving lives with no thought about it because the holy presence of God is not real to us.
We've all heard of the love of God. All of us intellectually have heard of the love of God, and yet we are completely, we feel snubbed, we feel shamed, we feel worthless, we feel insecure because the overwhelming love of God is not real to us. We know about eternal life. We know about heaven.
And yet we scrap and save and work and try to stay eternally young in our being and in our appearance and make this world a paradise because heaven is not real to us. That's what Jonathan Edwards is saying. That is all encapsulated in they forgot God. The things they knew were true. We're no longer real for them.
All it means when that happens is that we have forgotten. That those things have become lightweight unto being unreal to us. To remember, therefore, is therefore to beg God, because we cannot even do it ourselves, to recenter our hearts in him and to make himself real to us.
That's why married people need to have dates. You're legally married and yet you're unreal. I mean, my heart is no longer centered in you. We have got to get intentional and sit down and look at each other and do what?
Remember why we're married! Remember that we love each other. Remember that the ultimate relationship, humanly speaking, is each other. But you have to be intentional about that. That's what it means.
We've got to stop and we've got to sit down. We've got to look at the Lord and say, help me to remember who you are and how I am loved. How often does that have to happen?
All the time. Tim Keller says, our hearts are like a bucket of water on a cold day. They will freeze over every day unless we continually smash the ice that's forming on top.
I mean, we're used to regular things. It wasn't like, oh, I ate last week. We are very, very busy to eat every day, to exercise, to maintain the things that we think are important in a daily way. Remembering the Lord, centering... in the Lord.
All of that is daily. It's not this one-time conversion experience. And that's what happened to the Israelites here. And the crazy thing is, is if God is not central to us, if we are not centered in him, then no wonder we're serving the bad, because there's no motive to pursue the good and to shun the bad.
I mean, that just becomes this weird, dry kind of legalism that becomes its own idolatry of this is who I am. I'm the good people, and I always do. I mean, the whole motive behind that is because we belong to him. But beyond not behaving correctly, what happens soon enough where there is only forgetting and never the remembering is that we cannot even discern or recognize the good from the bad.
And so it is not by happenstance that you've got all the way in chapter 3, they forgot the Lord, therefore they did what was evil where? In the eyes of the Lord. We have no idea what it looked like to them, and we know what it looked like to the culture. It looked absolutely fine. So you go from chapter 3, they did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord, to the last verse in the book of Judges that said, every man did what was right in his own eyes.
I mean, if I throw out a presidential candidate's name right now, it's like savior or pure evil, like depending on your perspective. I mean, depending on your perspective, who gets to say what is the good and what is the bad? The Lord does. and when they have forgotten him and disregarded him, they don't know their right hand from their left. And so they go from doing evil in the eyes of the Lord to doing everything that is even more evil than what's described here that actually is called what?
Right in their own eyes. That's what's crazy is not only can we not recognize evil, we call evil good. We call evil good and all that comes from this cause, this root that they forgot God.
But notice the cause and effect order because it is cause before consequences. They forgot God, therefore they served the Baals and the Ashtoreth. that is always the order of the cause and effect.
No one is running after the idols, and therefore they forget God. We always have to turn away from God before we pursue anything else. Our hearts have already been dislocated, free-floating, before they find their home someplace else.
And so the Lord is not pointing at the bales. He's pointing at the heart. The Lord never points any place but the heart as the cause of our disease. He's saying it's the heart, not the lame. where the idols come from.
The Canaanites can set up totem poles and carve stones and build temples, but only the Israelites'hearts can make those things idols. Only their hearts can make those things idols. Listen to Michael Wilcock.
It's always the same old, same old boring sin. The sin of centering our lives on the value of the world right around us and therefore showing in practice that those things are more valid, important than the Lord is. and we all know that. How much time do we spend on social media versus reading God's Word?
I mean, that's a cultural value that flip-flopped what is important. How much do we spend on our looks versus our character? How much do we spend on serving those people that can turn around and serve us and gives us social capital versus those who are really suffering and needy and it's sacrificial to love them? I mean, we know how this shows up because our hearts have become uncentered. or we kind of look at this and it's always this big general, they abandoned the Lord and they served.
It's like, why do these passages never catalog specific sins? Because they're about the heart of sin and the heart. Okay, that's going to come out in whatever the idols are of the culture around you.
I mean, but it's going to be the same old boring thing, the heart's dislocation from God. The hearts of this location from our center in God, the fact that we, that he has a right to us, that we belong to him, and so therefore we belong to and serve the idols. That's the cause.
It's always the heart stupid, okay, in case we don't remember all of that. Somebody asked a few years ago when we taught 1 Samuel, and it really was all about it's the heart stupid. They're like, why didn't you entitle it that? I was like, because if you put it's the heart stupid, that could be for every book in the Bible, okay?
That's not specific to 1 Samuel because the Lord's always dealing with the heart. He's always dealing with the heart. What are the consequences of the disease that is coming out of this amnesiatic heart, so to speak? Well, those amnesiatic hearts that forget the Lord then lead them to cuddle up with this culture.
To what degree? To the point of intermarrying with them and worshiping their gods. And so then you've got that downward slide.
So therefore, the consequences of that are that they first get absorbed into these nations, then they get dominated by them, then they get oppressed by them, then they get utterly enslaved to them. That's always the trajectory. In verse 7, it says they served their gods. In verse 8, it says they served their tyrant.
It's always going to go from one to the other. Sin is getting what you want. And they're always getting what they want, and then some. And just like with all of our sin, we get far enough into what we want and find out what? It's not what we want.
I mean, sin is always self-destructive, that it's not really what we want. There's the language here that God sold them to Eglon, okay? And the reason that it's the selling and that that's a logical kind of consequence and continuation of where they are going is he's not only saying this is what you deserve, it's really saying because this is what you are like. You belong over here. This is what you are running after.
And then you pause for just a second in the Mad Libs, okay, in the details of what are happening in this story, and you've got the irony of these enemies. If you look down at all the ites, okay, that are listed in the land of Canaan that were coming under the severe but very specific judgment of God, neither the Moabites or the Amalekites are found there. They lived outside the borders of Canaan.
They lived on the other side of the river. All of Deuteronomy is given on the plains of Moab. Okay?
Moab had already been dealt with and defeated. King Balak of Moab is the one that called Balaam to come and cursed Israel. Moab had already been defeated. When Moses'hands were held up by Aaron and Hur, they defeated the Amalekites when they were coming out of Egypt to begin with.
These people should already have been dealt with had they not reversed the story. And then as the ultimate kind of gut punch, they have now taken Jericho and are using it as their headquarters. The ultimate sign of the conquest, the ultimate sign of God's favor and the fulfillment of his promises now belong to them, and Eglon is operating out of there. So what are we seeing?
We're seeing the undoing of the conquest. We're seeing the judgment narrative here flipped, and it's not that he's merely paying them back. God is not merely paying them back. If he paid them back and withdrew completely, what? They would be destroyed.
I mean, we know that. If we withdrew completely, they would be utterly destroyed. His anger is kindled, yes. And why is his anger kindled? Why is that good news for us?
Where does his anger come from? His love. We can pass people on a street corner that are so destitute and so down and out and perhaps have written their own destructive story, and we have a moment of awe and we keep driving. Why? Because it's not our kid.
We would not pass our child on that street corner in that condition, and yet it would make us so angry. That is the Lord's anger is always coming from his love because they're his. They are his. He has picked them up and carried them across the sea and through the wilderness and across the river and tried to plant them in this land, and now they're homeless on the street corner in their own destruction, their own addiction, in their own idolatry in their way. He loves them so much he will not leave them comfortably in their sin.
I remember a number of years ago a friend of mine called and she was really in the grips of just some habitual really bad choices and just defiance of the Lord and she was coming to the end of herself and she says, I know at this point that God has completely abandoned me. And I said, oh no, he's right there making you miserable. That's what he's doing.
Praise be to God. He is right there making you miserable. He loves us too much to leave us comfortably in our sin.
Ralph Davis, misery is not deliverance. But if misery pries our hands off of sin, then it might be the beginning of our deliverance. Misery is not deliverance.
But if that misery is used to pry our hands off the sin, it might be the beginning of it. God hands them over, yes, but not to destroy them, to awaken them. And yet they are slow to wake up. Now it's 18 years. 18 years of this before they cry out.
And when they do, how do they cry out? The literal translation there is they give a yelp of pain. They cry out only.
in their distress. Again, God is not gullible. There is no inkling here of repentance.
The cry is arising from the experience of distress, not from a realization of sin, not from an ownership here of sin. And how do we know? Save us from them, not save us from us.
Okay, the cry of repentance is always save us from us, but save us from them. So it's a cry of survival. It is not a cry their submission.
It's like that didn't quite qualify what? And God responds and he knows it's a completely incomplete if not incorrect cry and God still responds because he hates their misery. He comes running in his compassion and his compassion is the only reason that all these cycles are not each and every one of them a fatal crash.
And how does he run towards them? In this bizarre mad-lib character named Ehud. Okay, so the deliverance here takes this bizarre twist. We don't have Othniel anymore.
We have Ehud. But the blank is the same. Look at verse 15. This is the theme of every judge's chapter or every judge's cycle. Okay, the Lord heard their cry and he what? Raised up a deliverer.
Don't miss the main point. The Lord is delivering. The Lord is rescuing. The Lord is lifting them up in his compassion.
So when we get lost in the details, sometimes we forget that he delights to rescue. He delights to love, but we might be really surprised how he does it. He does it here with Ehud's left hand.
So I want you to see three things here about Ehud, this crazy left-handed savior. The first thing is, what is the logic here of Ehud's left hand? And the answer is... Ain't no logic. There's no logic to this at all.
The story is set up, the history is set up in its absurdity because it is absurd. The whole story is left-handed. The whole story is unexpected. What do we read about from beginning to end in the scripture?
We read about God's right hand. God is always talking about his own right hand. He destroys his enemies with his right hand. He swears by his own right hand. He swears by his own right hand.
He swears by his right hand. He bestows blessings and pleasures forevermore at his own right hand. His chosen one sits at his right hand because it's the right hand that is the sign of honor and power and ability and majesty and strength. Okay. So into this right-handed world enters Ehud, this left-handed man.
Now the crazy thing is the name Benjamin, he is of the tribe of Benjamin, means the name of the Lord. Son of the right hand. That is what the name Benjamin means.
So in this whole thing, we're not speaking the language, so we're not seeing it. Enter Ehud from son of the right hand who is a left-handed man. That's how it reads.
He is a son of the right hand who is here a left-handed man. What does it mean that he is left-handed? Well, there are a few.
There are very few that mean he's especially gifted. Charles Shackeford was a NBA pro basketball player, and he was also making a great resurgence, and he was interviewed after a game where he had really shown out, and they said, what is the secret to your just dominance right now on the court? He goes, I can shoot with the right hand. I can shoot with the left hand.
Man, I'm amphibious, okay? I'm amphibious, man, okay? The passage could be saying here, That Ehud is amphibious, that he's ambidextrous, okay, that he is especially gifted. I don't think that's what he's saying because the language here for left-handed actually means restricted in the right hand.
And so most probably, and I've now looked at 14, I think, different commentators this weekend, I think 12 to 13 of them all agree, that this means of some kind of limitation, if not full-on paralysis, deformity, or something in his right hand. And he is forced into being here a left-handed man. Therefore... The ultimate irony in the story is that everybody in the story is focused on his weakness. Everybody in the story is focused on his weakness, and that irony sets up this whole series of ironies that just unfold as this brief story unfolds for us.
So it's probably Ehud's left-handedness that made him the logical choice to take this agricultural tribute to this nasty fat king, okay, who has 10,000 able-bodied soldiers and all the things. Because what? Because he was no threat at all.
This shows the abject humiliation of Israel. It's all in the language here. They sent a tribute to Eglon, what does it say there? By Ehud's hand. They literally sent it by his wrong hand to show who they were.
He is no security risk at all. There is no threat here. When my husband, when we were newlyweds and he was finishing grad school, and he had, thankfully, a number of job options, we're sitting down and talking through all these different places we could live and all these things. He's like, I mean...
What do you think I should do? And he's thinking I'm going to talk about his giftedness and opportunities and upper mobility. I was like, as long as you work with nothing but elderly, homely, overfat, not fun women, I don't care. I don't care where you work. Okay?
I mean, it's like he's the catch of the century. And I was like, I want no threat. Okay?
No threat to me. And so that's kind of who Ehud is. He's the walking in as Mr. No Threat. They don't even search him.
He walks right up. And he's able to circle back. and walk right back in and get a private audience with the king.
No security detail, nothing there, because he is no threat at all, because he is not dances with wolves. He is least likely to succeed, okay? It's kind of his name here. And so you've kind of got this mismatch of the sign of Moab's strength and the sign of Israel's weakness in the same room. And Eglon is huge.
Understand, very fat man, that is not typical biblical language. Okay, that is not typical biblical language. So this is saying something significant. Back in my days in college, people would put all their dietary inspirational comments and goals on sticky notes and put them all over the mirror upstairs in the sorority house. You know, it's like homecoming is coming, spring break is coming, you want to be able to get back in your jeans, you know, all the kind of things.
And I loved it. One day... I walked in, there was a sticky note in there, and you have to understand, this was like the 80s when everybody was wearing like Benetton and a spree, like oversized belt, you know, sweater.
And they said, you're not fat until your sweaters don't fit, right? That's like the ultimate standard. You're not fat until your sweaters don't fit, right? Eglon is fat by any standard, okay?
His sweaters don't fit. This is the overwhelming thing about him. And so he comes back in, this left-handed man that is no threat at all.
And he says, I have a message for you. I have a message from God, from the generic word God, not Yahweh there. He probably would not have responded to that.
And so he stands up, right, to make himself an easier target. Because if like Jabba the Hutt had been sitting down, it would have been hard to give the deadly blow. And instead, he stands up. I have a message for you. And literally, the dagger, the sword is the message.
And if you look back at what Balaam, pagan prophet, said to Moab. about Israel is that he will overrun the nations and pierce you. And so we're seeing this judgment lived out in here. And so you've got all these ironies, like in receiving the offering, Eglon becomes the offering.
His name means bull calf, like fatted calf. And so he is literally becoming the sacrificial offering. And so Ehud does this and just leaves it in there because he's a very fat man. I mean, my era of Saturday Night Live every week, there were Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy.
I don't know how many of you remember Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy, but one of my very favorite ones was, if you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let them go, because man, they're gone. That's my favorite, okay? I mean, if you ever stick a double-edged dagger in the gut of a really fat man, just leave it there, because man, it's gone, okay? It is gone, and that's exactly what he does.
He leaves it right then. And so then you've got this whole irony that all of his servants are there. His security detail is there, and where are they? They're standing outside the door because he's taking this awkwardly long time in the restroom. And you've got this long time, and you have the smell of dung everywhere because it's all over the floor because the Bible tells us it is.
And so they're like, okay, well, obviously this is what's going on. And in the meantime... Awkward left-handed Ehud has jumped over the railing and has made his mistake.
They never dreamed anything could have happened with large king and left-handed man. And then the final irony is that it's Ehud. Ehud, who is blowing the trumpet. Ehud, who is rallying the troop.
Ehud, who is leading them into battle. And we're told again in verse 29, Moab has these crazy superior forces. The rest of them have basically been enslaved for 18 years.
And they've got these superior forces. Where's the logic? There is none.
There is no logic to this whole left-handed story. Moab is delivered by God into Israel's left hand. So what's the lesson?
What's the lesson here of Ehud's left hand? The lesson is not that Eglon and all his attendants are really bumbling idiots and they're all shown to be who they are. They're just no match for God's plans. God raised up a deliverer.
It doesn't matter who it was. God raised up a deliverer and therefore he was going to deliver. God is finished with his judgment purposes for Eglon. okay his name is now no longer an instrument okay and now he is receiving God's justice at all if you look back at the active verbs the Lord raised up the Lord raised up the Lord gave the Lord gave the Lord raised up because he is always no matter who's filling in the blanks whether it's a normal one or a mad loved one he is the constant through all of them the point is there are no limits to the resources and the plans and the purposes of Almighty God And this is only going to become clearer as we go through crazier cycles here in the judges.
We can know God's promises. We can claim God's promises. We can hold God to his promises.
But he is never bound to our expectations of how he is going to fulfill them. Lord, you have promised that you're not going to withhold anything good from me. You've promised that. Now, I'm going to tell you how that needs to look, Lord. I've decided this is the good.
Lord, you've told us that you would not let our foot slip, that you would not ever leave us or forsake us. Let me tell you what that needs to look like. Lord, you made promises in baptism to my own children. I don't see them.
Let me show you, Lord, what that's got to look like. Lord, we know that we need to ultimately need you, but I don't want to feel any need. I never want to feel any need.
I don't want my children to feel any need. And so we're always trying to tell him how to keep his promises to us. And this is just one story of a billion in the scripture that says those promises are all yes and amen and Jesus. And we have no idea how he's going to fulfill them.
But he will. He has and he will. We cling to his character.
We cling to his promises. But that does not mean that we can predict. And it does not mean that we can even understand what he is doing in our lives.
He is the God of surprises. already talked about that. Do we know enough of him and his promises and what he has done for us in Jesus to rest in his methods, to rest in the way that those things play out?
Malcolm Gite, who is an Anglican priest and a poet, has all this great writing on words because he's a poet on the difference in comprehension and apprehension. I got totally lost reading all of this in the last couple of days. but comprehension is something that the the prehend part means to get something but but when we talk about comprehensive it means what we get the whole thing we can wrap our minds completely or if we comprehend something we can wrap our minds completely around it which means that thing can't be any bigger than my mind because my mind's got to be bigger and be able to wrap all the way around it what i love in the writing of jonathan edwards is this you constant language of apprehended and apprehension, okay? What that means is we can grab just a little bit of it. We get a glimmer of it.
We can just touch it, and then we can grab a little, and it draws us into grabbing more and more and more, but we'll never get the whole thing. My neighbor just got back from the northern peninsula of Michigan, and she went up to see the northern lights, and she goes, I've wanted my whole life. It's a bucket list thing, and she's well up there in age, and she said, you read about it?
you look at pictures, you look at videos, then you see it. And she's like, and you just, you can't comprehend, right? I mean, you read John chapter 1, we can't comprehend that. We can apprehend that, that the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And so that's what, I mean, so when we look at the Lord's methods, it's an apprehension of his loving presence and his promises in our lives.
It is never a total comprehension. God is nothing like their idols, nothing like their false gods with the limited means and the limited areas of influence. I mean, it's the left-handedness, it's the unexpectedness, it's the upside-downness where his glory and his power shine more brightly.
And this is made more clear. clear, okay, more explicit for us in the New Testament. 1 Corinthians chapter 1. Think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were powerful.
Not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of this world to shame the wise and the weak things to shame the strong. And the low things and the despised things that are not to nullify things that are so that what?
No one can boast. Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord. That's the lesson of the left hand.
That is the lesson here of the left hand that Israel fails to grasp here. No one can boast before the Lord. Anyone can boast in the Lord. That's what 1 Corinthians tells us.
That's what the story of Ehud tells us. That's what all the cycles and the judges tell us. No one can boast before the Lord, but anyone can boast in the Lord.
Israel sent a tribute of their humiliation. God raised up a left-handed deliverer, and he made a dagger. He got it. There was something bigger here going on. Ehud learned the lesson.
He can blow the trumpet. And instead of saying, hey, who's the biggest, strongest guy here? Lead us into battle. He's like, you can follow even me. Because the Lord, it sounds just like Joshua.
Because the Lord has given them into your hand. And so it's another story that takes us back to Joshua, that this rabble-rouser led by the left-handed man that go against 10,000 strong, able-bodied soldiers and completely wipe them out. God can use anyone to accomplish his purposes.
He can use any means to accomplish his purposes. We can go ahead and boast in our confidence in that because we can only boast in them. We think that judges kind of...
shades God's glory. It just magnifies God's glory. There's no logic here except for the fact that he is committed to his people.
What are the limits of Ehud's left hand? Well, we see it in chapter 4, verse 1. And what does it say? Nobody ever calligraphies this and puts it on their wall, but it's a really common verse in the scripture.
And the Israelites again did what was evil. in the eyes of the Lord. Get used to it.
How ultimately effective was Ehud? And the answer is he was not, right? I mean, he was not. He was a deliverer from their, a momentary deliverer from their oppression. I mean, you look at this cool story and he has gone from this harmless, you know, probably handicapped in some way, envoy to this, to this crazy savvy.
brave executioner to, that's all. It stops right there. That's as much as he was because he's not an adequate savior.
With just one hand, he is supposed to be a signpost to the Lord. I mean, I've gone through seasons in ministry, particularly campus ministry, that things are going so well that I just end up with this huge Messiah complex. And all of my hands are pointing to me.
Come here, young one. Let me help you, right? I've got all the answers and all the things.
And the way that the Lord showed me again and again and again, that it was like some moment, and then this precious girl that I had misled towards me instead of towards him is falling. I'm not an adequate savior. Ehud is not an adequate savior. By God's power, he can deliver them from Moab, but he cannot deliver them from themselves. He cannot tear down the idols in their hearts.
And you have this refrain through this passage that there are these carved stones, okay, which means probably physical idols. There are these carved stones that are where? It tells us twice in this passage.
They're at Gilgal. Those are not the only stones at Gilgal. Do you remember the first week of Joshua?
Twelve stones got carried by the tribes up out of that river and set right there so that all the generations would know who the Lord is. and what he has done. And now they've got idols next door. And it doesn't say he keeps passing the Joshua stones. He keeps passing the idols.
Why doesn't he stop and tear them down? We don't know. There's a lot of coexistence going on.
He is not an adequate savior. Ehud cannot break them from the real bondage. Ehud himself needs saving. My best friend lives in DC. There is that homeless man in their kind of neighborhood spot that she sees a lot, buys them breakfast and does different things.
And so she was talking to him one morning visiting, she goes, okay, I'm going in here, you know, what do you need? And he kind of gave her a list and she's adding it to her list and then he looked up and he grabbed her hand and he said, I'm going to give you a list. And she said, okay, I'm going to give you a list. And he said, okay, I'm going to give you a out of her hand, he said, what I really need is a girlfriend.
She's like, okay, well, all right. Are we brave enough? Are we truly, I'm asking, are we brave enough to ever ask God for what we really need? Nancy Guthrie's book on praying through the Bible for your children means so very much to me because every single day from whatever passage she's looking at is reminding me to beg the Lord for what I really need and for what my children really need.
I have forgotten it two hours later. I mean, it's crazy. Do we know to ask for what we really need? And what we really need is, Lord, save me from me.
That is the ultimate thing. It is not traveling mercies or health or money. or anything. Not that those things do not matter, but what we ultimately need is saving from ourselves.
They never do ask that here. So the question that we have to wonder for reading, really reading conversationally, so to speak, interacting with God's word, why is that not the end of the story? I mean, Ehud completely delivers them, and then again they do evil.
Why is that not the end of the story? And then you're like, wait. why is every Old Testament story not the end of the story? Why was the garden not just the end of the story? Why was Cain and Abel not the end of the story?
Why was Babel not the end of the story? Why, after the Lord comes to Abraham and makes all these promises to him, and he picks up and he moves, but then he goes wandering around and lying that Sarah is his sister, and he gives away his wife. Why is that not the end of the story?
Why, when Judah treats his own daughter-in-law as a prostitute and impregnates her without even knowing, that's like a whole other thing, why is that not the end of the story? of the story why is Exodus not then so why is selling Joseph not the end of the story why is the disobedience in the wilderness not the end of the story why is every single cycle and judges not the end of the story why Because there's a determination of God's heart. We're determined by our hearts, and so is God. And you know what you find in God's heart?
Determination. Absolute, covenantal, committed... promised determination to chase after people and make them his own.
And only the determination of God's heart can overcome the disease in our hearts. Three things here that are just is true in all of these accounts, because these are more pattern passages, and then we are really going to get into it, okay? But in the first place, it's the determination, his determination, that brings him into our mess. We talk about taking our mess to God. You understand, we have no right to take our mess to God.
He has to come to it. We don't get to approach God without it, I mean, ever. And so it's the fact that he comes to it, and that's what shocks all of our polite sensitivities.
Why are we talking about all this blood and guts and gore and dung and fat and all of this stuff in this story? Why is it even here? Because the Lord will come into our mess. God is not afraid of the realities.
He runs to the realities. I was talking to a young mom friend recently. She's in it, in it with young kids, all the physical labor and the fun of young kids.
And her mom had come for an extended visit. And I said, I said, hey, how was that? Was that helpful? And she was like, are you kidding?
She's like, she never ever does anything. She just takes pictures and sends them to her friends. She's like, she wants the press.
She doesn't want the realities, right? She wants the press and she doesn't want the realities. God wants the realities.
He is constantly running to the realities. You know, so often we go to council. or we go to therapy because it's trying to pull things out of us. It's trying to get us to be honest.
How honest are we with God? Really, I mean, I'm talking about gut level. How honest are we with God?
Because I got a news flash for you. He already knows, okay? He already knows.
So why aren't we honest? We don't want to know. We don't want to put words to it.
It makes it too real. It makes our realities too real in that way. But here's what I want you to understand about bringing our messy realities to God. Our confession, okay, our honest confession before the Lord. does not invite his love.
You know what our honest confession does? It seizes his love. It's not inviting it like, if I do this, then the... It's realizing it for us. It's realizing how loved we are for us that we get to say this, and he's still there, and he sees this, and he is still there.
Listen to Ralph Davis. That's the glory of this passage. It tells us that Yahweh deals with the dirty, mixed-up affairs of life in which his people find themselves. Here we are, some in family situations we have messed up, some in emotional trauma, some in grief and sorrow, or the clutches of temptation.
Life seems to be a mass of twisted coat hangers and disconnected doorknobs. And the glory of this text is that it tells us that Yahweh is not a white-gloved, standoffish God out somewhere in remote left field of the universe who hesitates to get his strong right arm dirty in the nasty yuck of our lives. The God of the Bible does not hold back in the wild bill yonder somewhere waiting for you to pour Clorox and spray Lysol over the affairs of your life before he will touch it.
Whether you can comfortably put it together or not, he is the God who delights, delivers people in their messes. His determination leads him into our messes, but it's not just that he's there with us. It goes further.
His determination doesn't just love us, as God on high, as he does, and pick them up and deliver them. He clothed him in our flesh. He really came into the mess. He put on our flesh.
He came as one of us. And what did he do while he was here with one of us? He touched lepers and has prostitutes snotting and crying all over his feet and wiping him.
I want you to think about what prostitutes in downtown Nashville look like right now. Do you want them rubbing all over you, even all over your feet? Someone whose skin is falling off, would you touch them? Would you run to them? He is running towards those kind of mess.
A woman who's been bleeding for 12 years, no one will get anywhere near her. She's always unclean, and she is touching him. A man who's been a demoniac, who is naked and torn to bits in the tombs, comes running towards him, and he was... That's what it means that he comes into our mess.
He put on our flesh, and his flesh came into our mess, our pain, as... one of us and not just one of us as what as the lowest of us he came as one of the ones that we would not necessarily believe he is the judge right the judge of all judges and when he came we could not even recognize him Isaiah 53 he had no former majesty that we should look at him and no beauty that we should desire him he was despised and rejected by men a man of sorrows acquainted with grief Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. He came as the low one.
He came as the outsider. He came as the left-handed one, so to speak. And that's where so much of mainline theology will stop right there. he's willing to come into our mess, and he is willing to become one of us, that he can relate to us. And so what we have from the Lord, according to all of that, is that we have solidarity, and we have empathy, and it stops right there.
But the Lord did not just come to relate to us. He did, he came to what? To redeem us.
Solidarity is not enough. He had to substitute. He had to substitute. How far will he come into this kind of mess in the story or into the mess of our lives? It's not enough for him to come to the mess.
It's not enough for him to even become one of us. He comes all the way. Why does he come?
Because he came to bear judgment, not to bring it. Jesus says that again and again and again. Okay, I came to bear the judgment and not to bring it. Not only is he not above. blood and guts.
He is not above his own blood and guts. He is not above his own blood and guts to redeem us. If he had just come as the warrior, if he had just come as the judge, if he had just slain the enemy, what? It would have been us.
If he had slain the enemy, it would have been us. That, this, is the ultimate, shocking, left-handed, unexpected work of God. That he does not win us.
He does not win us by slaying the sinner. He wins us by becoming the sin. That's the exchange. It's what's required. It's not really super extra cool.
It's what's required. He doesn't win us by slaying the sinner. He wins us by becoming the sin.
We do not have a left-handed Savior. We have what? We have a Savior who is deformed, eternally deformed in what?
Both hands. We have a Savior who's deformed in both hands. And you know where he is right now on Wednesday morning?
He is at the Father's almighty right hand, and you know what he's doing? He's showing him his hands. He's showing him his hands for me. And then that same Lord with those same hands promises that nothing can snatch me out of those hands.
Out of those eternally deformed hands that I can never forget as I'm wrapped up in them how much I'm loved by them because they are forever scarred with scars that I deserve. With my scars. He nailed them to our cross. He bears my scars in his body forever. Why?
Because he loves us. That's always the answer. We start at the same place every week.
We end up at the same place every week because he loves us. It's only the determination of that heart of God's love. that we know because it's accomplished for us, not just written down for us, not wished for us, because it is accomplished for us, can overcome the disease of our heart.
So the question for us this morning is, will I bring my divided heart? Will I bring my diseased heart to be captured by that heart? And when I say captured, I mean captured.
Because there is no place anywhere in the scripture that tells you that you can be Christ-covered if you are not Christ-captured. We want the coverage. We just want the, I mean, we cannot be Christ-covered unless we are Christ-captured. Captured doesn't sound good to us until we understand what it means to be captured by the Lord. And what does it mean?
He will tend his. block like a shepherd. He will pick up the lambs and carry them in his arms close to his heart. That's what captured by the Lord means. That's what captured by the Lord means.
It means full security. It means full love. And you know what it means?
No autonomy. Because when you're captured and you're being carried, how much is up to you? Not much. So I have an assignment for all of us.
Will you remember? I sat at the time, I'm going to start crying. I've been crying all morning.
Because it came across my mind, and I looked it up, and I probably watched it 20 times. In the Super Bowl of 2020, before the whole world changed about a month later, in the Super Bowl of 2020, 2020, there was a commercial that blew all the rest of them away. It was a Google commercial called Loretta. I don't know how many of you remember that.
And it actually started, it really is the grandfather, the 85-year-old grandfather of a Google employee. who had lost his wife. And it's advertising Google Assistant that you can just tell things and it will keep lists and do things for you. And his voice comes on and he says, Google. And first he types in, how to not forget.
and Google responds, repeat details to yourself, and so he starts, Google, show me pictures of Loretta, it's all these pictures of them, like all the way, that's so precious, and he said, Google, Remind me that she had such beautiful handwriting. She loved tulips. They were her favorite, and there were video clips and photos all through this.
She always snorted when she laughed. She always told me not to miss her too much and get out of the dang house. You remember when we went to Alaska?
Do you remember our honeymoon? And it's all of these things through, and at the very end it says Google. Don't let me forget I'm the luckiest man in the world.
I live very close with mind memory loss as so many of you do and it is so heartbreaking but y'all the bible's not talking about that it's talking about heart memory how not, how to not forget. And you know what we have to do is go back and read again and again and again these things that are my history of how the Lord loves me. But you know what I need in addition? I need my own list said out loud and written down. Look what the Lord has done for me.
Look back over my life. Look how he has provided for me. Look how he has protected me.
Look how he has brought me to himself. Look what he has taught me. Look at my husband.
Look at my children. Look at my family. I mean, look at what the Lord has done for me. done and loved me and taught me.
Memory is a work. It is a work. Don't come to the end of any Bible study and say, that sounds good. Go back to they forgot God. All of this was theirs and they forgot God.
And the next verse is they forgot God. And the next verse is they forgot God. How will that not be us? How will that not be us? Can we center ourselves in the eternal truth that his heart is centered on me?
And what he has done to make me his own. Go watch that commercial, dare you. Okay.
Love y'all. We're praying. Oh, Lord, I pray that we would not forget.
Lord, we know, we comprehend, but we don't apprehend, and we don't sit there, Lord, we don't look to you. We don't speak of your marvelous deeds to one another and to our children. Lord, everything else... seems more real and more concrete and more important and more formative to us than you and your love. May we break the ice that forms over our hearts every day.
And Lord, may we keep a running list of the crazy monuments of your love. and care for us all the way through. Lord, thank you so much that when we forget you, you never forget us.
And I pray that by your spirit, through your great love, Lord, that you would kindle in us heart memory, heart memory, Lord, that not only appreciates but that centers and obeys. Lord, thank you so much that not only are we counting down the days until you come for us, that you're counting down the days. And, Lord, grow our memories, Lord, that our futures might be transformed.
by what we already know to be true of you and your love. Thank you for this crazy account. Thank you that you come into our mess.
Thank you that you do not leave us alone. Thank you that you bear my scars, and thank you that you plead them for the Father. And we pray it all in Jesus'name. Amen. Amen.
Thank you. Next week, we're back at it. Big passages, lots of stuff.
Gird up. Eat your Wheaties.