Well, we've called this series in the book of Judges Hope in Dark Times. We often find ourselves in dark places in life. I mean, the obvious one at the moment is Covid, which has caused all kinds of chaos, anxiety, stress and difficulty—and in some cases, serious illness and even death.
But there are other illnesses people go through. We've prayed for one of our brothers this morning, undergoing surgery shortly. Or perhaps it's darkness at work—difficult times at work, difficult, unrealistic expectations—or maybe even a complete lack of work. Some people battle for many years with depression. Or maybe it's trying to secure the help we need for our children, or for our ageing parents, or for your husband or wife who needs expert help and you're fighting to secure it.
Or maybe some folk here have been, at times, on the receiving end of various types of abuse—dark places. And in dark times, the church should be a place of safety, a place where people can come and find that they can be gently rebuilt by the gentle and lowly Lord Jesus Christ.
Tragically, though, there have been times—and they come out in the news from time to time—when churches themselves have been places of yet further danger, and people have discovered the darkness reaches even into the church, and they experience the same problems they had in the world in the very place that should be safe.
The Bible does not just contain stories of victory—stories in which everything is obviously going well, God is self-evidently blessing his people, his people and their adventures in life are on the front foot, and things are moving forwards and they all lived happily ever after. There are stories like that in the Bible. But there are also stories of dark times in the Bible, when God's purposes seem somewhat hidden, when things appear to be going backwards—even when the darkness comes from within the people of God, what should be the shining light and the place of safety.
Now, I personally think it's wonderful that the Bible contains portions like that, because we don't all live in the sunshine. And isn't it good to read of God's goodness shining through the mess—and not only to read of God's goodness in times when things are going so well we sometimes find it hard to relate to?
In fact, none of us actually lives in the sunshine. And that's because all of us are sinful. All of our hearts are warped and twisted. We deserve the judgement of God, and therefore all of us actually live in dark times. All of us need God's deliverance, whether we feel that or not.
And Judges is just such a book. It is a book in which times are dark, and yet God's hope and goodness wonderfully shine through anyway. Judges is a book in which we read of ugly things done to God's people, in which we read of ugly things done by God's people—and yet still hope shines. God shines.
If you were here last time, Lee introduced us to the way in which the book of Judges tells the story of a cycle. A cycle in which the people of Israel turn their backs on the one true God to worship other gods instead. Then, as a result, God leaves them to be oppressed by foreign powers, and their lives are made miserable for many years before they cry out to God in despair and ask for his rescue.
And God, in his kindness and goodness, remembers that these are the people he's promised to bless—and in grace, he comes in to rescue them by raising up a warrior, which the Bible calls a deliverer or a judge, who goes into battle, defeats the foreign power, and times are good again—until the judge dies. And then it's right back to where it was before.
Actually, no—it's worse than where it was before. We're actually told that when the judge dies—chapter 2, verse 19—the people return to ways even more corrupt than those of their ancestors. It's not a cycle—it's a downward spiral, as it gets worse with every run through the pattern.
And we very briefly met the first judge last time. We met him briefly because he's only mentioned briefly—a man called Othniel, who in many ways was the model judge. All the rest are distortions, slightly, of what they should be. Othniel dies—chapter 3, verse 11—and chapter 3, verse 12, you know what's coming next, don't you?
"Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord." So God handed them over to the people of Moab and their king, King Eglon—this time for eighteen years. The people cry out to God, and God raises up a judge to look after them—a man called Ehud.
Now, we're going to watch this story play out. And as we do, we will see some encouraging things about the way in which God is our rescuer and our deliverer.
But before we look at the human story playing out in history—the Ehud, the people of Israel, the ways in which even the Moabites contributed to their own overthrow—before we get to that, let me just point out the really important thing here, which is that God is the hero of this story. This is not a story about Ehud rescuing Israel. This is a story about God rescuing Israel.
So, for example, verse 12: it is God in whose eyes the people of Israel did evil. And verse 12: it's God who gave Eglon king of Moab power over Israel. So it's not the devil that did it—God gave Eglon power over Israel. Get your head around that one—that was God's doing.
At verse 15, it was God that they cried out to. Verse 15, it was God who gave them a deliverer called Ehud. And then, at the end of the story, verse 28, it turns out that it was the Lord who had given Moab, the enemy, into their hands.
God is the main player on the stage here. This is God's story in which human beings play their part. God is the hero, and we mustn't forget that as we look at what the various human beings do. This is a story inviting us to trust God—not to put our trust in princes, who are mortal and who will fail us.
But having said that, let's look at three things in this story about the way in which God delivers us.
Number one: God rescues through a champion.
God rescues through a champion. Interesting to compare Othniel and Ehud at this point. So chapter 3, verse 10, we're told that Othniel—the Spirit of the Lord came on him so that he became Israel's judge and he went to war. What, just Othniel? No, of course not. The Israelite army was mobilised—he led the army into battle and they defeated the unpronounceable king who was causing them grief.
Whereas with Ehud, what happens is, as the story goes on and the cast on the stage—if you imagine it as a sort of staged production—just gradually thins out, until at the heart of the action you have just two people. Very much intense.
I don't know if you noticed—when you get to kind of verse 20, 21, 22, the story is going really slowly. It is in slow motion, okay? Literally—look. So, he reaches with his left hand—stabbed him—no—drew the sword from his right thigh. You're watching the sword go in slowly. You're watching the servants outside, wondering whether to open the door—they waited to the point of embarrassment.
I liked the translation Lee read for us, because it captures the word—then you get behold—and yeah, behold, they're going to open the door—no, behold, no one opened the door—"Oh, come on!" It's going so slowly, with just these two people on stage.
And only once Eglon is dead and Ehud has escaped does he draft in the other Israelites, who can help to come and to kill the other Moabites, to secure the country's borders, and so on.
The turning point of the narrative, the centrepiece, is when God's champion—Israel's champion—assassinates Moab's king one-on-one. Now, this is a pattern we meet again in the Bible several times. For example, King David. David becomes king, and immediately there's a crisis, and you have a huge battle scene.
And I won't get the cast that did this for the all-age teaching slot to come and reenact it, but some of you were here for that. You have two armies on opposite sides of a great big valley—the Israelite army and the Philistine army.
Now, what happens next? Do they advance down in battle formation to the foot of the valley, form two massive shield walls that step forwards and lock and try stabbing underneath until finally the shield walls all break down, and you have 10,000 people—you can't work out who's on what side—and it's just chaos?
No, that's not how the story happens at all. It's one story that many children know from the Old Testament if they don't know of any other. No, the Philistines choose one champion—Goliath, a nine-foot-tall man—and Israel sends forth the young David, the shepherd boy, who with his sling dispatches Goliath. And that's it. The battle's over. One-on-one.
Here we are—the people of God—oppressed by our own sin, oppressed by the much suffering in our lives, oppressed by sickness, by all kinds of darkness. The battle is won as the Lord Jesus, God's champion, fights in darkness on the cross. All alone, he delivers the decisive blow to sin, to death, to the devil. And so deliverance comes not because we battle the powers of darkness, but because our champion does it for us.
Now, that's already happened. The decisive blow has already been dealt. And we live after that—the hinge in the greatest story of all. We live after the turning point in the greatest narrative of all time. And because we live after that, it means the final victory is just an exercise of mopping up. It's absolutely certain that victory will come.
God rescues through a champion.
Second, God rescues to a place of laughter.
God rescues to a place of laughter.
One of the hardest things about this story is that we are meant to find it funny. Now, the trouble is, we're not actually sure if we are allowed to find it funny. We're not sure if the humour is appropriate.
Let me do a little experiment here: try telling the story in all its colour to a seven-year-old boy. Statistically speaking, most of them will find it very funny. This is toilet humour. This is literally toilet humour. Some of the jokes actually revolve around whether or not the king is on the loo.
Now, this is—so you see—are we meant to laugh at that or no? We feel a little awkward. Why is this passage even being read in church? This is the kind of humour that, if it was shown on stage, would have Christians writing to their MP and starting petitions on change.org to have the production shut down. But it's in the Bible, and we are meant to find it funny. And specifically, we are meant to find the Moabites funny.
Let me take you through the cast. Let's start with the king—King Moab—sorry, the king of Moab, King Eglon. We are told he was fat. In fact, we are told he was exceedingly fat—so fat that an 18-inch blade found space to disappear entirely. If they did a post-mortem, when they had to run the X-ray, they would never believe what they found stashed inside the man's belly. One writer describes him as having the ideal physique for a sumo wrestler. And that is roughly it.
Now, don't get me wrong. We are not to laugh at people who are overweight. It is unkind. Many people—most people—who are overweight are very aware of their own challenge. They are embarrassed by it. They are battling it, and often it's for reasons that are not their fault. So this is not a story to laugh at people who are overweight.
But Eglon is different. We are meant to laugh at him—partly because his being overweight was his own doing. This was a culture in which nobody was overweight. Food was hard to come by. You didn't have a kind of supermarket where you could just go and buy anything, of any season, flown in from Argentina. You had to work hard. Often rains would fail, and you'd only grow enough for that season. If the crops failed, you would starve. And most people worked manually and didn't eat enough. So most people would have been, broadly speaking, pretty skinny.
If you meet someone who is a little overweight, you would think, "Well, what have they got tucked away? Okay, they've been at the biscuits." You meet someone who is hugely overweight, and there's something wrong. They've got there somehow—suspiciously. How do they get all that food? Well, we know, don't we? He nicked it from the Israelites. For 18 years. This is 18 years of overeating the food that the Israelites were starving for—not having themselves. So you see, his obesity is not something that would be unkind to laugh at. It is—it is—a symbol of everything that is wrong with the man.
What's more, his weight makes him an easy target. Picture Ehud with his sword. He said, "I have a secret message for you, O king." At this point, the man is not going to be quick on his feet, is he? He slowly staggers to his feet. And let's be blunt—Ehud could not miss. Just stab anywhere in front and you will hit something.
He was also a thick and arrogant king, as well as being overweight. He concluded very quickly that Ehud could not possibly be a threat and so allowed himself to be left alone with the one man who had motive, means, and opportunity to kill him. He's arrogant and naïve.
So that's the king of Moab. We're meant to find him funny.
Then there's the royal servants. Now, they were foolish enough in the first place to let their king be left alone with the man who turned out to be his assassin. But then Ehud needs a plan to get away, having done the deed. No problem—because the servants are going to give him all the time in the world. We watch them standing outside, dithering—literally dancing. They're kind of dancing on the spot, doing kind of, "What do we do here? This is... awkward. What do we do now?"
They give him a bit more time. They think the king might be on the loo and would not appreciate being disturbed. They are encouraged in this misperception because, when he was killed, we are told his bowels discharged. The king actually was on the loo, and the smells seeping under the door would have confirmed that this was what their king was doing. But eventually they think, "This is ridiculous. Something must be wrong." And by the time they finally open the door, Ehud is miles away.
That's the royal servants.
Last people to look at from Moab are the Moabite soldiers, who let themselves get trapped on the wrong side of the river. Idiots. And when the NIV tells us that they were all "vigorous and strong", that word vigorous would more usually be translated stout. These soldiers were built like barrels. They were little copies of their king.
So you can imagine, they had all passed their fitness test to get into the Moabite army, but were glad that, since they enlisted, having to retake the fitness test on regular intervals had been suspended—because none of them would have passed. Too many doughnuts. Which means that when it came to having to get over the river, having got themselves trapped on the wrong side, they weren't exactly hard to chase down either.
So we have an overweight, greedy, naïve king, surrounded by dithering, blundering courtiers, with an army of podgy, unfit soldiers with no idea of strategy.
Now, remember: Israel shook off Moab not because of any of those things. If they had had the most lean, well-trained, intelligent troops, they would still have won—because the hero of the story is God. But the story is told in such a way that we are watching pantomime villains. This is bordering on slapstick humour. We are meant to laugh at the bumbling enemies of Israel.
Why? Because if you lived in Israel for the 18 years when Moab oppressed you, they did not feel like bumbling idiots. Eglon was more terrifying than the worst Bond villain. Okay, archaeologists are yet to uncover his shark tank—but if they did, you wouldn't be surprised. He was a figure of terror and fear. His weight was not funny—it was intimidating. He was a monster of a man.
So how wonderful to sit on the other side of it all, and to laugh and laugh and laugh at the ones we were once so frightened of.
If you've read or watched The Lord of the Rings, you need good stamina to either read or watch. Peter Jackson doesn't make short films. But the book three, The Return of the King, the great... It is a spoiler alert, but you kind of know what's going to happen — that you... the ring does get destroyed. Okay, that much I can tell you. There they go, they finally destroyed it.
It'd be a very modern book, wouldn't it, for Tolkien to write a book where you read six books' worth of The Lord of the Rings, only to find that they failed and they all got killed and that was the end of the story. That's how the modern version would run. But no, no — Tolkien knows how to wrap a story up. The ring does get destroyed. Sam Gamgee has a well-earned, very long sleep. He loses track of how long he's been asleep, and he wakes up and finds Gandalf peering down, looking at him. And here's what Tolkien wrote next:
At last he gasped, "Gandalf! I thought you were dead. But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?"
"A great Shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed. And the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land. And as he listened, the thought came to Sam that he'd not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.
It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring, and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased and his laughter welled up. And laughing, he sprang from his bed.
"How do I feel?" he cried. "Well, I don't know how to say it. I feel, I feel—" He waved his arms in the air. "I feel like spring after water and sun on the leaves, and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I've ever heard!"
When God rescues, he brings us to a place where we will look and laugh at all the things that torment us now. There is a day when, for all those who know and love the Lord Jesus, all the things that hurt us will be gone. And as horrible as they are now, we will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about. And we will laugh.
God rescues through a champion. He rescues to a place of laughter.
Thirdly, he rescues in surprising ways.
As well as containing humour, this story contains surprise — three surprises God has for King Eglon.
The first is the deliverer: Ehud. We're told he was a left-handed man — or the way that's written more literally, he was impaired or impeded in his right hand. In Bible thinking and Bible culture, your right hand is the hand that gets things done. If you want to rescue someone or fix something, you use your right hand. God's right hand has won salvation for him. The right hand is where God says to his Messiah, in Psalm 110, "Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet." At his right hand are pleasures for evermore.
So, if Ehud is going to be a deliverer, he needs to get his right hand and deliver the people. Only he can't use his right hand. And there's a huge irony in him being a left-hander, because he's from the tribe of Benjamin. The name Benjamin — Benjamin was Jacob's favourite son, and he called him "son of my right hand". So if I read that as the literal reading, here again the Israelites cried out to the Lord. He gave them a deliverer — Ehud, the son of Gera, the son of my right hand, impaired in his right hand. So the son of my right hand can't use his right hand. It turns out that that's a very convenient thing.
So that's one surprise. The next surprise is the sword — a homemade sword, that because he's left-handed, he straps to his right thigh, which is not where you would normally put a sword if you were going to use it with your right hand. That means that the man and the weapon never get suspected, which is probably how he got past security to have a one-on-one session with the king.
Third surprise is the message that he has for King Eglon: "I have a secret message for you." Now, sometimes in English, we get words where the same word can mean two totally different things — like the word yolk, which could mean an egg yolk or a piece of wood that you use to harness an animal to your plough. Two totally different things. There is a single word in Hebrew which can mean either a word or a message or a thing or a whatchamacallit. And that's the word here.
So he says, "I have a secret..." — well, you can think message. I'm thinking thing. But let's just let that ambiguity play for a little, shall we? And Eglon discovers it's not a message, it's a thing — it's a sword, whatchamacallit. So they're all expected — not so unexpected — not what you would be expecting to see at all. They're all surprising — the man, the sword, and the message.
In fact, a little detail for you — I'm not quite sure about it. I think this is here first, just comparing verses 22 and 23. So we know that the sword is hidden, concealed and stealthy. But I think there's a deliberate parallel being drawn here between the sword and Ehud, the man who has it. So we're told that in verse 22 that the fat closed in after it, and Ehud then goes out to the porch and closes the doors after him — same vocabulary. So just as the sword was kind of hidden in the last thing you would expect, so Ehud is hidden and the last thing you would expect. They're both this huge surprise.
So God brought this great victory, but it came from the most unlikely place. As you look at your sin and at the many visible and felt problems in your life, you would never guess in a month of Sundays that deliverance would come through an unattractive, crucified man. He is the ultimate hidden, stealthy, under-the-radar, surprising rescuer. He is not what you would expect.
And then how will your friends and neighbours get to hear of the good news of Jesus? Well, through people like you telling them — through us. Now, you might expect that God would mainly use people who are athletic, articulate, young, fit, healthy, who would get a successful audition for any film role — sporty, just generally popular, able to hold a conversation, good at connecting with people — someone like that. Well, you know what? He wants to use you.
It's almost true to say that the more you think you are not the kind of person God could possibly use to reach with the good news of the gospel, the more you are exactly the kind of person that God wants to use to do that.
Writing to the church in Corinth, he says this — 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 26 to 28. He says this:
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.
But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.
Conclusion
So we live in a dark world. Where's your confidence that things will get better? If it's anywhere other than the Lord Jesus Christ, please put your trust in him. The Moabites discovered that God's champion had won a decisive victory — pulling the rug from under the feet of the one they thought was keeping them safe, their king — and they found themselves trapped on the wrong side of the river.
So don't put your trust in something or someone who will let you down. On the time scale of eternity, God's sweeping victory will become apparent. So don't be cut off by the rising tide by thinking that you can put your confidence somewhere else and it will work out well. Only the Lord Jesus is the one who can help.
But if your trust and confidence are in the Lord Jesus, then he may be the most surprising place to look when faced with your own sin and with so many black and difficult struggles. But as your champion, the battle has already been fought. And one day, he will return, and you will look back, and together we will laugh at all the things that you once found so terrifying and so discouraging.