Clough Judges Lesson 5

Judges 3:11-31

 

In Judges 3 we come to the next judge in our series.  We are in the main body of the book of Judges.  This main body extends from Judges 3-16; these chapters are devoted to an analysis of the upper class or the leadership class in Israelite society.  The point you want to remember is something that is never stressed today, is that no society can last without an upper society.  You always must have an upper class of leaders.  This business about democracy and everybody being equal just doesn’t cut fit the facts of history and never has.  There is such a thing as democracy; that’s the very process that originally is found in Scripture.   But nevertheless, the Bible recognizes that without a disciplined, effective, powerful upper class you cannot go two inches in history.  You cannot show one society that’s ever succeeded without some sort of upper class leadership. 

 

So in this section, Judges 3-16, we have an analysis of the upper class, the aristocracy of the nation and this is double important because these people are not heredity.  In other words, they’re not involved in some lineage or genealogy that automatically produces the upper class in their lives.  They are called by the Holy Spirit to be the aristocrats of the society, to be the leaders of that society but the interesting thing about this is that through the chapters you always find this upper class is unable to hack it.  By the end of Judges 16 you see that in spite of the fact that God Himself has provided upper class leaders, nevertheless the nation still goes down to defeat.  The reason and the principle behind the book of Judges is that you have negative volition at the point of God-consciousness, when a person is aware of God’s existence, or you have negative volition toward the declared will of God and this is sin and sin always forces a society into a position where it must give up its freedom.  Therefore, by the end of the book of Judges, when you hit the book of Samuel we will go over to a centralized power.  People will lose their freedom and they will lose it because of a spiritual principle; they have failed to exercise their responsibilities as individuals and this always spells the death of freedom. 

 

So in Judges 3 we move to the second judge.  Again the story of this judge is set into the frame of the rest of these chapters.  This framework was given to us in Judges 2:11-19 where we said there are three basic points that will be made.  We don’t know who it was that put this book together; we suspect it was Samuel or some of Samuel’s seminary students, but nevertheless, they compiled this as an analysis of history and they followed a three point outline.  The first thing was to analyze where the nation began its fall in every cycle, and this would involve apostasy.  So in your outline in given in Judges 2:11-19 your first step in the first three verses, 11-13, is apostasy.  This is important because I want you to notice that the problem with the nation was not immorality.  The problem was negative volition toward spiritual truths.  That was the issue, not something else, not immorality, not these other things.  The other things are results.  And so what do we have?  We have a long of people wringing their hands about the United States and immorality.  Immorality has nothing whatever to do with it; immorality is a result of something that precedes it, always.  And this is the whole Bible makes, you have to have the existence of the Triune Creator God and the existence of a personal relationship with that Triune Creator over the universe or you have no morals.  That’s all secondary but Christians throughout the years have insisted upon putting morals and making morals the issue; morals are not the issue.  The issue is the existence of God who has certain standards; that’s the issue; without that your morals fall to the ground. 

So morals are not the issue, therefore in each one of these cyclic analysis of the history of the reign of the judges it always goes back to a religious apostasy; a religious or philosophical apostasy.  It starts with the way people think, not the way people act.  Thought always precedes action.  So you have this first thing, apostasy.

 

The second cycle or the second step in the book of Judges that will be repeated over and over and over again is chastening.  This was Judges 2:14-15, that when the nation religiously apostacizes God must send chastening, and He whips the nation into shape.  Chastening is the second step, so the chastening functioning results from their apostasy, it results from suffering.

 

The third area is the area of deliverance, the fact that when the nation recognizes that it is out of fellowship, and it recognizes that it is in servitude and it recognizes that by its own power cannot attain freedom, and it petitions the King of Israel, the real King, which is Jehovah, then Jehovah delivers.  The interesting thing to notice is that before the deliverance there has to be reached a point where the believer is humbled; humbled to the point where nothing of his own power will ever give him the freedom.  Nothing!  He petition that the deliverance come from outside of Himself, the source being God.  And this has to occur in all of these cycles; we see this over and over, before the deliverance you must have the humility, a humility that despairs of self-help, operation bootstrap and so forth, and until you get to that point, no deliverance.

 

The other thing that we’ve noted was that this is not just history but there is a spiritual analogy going on between the historical facts and our life as believers, and here’s what makes this history of direct importance to us as a Christian, in that the principles we are observing operate are the same principles that operate in our Christian life.  We draw these two circles, the top circle is our destiny in Christ; the sovereign conditional promises of God, the work of God the Father, the work of God the Holy Spirit, the work of God the Son, the certain work that nothing can stop.  But we draw the bottom circle to indicate that in time, at this one moment we are either in the known will of God or out of the known will of God.  There are only two places you can be at any given moment as a believer; no other place.  No matter who you are, no matter how old a believer you are, no matter what your condition or environment, you are either out of fellowship or in fellowship at any given moment.  And we define that as being in the known will of God for you at this moment or out of the known will of God and rebellion against it. 

 

Now what this judge’s cycle is teaching is that we go on negative volition; negative volition knocks us out of the will of God.  We are rebelling against the will of God at some point in our lives.  This may be different, there are some things that are absolutes in the sense that they are true for you, for me, for every believer who’s ever lived.  The Ten Commandment type of thing, there’s your moral absolutes and that is part of the known will of God, but only part of it because God treats each one of us as personal beings and as individuals.  So one Christian may have a call from God to do something, another Christian may not; another Christian may be led into some completely different ministry and it would be just as much a sin for you to resist the leading of God in your life toward that area of ministry as it would be for someone else in accomplishing their ministry.  It depends, sometime one Christian can do something and it will be a sin for him, for another Christian it might not although, of course, there are the basic absolutes that are true for everybody.  Nevertheless, there is an individuality, there is a relative-ness, if you want to put it that way, to God’s leading. 

Looking at this way we see the first step is out of the bottom circle by rebellion.  When we are out of the bottom circle this places us in a situation where we become vulnerable.  The Bible tells us that we live in a spiritual universe; a spiritual universe consisting of a satanic spirit.  When I say the word “spirit” I don’t mean Satan himself; this is explained in Ephesians 2:1-3 where the spirit referred to is the general spirit that dominates the culture.  So if you study the history of ideas, you can go in western thought, for example, to the Midlevel period, you can come down to the Renaissance, you can come down to the Reformation, you go on into the ancient enlightenment and you can trace areas where certain ideas have predominated; certain great presuppositions in the thought of man.  These great presuppositions the Bible identifies, when they are engaged in an anti-Biblical mode, as part of the satanic spirit that controls the culture, controls everybody, artists, musicians and what have you.  And it will control the Christians; Christians are controlled by this to the extent they are ignorant of Bible doctrine.

 

So again, here’s the small circle, you may be a baby believer, you may be a new Christian, and you know that much of the will of God.  That’s fine, only in that area you know what the truth is and you are responsible to follow the known truth of God.  Later on in your life as God reveals more to you and you study more this circle expands and so now you know more of the will of God for your life.  Again, now you’re held responsible for that.  Therefore we have this constantly enlarging circle; that’s maturity, that’s growth, and so this is one of the sobering aspects of growth in the Christian life.  Everybody says isn’t it nice to grow; not necessarily, it makes you more responsible.  You have a greater respon­sibility the more you know so just think of it, a thousand more ways you can get out of fellowship 20 years after you’ve been a Christian than when you first started.  So growth involves greater responsibility.

 

This is what we’re talking about; we’re either in fellowship or out of fellowship.  All right, suppose we’re out of fellowship.  Now what happens?  Now we are in a position where Satan can work on us.  And he works on us through out old sin nature; two elements, Satan, as the old-fashioned theologians used to say, the world, the flesh and the devil, and that is an accurate portrayal of the thing.  You have two major sources, Satan and the sin nature.  The world system is a result of the two, but you have two prime movers here, Satan and the old sin nature and they both couple.

 

Now in the series of the Judges you’re going to find the history of the nation Israel.  You’ll find this nation is going to be attacked from various sections.  You saw last time an attack that came from Aram of the two rivers, or Arimea in the area which is now Syria or Damascus, around that area, it was Cush, this king who apparently came from the Arabian Peninsula.  Tonight you’re going to see an attack come from the east, from a land called Moab and you will see as we move through the book of Judges there’ll be various attacks from various sectors.  There’ll be one from Philistia.  The thing to remember to tie this to the Christian life is to think of each one of these kings as basically agents of Satan.  And think of the map of the nation Israel as your bottom circle.  And so you are being assaulted at all points.  Now there’s a force that seems to be common to all of those and that is the force of Amalek and Amalek is very analogous to our old sin nature.  So showing that these kings operate in and through Amalek, or as Satan uses, in and through our flesh taught in Ephesians 2.  So we have these various attacks.  Notice they come from different directions and notice they come after we have gotten out of fellowship.  That’s important to notice because the great temptations come often to the believer after he is out of fellowship. 

For example, David’s great sin; people often make a big thing in Sunday School stories about David’s great sin.  The sin of adultery with Bathsheba and murder of her husband, that wasn’t his great sin.  The great sin was before that.  One chapter before David refused to go head…lead the armies of Israel into battle.  He was out of it before the temptation came and he succumbed to the temptation because he was unprepared to face it; the temptation again was a satanic attack on his life.  You, if you are a believer and you haven’t recognized it yet, you are an object of satanic attack and Satan can work on your life in various ways.  Satan can work in your life in two basic ways.  The first way he works in your life is surrounding you as much as he can with human viewpoint.  He will try to promote this program of ideas both formal, in the sense of promoting …if you’re an intellectual, formal philosophical systems that are totally anti-Christian in their orientation or he can promote on an informal basis, simply hatred, pride, anger, maliciousness and so on, these kind of things that are directly promoted by him.  So he will try to promote these ideas.  You can see how this works in such passages as Ephesians 4:27, 1 Timothy 4:1; 1 John 4. 

 

So Satan is promoting this human viewpoint and he’s careful to surround you with this.  This is what’s been wrong with fundamental Christianity for 20, 30 to 40 years because the fundamental­ists have by and large said we don’t drink, we don’t smoke, play cards and so we have all these standards and if we don’t do these then we are protected from the world.  And the obvious fallacy is that you’ve got human viewpoint all around and this is what has immobilized the whole thing; it has made fundamentalism immobile because they have not recognized where the enemy is.  The enemy is the human viewpoint that you engage in 24 hours a day, you breathe it, and you can’t help it.  Talk about polluted air; Christians had polluted air since Jesus Christ’s day.  That’s literally the translation of Ephesians 2, “the prince of the power of the air,” talk about air pollution, and he’s talking about spiritually the fact that Christians have been living in air pollution for 2000 years and the only thing is the ecologists are waking up to the natural type of air pollution, but the Christian’s should be experienced in this problem since they’ve had the problem for 2000 years.  So you have human viewpoint air pollution; spiritual pollution in the environment, everywhere you go, no matter what it is, the movies, the arts, the theater, the literature, the science, wherever you go Satan is interested in packing as much as he can into your mind.

 

But the second thing is, suppose you are able to resist this; suppose through a knowledge of Bible doctrine, the fact that you have been able to sit down at the Word of God yourself, you’ve been exposed to Bible teaching and you’ve had a chance to study; that’s one advantage of tapes in the sense that you can sit down, repeat, study, go back, etc.  Every believer that I’ve known has, through tapes or some other system, had a chance by himself, on his own, to dig this material out, not just listen to it taught but actually work with it. 

 

So Satan, if he is not successful in promulgating human viewpoint, he will increase pressure in your life to make you accept this; create some situation, get you off balance, where you’ll choose the wrong thing.  This is why that famous promise often quoted by believers, 1 Peter 5:7, “casting all your care upon Him,” if you look at the context, the reason why Peter gives that great promise to the believer is because who is it that’s going around seeking whom he may devour?  And the context tells you what’s happening there is that Satan is going around, in that day through physical persecution from the Roman Empire, trying to pressure believers into panicking, trying to get them so upset, so worried, getting their eyes on every little problem that they can imagine to get their eyes off the grace of God, and that’s why that is a command, “cast your cares upon Him,” the reason being that if you don’t cast your cares upon Him you are in a position where Satan can nudge you right out.  He’s an artist at it, he’s been doing it ever since Adam.  So therefore we have a situation where we are up against it; we are up against the idea and if we resist the idea then Satan has a pressure situation to just get us in a right thing where he knows our area of weakness is the greatest.  And you’re naïve if you don’t think this is going to happen to you as a believer.  It will always happen to you; if you are operating in a life that is glorifying to Christ Satan is angry at you; Satan hates you with a hatred that you can’t even fathom and he is going to do everything he can to stop your ministry.  He is going to do everything he can to sidetrack you.  This is why we should be praying one for another, as well as, of course, we have the intercressory ministry of the Son and the Spirit. 

 

But in Judges 3:12 we come to the second judge, a judge called Ehud, not a very thrilling name but nevertheless a man who conducted a very interesting expedition.  Now the reason why this is so interesting, and if you’ve had experience in reading classical literature, should recognize some parallels here with a man by the name of Home, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the great heroic epics of the Greek heroes.  If you’ve done any reading in this area, this is the same kind of literature, this is the same kind of literature, this is epic history, this is the heroic age and these men are looked upon as the great heroes.  But I want you to notice something between the Greek hero and the Jewish hero; there’s a difference.  There is a parallel in several areas.  The first parallel is that these heroes are the men of blood and gore.  This is common; this is common to Hercules and it’s common to Samson and the rest of these men.  What marks them off as heroes is that they are bloody fighters. 

 

The second thing that marks this off as heroic literature is that you have all of the gory details mentioned and you wonder as you read this literature, why are all these details in here?  This is simply because, it is believed by scholars, that what you see now compiled very neatly in the book of Judges was actually sung around the campfires and in these small towns as the rhapsodists would go into the town and begin to recite, and they’d tell these stories about the great judges, and finally these were compiled together in the book of Judges.  And so you might look on these originally as constituting cycles of song.  You say well isn’t this prose, it’s not poetry?  We do have some poetry, we have a great song in chapter 5 coming up, but nevertheless, though it was prose it was chanted and these people would probably gather around and they’d be anxious to hear about the great heroes of the nation and how they obtained deliverance.  So these stories would be chanted and the realistic details would be given to show that this really happened.  And you can just imagine, if you ever try to tell a story to a little child, you tell something about a truck or something and the kid wants to know how many exhaust pipes it had, all the details, they want the details.  And so we have the details provided in these stories.  It’s very picturesque; as you read these stories you have to remember this.  This is heroic literature; if you want a type read Homer.  It’s that kind of literature and you’re going to have to expect some blood and guts in it; but that something that’s being promoted necessarily, it’s simply the style of the literature.

 

The second thing you want to notice about this is while we have similarities with other kinds of heroic literature there are some crucial differences.  And the differences are: first, the heroes in this book are presented with all their faults.  The other stories have their faults presented too but here the faults are clearly presented in a schema which shows that the deliverance really came because God’s Spirit was working in their life.  In other words, these men on their own didn’t do it; these men are men of clay; these men are men of sin natures, these men are men that flunked the test all over the board but God’s Spirit works in their life and through God’s Spirit working in their life they are able to accomplish great things.  But every one of these judges, we would probably turn them down for church membership if they walked in.  Think of Samson and his girlfriends and so on, all these kind of things that go on in the book of Judges show you that God, in His grace, choose to work through sinful men.  This is not condoning sin; it’s simply announcing the fact that in history, as a matter of fact, God has worked this way.  You are going to see an assassin; this is the Lee Harvey Oswald of the Old Testament, what you’re going to see tonight.  This man is nothing more than an assassin.  Yet God is going to use this assassin and the Bible is going to declare that God put His Spirit into this assassin and God ordered the assassination.  This not to justify assassination.  You don’t read Judges and say hey, I got a neat idea, God is leading me from Judges 3.  You have to take it in context; you may like to assassinate somebody but you just keep it to yourself; you don’t claim guidance from Judges 3.  That’s not what it’s for.  It’s simply to show that when the nation humbled itself before God, God in His grace provided the Spirit to these men, and now you’re going to read the details of the fine art of assassination, beginning at verse 12.

 

Judges 2:13, “And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the LORD,” now without amplifying this, this is not necessarily immorality.  All this is saying is that they did evil in a religious sense of apostacizing against God’s Word.  For example, you have some details of this in Judges 2:17, “they would not hearken unto their judges, but they went a whoring after other gods,” you see the nature of the sin here is a religious sin.  This is always the case…always the case.  The religious sins precede the immoral sins, it’s always this way, always has been, always will be.  A person has to be out of fellowship before they get in trouble in this area.  So this is the same thing with Judges 3; the same thing; although you’re not given the details the evil here is a religious spiritual evil.  Again, “in the sight of the LORD” means after the judgeship of Othniel.  Othniel was Caleb’s nephew and you remember that this nation served the Arabic kings for eight years and then was delivered and prevailed in verse 11, forty years.  So you have forty eight years.  The word “after” means after this 48 year period you have a cycle develop again. 

 

 Judges 2:13, “…and the LORD strengthened Eglon,” the word “strengthened” can also mean encouraged and we know from extra-Biblical sources that Eglon, or at least we suspect from extra-Biblical sources that Eglon was actually not even raised up to very strong power.  What happened was that the nation internally was in such chaos that he looked across the northern end of the Dead Sea…here’s the geography; Moab is over here, you have the nation Israel separated by the Jordan River.  Up here you have Transjordania; they had all their ranches up here.  So what this man is going to do, he’s going to drive a wedge right across there, cut off all this food supply, he’s going to get all that beef from Transjordania and he’s going to wipe them out as far as their logistics is concerned.  So he’s going to go across the Jordan River and hold at a place called Jericho.  Jericho was very crucial because that was the first place that Joshua hit; it’s a commanding post and by holding Jericho and Gilgal you control the fords of Jordan.  So it’s a crucial position militarily.

 

So he’s going to come across there, but history tells us the reason why he came across was that he had no opposition.  So we have verse 12, again a similar historical situation where we have the Lord actually encouraging…notice it’s God that’s doing the encouraging.  Why?  Because the nation is out of fellowship and He’s stirring them up, He wants someone to come and discipline.

This is analogous to the fact that when we are out of fellowship guess who stirs Satan up?  Satan may stir himself up but the ultimate cause behind it is God Himself.  Don’t ever get caught in a dualism.  There’s no such thing as dualism in the Bible; you have God always sovereign over the forces of evil and even this evil that is going to happen to the nation, the king of Moab, it is God behind that, not responsible but in the way in which we demonstrated this morning.  God is sovereign and yet He has total control over His responsible creation.  So “the Lord encourages Eglon, the king of Moab against Israel, because they had done evil in the sight of the LORD.”

 

Judges 3:13, he gathers two groups of people; one Ammon, and the other Amalek, notice Amalek gets involved.  “And he gathered unto him the children of Ammon and Amalek, and went and smote Israel, and possessed the city of palm trees.”  We’ll meet Amalek often; Amalek is a type of the sin nature for the believer and Ammon is very interesting because he was related to Moab.  In Genesis 19:30 we see this relationship.  You have a situation here where Lot commits incest with his two daughters and out of this comes Ammon and Moab, so again you see the carnality of one generation affects believers in the next generation.  We, unfortunately, have to live in the mistakes of our parents.  No generation is perfect.  The generation gap didn’t begin in the 20th century.  So you have always the believers inheriting the mistakes of their parents.  So Ammon and Moab wouldn’t even be there if Lot hadn’t have gotten out of fellowship at this point.  That’s just a historical lesson. 

 

Now let’s finish this assassination episode.  The king of Moab crosses Jordan, he comes over and in verse 13 it says “he possessed the city of palm trees.”  The city of palm trees is the ancient name for Jericho.  Jericho is a military strong point.  He must hold Jericho.  So he goes over there and he holds Jericho.  By controlling this high point of ground, evidently Jericho was on a high point of ground, he can control this whole area.  It is this area from which the food for the nation has to travel.  For some reason they don’t cross up here; the beef and so on from the ranches up here to the north, from Transjordania, have to go down here and he is holding this position.  So it’s a very, very crucial point that he’s holding militarily because he can control all traffic across the Jordan River at this point.  So this is what it means.  Notice too, this does not mean he controls the whole nation; the men who control or reign over Israel are not necessarily reigning over all the nation, they’re just simply reigning over crucial points in the nation. 

 

Verse 14, “So the children of Israel served Eglon the king of Moab eighteen years,” analogous to a believer out of fellowship who is a slave to sin.  You’re either a slave to Christ or you’re a slave to sin but you do not really have your own autonomous free well, it just doesn’t exist in the sense of autonomy, as though God and you determine which way you’re going to go period.  You go one of two ways that are determined for you; you choose which way but you have only two choices, one God’s way or one try to fight the thing and become a slave to sin.  This is explained in Romans 6.  So here we have servitude.  Notice again, loss of freedom due to sin; loss of freedom is due to sin. 

 

Judges 3:15, “But when the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, the LORD raised them up a deliverer,” the word is the same word from which we get Jesus, Jesus means the deliverer, and so the word “deliverer” here is another name for judge, and this man’s name is Ehud, “Ehud the son of Gera, a Benjamite, a man left-handed: and by him the children of Israel sent a present unto Eglon the king of Moab.”  Now this man is going to have his idiosyncrasies but the thing to notice is that this man is called by God.  God raises him up and notice again these people would still be under bondage to a Moabite king if God had not raised this man.  In other words, what am I saying?  The deliverance is by grace; the deliverance is God Himself providing it.  All right, they “cried unto the LORD,” they got to the point in their life of surrendering, you might say.  They got to the point where they said okay God, I recognize that I am a slave to sin; I recognize that only You can deliver me and so on.  Very similar to salvation, when a person realizes that they are morally corrupt before a holy righteous God, that they can’t do it by their own good works and they give up that concept and simply say well, I’m going to receive what Christ has done for me.  It’s the same thing in the Christian life.  You decide you’re tired of going it alone and fighting the system and so you ask for deliverance, you might say, from outside.  And here’s the deliverance coming.  We have it through 1 John 1:9; they had it by asking for a judge. 

 

Judges 3:15, “…Ehud, the son of Gera, a Benjamite, a man left-handed,” now the left-handedness is not peculiar to Ehud because later in the book of Judges we read the whole tribe is left-handed, which, by the way, shows you something.  Liberal critics never pick this up; it shows you that when it says the tribe of Benjamin is one genetically related tribe it’s correct.  The liberal, on his basis can’t explain this kind of thing; he says it’s just a stupid observation or something. Evidently they had some sort of a genetic weakness in this particular tribe and that shows you right there that the tribe itself is related; it’s not just a collection of people in an area.  The liberal would say that you have a group of people collected in some area some place and that we have these people all circulating around and somehow they’re called the Benjamites.  Okay, you have a man left-handed, “and by him the children of Israel sent a present,” now that’s a sweet little word for tribute or tax.  In other words, he had his internal revenue service operating.  That’s always the first thing government does is start a tax system and no matter what they do they always find ways of spending it but they have trouble raising it.  So this man immediately begins a tax.  So these people thought boy, this guy loves his taxes, so what we’ll do is we’ll give him a real present this time.  So they’re going to commission of their men to be the tax-payer and he’s going to go to the IRS office.  So “the children of Israel cried unto the LORD,” and they are going to give him a present, or tribute.

 

Judges 3: 16, “But Ehud made him a dagger” now this dagger is a peculiar thing.  Most daggers in the ancient world had a handle on them so if you were fighting with the thing and somebody’s knife blade comes along he’d get stopped.  This is a peculiar dagger and the reason why these details are here is to tie the story together; when you pick up these details read the details because they are going to be used later on.  This dagger is going to look like this; it’s a long thin thing.  When we get to man by the name of Shamgar he really has an interesting weapon.  He has a thing eight feet long and six inches wide and he just goes along and spikes people with it.  All the weapons that the judges have are very interesting little tools.  One of the suspicions of scholars who have studied this period of history, and it’s a very interesting one from out point of view today, is that the reason why these crude weapons were used is that they were disarmed.  Until the time of David they did not have steel swords and their enemies did.  And what had happened was that the Philistines, probably coupled with what we call the Hittites, had a monopoly on iron and steel and they actually disarmed these people.  So when you see these crude weapons, and ox goad and so on, this eight foot long trod and you wonder why these weapons—that’s all they had. 

 

Next time before you vote for gun legislation just remember, learn from history.  In history, always, the forces of oppression want to register firearms and get weapons out of the hands of the individual citizens; always have, always will.  I can take you back to Philistia, I can take you down into modern history and it’s always the same; nothing new under the sun and it you knew history you’d see that anybody that is asking for gun legislation is a historical ignoramus, doesn’t know anything about history whatever, and I don’t care who he is, he just doesn’t know anything about history because the facts of history are that every oppressor always tried to disarm the citizens.  And the facts of the case are that one of the interesting things that would keep us free in this kind of a situation is that the United States citizens own more guns than the entire United States army.  This is a potential force because you could pin down a whale of a lot of troops of guerilla bands if you had a well-armed citizenry.  And this is exactly what certain people don’t want.  So any time you see some senator or some house of representative man walking around asking for restrictions on firearms; you listen very carefully because you have an apostate talking, you have a man who does not know history and you have a man who really wants you to vote away your freedom.  The proper way of dealing with that is to deal with the way it always was, with the Mosaic Law and what was the Law of Moses; learn from history again.  How do you deal with crime?  Punish the criminal, you don’t punish the law-abiding citizen; same principle.

 

So Ehud made him a dagger, remember this is in a time of disarmament.  It “had two edges, of a cubit length;” a cubit was 18 inches, “and he did gird it under his raiment upon his right thigh.”  Now it’s important to see this because we’re going to have a scene that comes up here and you’re not going to understand why all this detail unless you understand what’s happened here.  The man is left-handed; this is important because in the ancient world the warriors were right-handed.  He’s left-handed; now this is going to take the body guards off guard.  He is left handed and he has the sword on his right thigh.  He is going to reach for this at the point of the assassination and the reason why he’s successful in assassinating, one of the reasons, is that he’s never caught.  In other words this movement would have aroused suspicion.  Anybody walking into the presence of an oriental king with his right hand beginning to move would cause suspicion, but not with the left.  This is an important point that you want to notice; the left hand reaching over to the right side, because this is how he’s going to thrust it in.

 

Judges 3:17, “And he brought the present unto Eglon king of Moab: and Eglon was a very fat man,” now they didn’t have figure control or something, but Eglon, maybe he just sat back in Jericho and ate all day or something, but he was an enormous individual.  Again, the storyteller, you can see this is a story that would have been told over and over, these details are slowly woven into the narrative because they all are going to be used later one.  Verse 18, “And when he had made an end to offer the present, he sent away the people that bare the present.”

 

Judges 3:19, “But he himself turned again from the quarries that were by Gilgal, and said, I have a secret errand unto thee, O king: who said, Keep silence.  And all that stood by him went out from him.”  Now what are verses 18 and 19 talking about, this end of the present?  What had happened, evidently, was there was a formal ceremony; this is all passed over in the story, but they evidently had a time when they would go to Jericho with a band of people, we have numerous analogies to this in other courts of history; we have in fact pictures and archeological references, you’d have a caravan of collected taxes in the form of booty, in the form of weapons, in the form of vegetables and animals and so on, a form of goods and produce.  And this caravan would come and it would be given to the receiving officer by an officer in charge of the caravan.  And what this is simply saying is that Ehud probably is in charge of… now you have to see this is large, he’s not just walking up with a little present with a bow on it, that’s not the picture.  He’s walking up with an entire caravan and he is the discharging officer.  He has been commissioned by the nation to hand this over to a responsible office.  Again I urge you to look at the ancient near eastern pictures and you can see pictures of this actually happening, it was a common thing in the ancient world. 

 

So Ehud is the officer that’s in charge of this caravan of goods, but in verse 18, “when he had made an end,” this is the end of the ritual, the ceremony that accompanied this.  This might have taken half a day of conveying all this and going through the oriental procedures of format and so forth.  “But when the ceremony was ended, he sent away the people who bore the presents.”  Why does he do this?  To show once again the grace of God is going to give deliverance to these people independent of their works.  In other words, when the mighty blow is delivered it’s going to be solely by the man that God has picked.  He doesn’t need the help of somebody else.  Later yes, but at this crucial point, the crucial blow will be delivered by God’s grace on behalf of the oppressed believers. 

 

Verse 19, “And he himself turned again from the quarries,” now this word I do not know, I have not yet been able to trace it down, it’s a noun form of the word to hew out, and every other place that I’ve studied it means idols, idols that are hewn out of something.  The trouble with it is that these idols are by Gilgal.  Now whether the idols were there erected, because Gilgal is just northeast of Jericho, whether this was Eglon’s strong point and you have Gilgal located and he had some sort of a marker or he set up and established these images we don’t know.  Some have suggested quarries on the basis of the fact that they had some near this area.  Whatever the word is, we don’t know, but there was some sort of a marker there that’s going to play a little role in the story.  “…and he said, I have a secret errand unto thee, O king,” actually a hidden message.  Now the “secret errand” is not true to the original.  He is talking about the fact that he has a secret word and this means in the ancient world he is a prophet.  

 

Now this would happen a lot in an oriental court, you’d a dreamer or a man who would come with an omen or something like this.  This man isn’t necessarily a believer in God’s existence here.  He’s simply a man that goes with oriental custom that when a prophet would walk into the court with an omen or a hidden word he wanted to know about it.  And so he says, “Keep silence.  And all who stood by him went out from him.”  The word “stood by” is a participle and it’s not just innocent people standing by, this was professional body guards that he had around him and he dismissed them.  It was a very clever rouse that was used here because in the presence of a holy man of God, even the pagan king would do service to Him, they’d get up and stand or they’d bow down.  And you can see this; for some reason they carried this respect.  Why we don’t know but you can observe it for yourself if you look at some of the archeological pictures of this.  You have the king actually doing obeisance, it was part of a gentlemanly behavior of the courts of those days.  So he used this to get entrée to the king and to get rid of the body guards.

 

Judges 3:20, “And Ehud came unto him; and he” that is the king, “was sitting in a summer parlor, which he had for himself alone.”  Again, another detail of the story being brought in because it will be used.  Where he was actually was upstairs; these homes were kind of block shaped and up at the top they had in the ancient world sometimes walls, now all the Jewish homes had to have a fence around them at the top.  Do you know why?  Manslaughter laws; in the Old Testament you could not build anything that would endanger human life.  [Tape turns] …on top of these roofs they had these shelters and during the heat of the summer and so on they would sleep up here.  And this man evidently had one of his quarters up on top of this roof.  “And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee.”  He has a message from God but it’s not quite the thing you’d expect.  But he says “I have a message from God unto thee.  And he” that’s the king, “arose out of his seat.”  The king arises and stands out of his seat, because again this is to do the obeisance to the man of God who had come with an omen.

 

Judges 3:21 “And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly:  [22] And the haft” the handle of this thing, “also went in after the blade;” now you have all of these details, again keep in mind this is epic literature, this is important to the people who would recite this, so the handle goes in “and the fat closed upon the blade,” this probably explains why these people…there’s two reasons I think why this is in here I think, one reason it explains why in the final analysis we did not have a fetish.  A fetish is often used in connection with hero stories, that the hero’s weapons would always be on display, and they were looked upon as a national fetish, this was the weapon that slew so and so.  But you have a narration here of a great killing, and there’s no weapon ever preserved and this is the explanation, and I think these details in here are for that reason, to explain why we don’t have this sort of a fetish or this memorial to this weapon that was used.  “… so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out,” that’s his guts for those of you who would like a contemporary translation.  This gives you all the details.  So he just plunged it in as hard as he could and he rammed the handle in and out came the man’s guts which is normal for this kind of a wound; you break the abdominal wall and that’s it.

 

Judges 3:23, “Then Ehud went forth through the porch, and shut the doors of the parlor upon him, and locked them.”  See, he plays it very cool, and you can just see, wouldn’t this make a great movie, he’s very cool, calm and collected, he walks out and locks the door and proceeds on his way.  Verse 24, “When he was gone out, his servants came;” these are the body guards, these are not just normal servants, these were the body guards that were hired by these kings to protect them, they were big men, “and when they saw that, behold, the doors of the parlor were locked, they said, Surely he covers his feet in his summer chamber.”  Now for those of you who don’t know any better, that’s going to the bathroom.   So this story has all sorts of details.  I am very much amused by these Sunday School materials that always have Saul in a cave and David cutting his cloth off; Saul is in there, he’s not sleeping, he’s in there going to the bathroom in the cave.  So if you want a little joke, that’s literally getting caught with his pants down.  But that’s Saul and David and that is “covering their feet.”  So verse 24, this is what they think is going on in there.

 

Judges 3:25, “And they tarried till they were ashamed: and, behold,” now the word “ashamed” is interesting, this means confusion of the worst sort.  They don’t know what to do, because you can obviously see what would happen if they burst in on the guy at the wrong time.  So this is a very amusing situation.  I think it’s part of God’s sense of humor as he writes this, these people are in a tremendous bind, they can’t go in the room, they don’t know what happened, this guy walks out and they’ve lost their leader, and so they break the door down.  So they see in verse 25, “he opened not the doors of the parlor; therefore they took a key, and opened them: and, behold, their lord was fallen down dead on the earth.”

Now the word “lord” is interesting too, because this is Adonai; this is the word used for God in Israel; it means absolute lord.  So this again is put in there, I think, again by the Holy Spirit to draw attention to something.  The crucial blow has been delivered.  You see, up to this point he’s always been called malek, malek, malek, the king, the king, the king.  Why has the vocabulary shifted just at this point?  The vocabulary is shifted and from malek we have the Hebrew word Adonai because the Lord has died.  This is, in the spiritual way, much analogous to the fact that on the cross Jesus Christ has delivered the key blow to Satan.  And so by killing the chief you automatically take care of the Indians.  And this is the whole point here.  The crucial blow has been dealt with.  

 

And then finally Judges 3:26, you have in very classical tradition Ehud escaping, “And Ehud escaped while they tarried, and passed beyond the quarries, and escaped unto Seirath.”  And verse 27, “And it came to pass, when he was come, that he blew a trumpet in the mountain of Ephraim,” now the mountain is not a single mountain, this is the whole mountainous region of Ephraim and he sends forth people with the trumpets to call together the army.  Why does he call the army from the highlands?  The army is in the highlands because they’re afraid of Moab; they’ve been chased up into the highlands.  So Ehud says come out of the mountains, and he orders the trumpets blown, and he assembles his army, “and the children of Israel went down with him from the mount, and he before them.”

 

And in Judges 3:28 he gives the great promise that we’ve seen as a theme for Joshua and Judges, “And he said unto them, Follow after me: for the LORD hath delivered” past tense, there’s one of those great promises of God.  This is a traditional promise of God, by the way, “Follow after me: for the LORD has delivered your enemies the Moabites into your hand.  And they went down after him, “and took the fords of Jordan toward Moab, and suffered not a man to pass over.”  And notice what they do, a very interesting thing, they do not retake Jericho, you see, they ply the cutoff principle to the king; he’s got his fortress over here guarding these fords over Jordan and here’s his citadel and bastion.  What they do is they drive down here and they take the fort, so now who’s cut off?  He’s cut off.  There’s no account here of them ever taking Jericho again; evidently the implication is that they did.    

 

Judges 3:29, “And they slew of Moab at that time about ten thousand men, all lusty,” that means these men were…not lusting in the English sense of the word, they were strong, it’s simply the Hebrew word for strong, “they were strong soldiers and all men of valor; and there escaped not a man.  [30] So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel.  And the land had rest fourscore years.”  Notice the deliverance.   

 

For a quick application and conclusion turn to Ephesians 1.  Who was the king of Israel?  We’ve met the king of Moab; who is the king of Israel.  Not the judge, remember what I told you when I introduced this book?  The shoterim come underneath the malek, underneath the king.  They’re not the king, the king.  The King is Jehovah Himself and Jehovah will rule His nation when that nation is obedient to Him.  Now as Christians we have an analogous principle which we ought often to go back to.  Missionaries go back to this probably more often than you would or I would simply because missionaries often face very terrifying satanic situations.  So they often have to go back to what we just kind of blasé excuse off, and oh Christ rose somewhere and He’s now at the Father’s right hand doing something, we’re not too sure what.  Now what you want to see is that when Christ goes to the Father’s right hand this means He has ultimate authority over everything.  So in Ephesians 1:20,-23 we have our king, just as Israel had her king.  The thing I want you to think about as we conclude and read through verses 20-23, think about what you would have been like back in those days; oppressed under the slavery, think of the fact that every time we’re out of fellowship basically we are slaves and it may be in your life you find that you are a slave right now, to something, to some source of oppression, to something that’s just taking the color off your life as a Christian.  It’s the same thing that’s faced by this nation.  Their political freedom had been denied them; the color was out of their national life.  How was deliverance achieved?  By a spontaneous war?  Huh-un, that war was initiated by God and led by God.  So how are we to attain our freedom and the joy and the abundant life that Jesus Christ gives us?  Again, it’s from God’s initiative.  And from what throne? 

 

From this throne, Ephesians 1:20, “Which he wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places.  [21] Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come.  [22] And has put all things under His feet,” notice that, that includes Satan, this is what often times…you can’t appreciate this as much…you talk to a missionary that has been involved in some of these more gross and more clear situations of satanic pressure over culture and where they see miraculous deliverance because it’s this truth that they always go back to, we worship a risen ascended Savior.  He is not hanging on the cross, that crucifix… it’s a denial; it’s saying that God’s program never was finished, Christ never got off the cross, He never got to the throne room of God.  It’s fine to have a cross but the cross should be empty; Christ is not hanging on the cross any more, He’s gone and He’s at the Father’s right hand.  “He has put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church,” look at verse 22 again, what a precious truth that is, “He gave Him to us,” that’s what that’s saying.  He gave a present to believers, Jesus Christ, head over all things, He gave to the Church.  And what is the Church?  Born again believers, every person who has ever received Christ.  [23] “It is His body the fullness of Christ, that is being,” passive voice, “that is being fulfilled all in all.”  

 

In other words, in the ongoing process of history Christ’s body is finished.  You think of it often times, as you look at a baby, an infant, proportionally the head is very big on a baby.  Later on the body gets bigger and bigger.  That’s the same way the Church is, the first days of the Church was the infant days.  People always want to go back to those; no you don’t go back in that sense, the New Testament church in that sense; the New Testament church is an infantile church.  It doesn’t have much body; it’s all head, just Christ and a few believers.  And then as you go down through the 18th and 19th centuries of church history people trust Christ here, a person trust Christ there, millions of people finally place their faith in Jesus Christ and out of this you have a developing body, but who is it that still reigns?  It’s Jesus Christ!  And He is the source of the deliverance.