Lefty Kills Fatty, Escapes
Through Outhouse – Judges 3:12-30
Open your Bible to Judges 3; this is a fascinating book to
go through, especially in terms of our own generation. The theme of the book of Judges is stated twice,
and that is that “there was no king in the land, and everyone did what was
right in their own eyes.” Now both of
those statements are pregnant with meaning.
The first statement, “there was no king in the land” is a double
entendre; what that means is that there is a double sense or double meaning to
that and what we’ll find is that this writer is filled with double meanings and
double entendres; in fact we’re going to see several of them, and several puns
or paronomasia; paronomasia is the technical word for a word play or pun. We are going to see a number of them in the
Hebrew in the passage that we’re looking at this morning. In fact, the writer is poking fun at the whole
scene that takes place in this second cycle in Judges.
This is important, some of you are going to be so shocked
by some of the things that are said here you’re going to vibrate a little bit
because it’s not necessarily the highest level of humor or subject matter at
times; it is a little bit course, but remember it is inspired by God the Holy
Spirit. So you’re just going to have to
relax and have fun with it because there is a lot of humor in the text and some
people get a little uptight when they start getting into some of the subject
matter and they just can’t relax and have a little fun with this so just
remember this is God the Holy Spirit pointing His finger and making fun here
and it just runs completely contrary to the whole political correctness
mentality of today. I mean, if you’re
buying into political correctness and the whole modern scenario of
post-modernism multicultural diversity then the Word of God is really going to
pull your chain this morning so you might just get prepared for it
mentally.
Judges 3, the point in the book is that they have rejected
the kingship of God. I was talking
about double meanings; the fact that there was no king in the land had a double
meaning. First, there was no literal
physical king like all the other nations had which indicated there was a level
of freedom in Israel during the period of the Judges under the theocracy that
was unknown to any other nation on the planet.
But because of their rejection of doctrine, because they failed to obey
the precepts of the Mosaic Law, and because of their negative volition to God
they were continually forgetting God, abandoning God and turning to the false
idol worship of the Canaanites around them.
Because they failed to appreciate doctrine, because they failed to
assimilate doctrine and make that the strength of their soul, God was continually
disciplining them according to the pattern of the Mosaic Law and He was selling
them into slavery to the various foreign powers, and they were being
overwhelmed.
By the end of that period they had been in carnality so
much that finally God discipline them in a way with giving them a king like all
the other nations and warned them that as a result of having a king like all
the other nations there would be an increased taxation, there would be a
bureaucracy and they would lose a measure of freedom that they had under the
theocracy. But rejection of doctrine
destroyed their capacity for freedom, their ability to live responsibility
based on the first divine institution of human responsibility, and the result was
that they continually collapsed internally as a society and as a culture. They didn’t have a physical king and they
had rejected God, the theocratic king, as the true king of the nation. So by rejecting God as the ultimate
authority in the land and the ultimate determiner of absolutes and of values,
by rejecting Him they were in complete relativism and they were doing whatever
they thought was right. And you see
this not only with the people which we’ll come to towards the end of the book,
but also it’s evidenced among the leadership.
So before we get into this second cycle we need to review
the structure of the book just to orient ourselves to what is taking place and
going on. Last time we finished the
first cycle, which is the judgeship of Othniel, and Othniel is sort of
presented as the perfect paradigm of leadership in the nation. Nothing negative is said about Othniel,
everything we learn about Othniel is very positive, he trusts the Lord, the
Holy Spirit comes upon him to give him military victory and there we recognized
the principle that freedom only comes through military victory and as a result
of that in Judges 3:11 we have the conclusion to that first cycle, that “the
land had rest forty years. And Othniel,
the soon of Kenaz, died.” Well,
apparently during the end of his judgeship, the end of those forty years, the
nation was going negative to God again and they were deteriorating into
disobedience.
So we have the continuous cycle in this section of the
book. Now if you look at the overall
structure of Judges it has three sections.
The first section, from 1:1 to 3:6 is the introduction and gives us the
various cycles of deliverance that will take place in the book. There is a cycle of disobedience, then
discipline, and then deliverance by a judge.
And the word for judge, shaphatim
means deliverer, not just judge in the sense of a judicial figure like we have
today but also had a military capacity and he was a…I guess a good translation
would be that of deliverer. So it sets
the tone in 1:1-3:6 that the nation continuously disobeys God, they have
compromised with the nations in the land and instead of annihilating the
Canaanites they have allowed them to continue to live.
Now that is analogous to the believer in the Church Age who
compromises with the sin nature and continues to let the sin nature operate in
certain areas of his life without applying Bible doctrine in the direction of
the sin nature to bring it under control.
Remember Paul makes the mandate in Romans 6 that we are to put to death
the deeds of the sin nature. Failure to
deal with the sin nature inside they lost the capacity for freedom because they
were first enslaved to the sin nature and that prepared them for slavery to
external enemies. It’s important to
remember that of the internal enemies that are mentioned backing the first part
of chapter 3 that God allows to survive in order to test Israel, the internal
enemies are not the external oppressors in the remainder of the book. So you have this cycle going on of
disobedience, discipline and deliverance.
In the main section of the book what God is doing is
indicting the leadership of the nation, that the leadership has failed to
fully, completely, exhaustively trust God using the faith rest drill and that
they too have assimilated the practices and the thinking of the Canaanites in
the culture. They are living now with
these Canaanite groups, the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the
Jebusites, all represent sort of a homogenous culture in the land. Because they are intermarrying with them,
they are compromising with them; the result is that their own thinking is being
torn away from exclusive obedience to God.
This is affecting the entire culture and so the theme of Judges is how a
people, how a culture, how a nation becomes paganized. And I use that word in its technical sense
which means to live and operate in a manner of thinking that is 180 degrees
opposite the Word of God. It is
operating on human viewpoint instead of divine viewpoint, operating on cosmic
thinking instead of Bible doctrine, operating on the thought forms of the
culture around us, which in James 3:13-15 is defined as soulish, earthly and
demonic. Human viewpoint, cosmic
thinking, are all tantamount to thinking like Satan thinks, operating on
arrogance and antagonism to God, which are the twin polls of cosmic
thinking.
So in Judges 3:7 to 16:31 we see how the leadership breaks
down because they too have assimilated pagan thinking into their soul. And then in 17-21, in the appendices, four
chapters, we see the breakdown of the people.
Now there are various cycles through the Judges and we’ll
see this again and again, going from disobedience to discipline to deliverance
and then they go right back to disobedience again and this is where we are in
verse 12. We see that “the sons of Israel” are moving from
deliverance to disobedience. So we’ve
moved from our first cycle, which is Othniel, to our second cycle, our second
major judge, Ehud. And there are six
more judges, Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah and Samson plus a few minor judges.
Let’s
look at Judges 3:12, “Now the sons of Israel again did evil in the sight of the
LORD.” Now this is a very short
statement of Israel’s problem. Again
and again we see in these cycles that the author doesn’t major on the problem,
he’s already outlined that in the first chapters, down through 3:6. So he just goes back to that theme,
reminding us of what they have done.
Now when it says that they “did evil,” evil is defined in the Old
Testament in this kind of context specifically as idolatry. It is a violation of the first two
commandments of the Mosaic Law, the Ten Commandments. Now when God gave the Mosaic Law to Israel
He gave it according to the covenant treaty form known as a suzerain vassal
treaty form which was a very common and typical treaty form utilized in the
ancient world at that time. We have
copies of that that have been discovered in archeology from the Hittites and it
is a treaty that is given from a great king to an inferior power that is a
satellite nation or is a subservient power that is on the fringe of the great
king’s empire.
And
the great king enters into a contract with this smaller power, this satellite
nation and says if you are obedient to me and you follow all the precepts of
the contract, then I will bless you in certain ways and I will give you
financial blessing and I will prosper you, but if you disobey then this will be
the result. So there is always a
blessing and a cursing addendum to the contract and that’s what we have in the
blessing and cursing motif of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28-29. So “the sons of Israel do evil,” and this is
in relationship to the contract and the contract is summarized in the Ten
Commandments which is the basis for all of the freedoms for the nation Israel
and the basis for their law; it’s like the preamble to our Constitution, it
just gives a summary of everything in the Ten Commandments. Now when it states “the sons of Israel again
did evil,” this isn’t talking about immorality, this isn’t talking about criminality;
it’s not talking about the fact that they’re engaged in sexual sins although
they are because of their involvement with the phallic cult and the fertility
religions of Baal worship and the Asherah.
But it’s specifically talking about the fact that they are involved in
idolatry; they have forgotten or abandoned God and they have exchanged the
worship of God for the worship of the creature and the worship of idols.
Now
again, evil is defined in terms of an absolute in this passage. Every time we see this in Judges the writer
is going to emphasize that it’s evil in the sight of the Lord. There is an absolute standard in the
universe and that is the character of God, His absolute righteousness. So God establishes the standard, that right
and wrong is not determined by what is culturally acceptable, what the majority
in the society think is right and wrong, evil is defined in terms of God’s
revelation and God’s character. That is
the moral absolute. As long as Israel
was positive to God and applying doctrine to the soul and fulfilling the
mandates of the Mosaic Law there was political freedom in the land and they
were not under bondage to an external power.
But what we see here again and again is as soon as things get going a
little well for Israel they abandoned God, just like many believers do today,
as soon as life gets good they forget doctrine. You see this over and over again, where people go through
problems in their life, they go through trauma in their life and they say well
I’ve got to get back to doctrine because I know when I was leaning doctrine,
applying doctrine, obeying doctrine, things were going pretty well. So they go to church for a while; five, six
months life starts to level out, they start making some good decisions, they
get out of the hole and the next thing you know you don’t see them any more
because everything has smoothed out and leveled out for them.
This
is what happens with Israel again and again; they do cry out to God which is
tantamount to confession in the New Testament, they confess their sin, they cry
out, Judges 10:10 says they admit that they’re in idolatry, but it’s
temporary. It’s like the baby believer
who confesses his sin but ten minutes later he’s doing it again; he does not
understand that the point of confession is not simply to get forgiveness but to
stay in fellowship by not sinning. It
is not that he is to use 1 John 1:9 as a license to sin, but as a grace
recovery procedure so they can stay in fellowship, because the point is to stay
in fellowship and grow, not simply to get forgiven for your sins over and over
again. Unfortunately the way that most
of us operate as babies is that once we trust Christ as Savior and we are
entered into eternal relationship with Him where we are in Christ and we have
an eternal relationship with Him that can never be broken, never be taken away
from us, we also enter into a different relationship in terms of time, in terms
of our day to day relationship.
And
what happens with a lot of Christians is the first time they hear about 1 John
1:9, that for example when you trust Christ you go into the bottom circle and
you are filled with the Holy Spirit and you are in fellowship with God. But as soon as you sin you are out of
fellowship in carnality, you are grieving and quenching the Holy Spirit. So you understand that Jesus Christ paid the
price for all my sins so all I have to do is confess them, 1 John 1:9 and I’m
back in fellowship. And then two
seconds later they’re sinning again and even while they’re thinking about
confessing their sin they’re planning their next sin and so it becomes kind of
a vicious cycle and that’s all they ever get is from one second to the next,
they are bouncing back and forth, in and out of fellowship, in and out of
carnality and they don’t go anywhere.
And
this is pretty much what happens in Israel, they just stay in fellowship and
positive to God for a very short time, there is no real deep change of
mind. That’s what repentance really
means, metanoeo, means a deep change
of mind and really following doctrine, and so they go through this continuous
cycle of decline all through the period of the Judges. So they violate this and even though they
have cried out to the Lord they don’t stick with doctrine and as soon as they
get a little prosperity off they go into carnality again. Now the result is that God is going to
discipline them. The second part of the
Judges 2:12 reads, “So the LORD
strengthened Eglon the king of Moab against Israel, because they had done evil
in the sight of the LORD.” This specifically states that the reason for
God’s action is their violation of the mandates in the Mosaic Law. The word for “strengthened” is in the Hebrew
the piel vav consecutive imperfect of
the verb chazaq which means to
strengthen, to give courage, and to provide military strength.
Now
the interesting thing here is the picture we’re going to get of Eglon, the king
of Moab, is that he really needs a little additional help in order to get
courage. And so it is only because of
God’s strengthening that has allowed Eglon to gain military victory over the
Israelites at this particular time. We
need to note that the verb chazaq is
an active verb and the subject is God.
God is the One who is strengthening Eglon. God is the one who is in charge of human history and God is the
One who moves the national pieces on the international chess board in terms of
raising up nations and destroying nations in relationship to His plan of human
history so we need to realize that God uses other nations, even evil nations
like Moab, in order to discipline His covenant nation Israel.
Moab
is located in what is called the Transjordan area of Israel. It is on the east side of the Jordan and the
Dead Sea, to the southeast of the main portion of Israel and it is near the
area that was given to Reuben, designated as tribal land for Reuben. So in order for Eglon and the Moabites to
gain victory and establish a stronghold, as we shall see in Jericho, which is located
just inside the west bank of Israel, just inside the western bank from the
Jordan River, that in order for them to have gained victory there they had to
have already taken control of…defeated Reuben and Gad and gained control of the
Transjordan area before they invade into Israel proper after crossing the
Jordan River.
Now
what we see in this verse is that this king is called Eglon. I don’t know whether this is his proper name
or not; just as last time with Othniel we saw that the oppressor was Cushan-rishathaim
which was more of an epithet rather that a proper name. Cushan indicated his area of origination
which was in Midian and rishathaim is a Hebrew word meaning doubly evil or
doubly wicked, so it seems more of a nickname.
Well, Eglon might have been a nickname as well and it has certain
connotations. This whole section starts
turning on these puns that begin with the name of Eglon. For example, Eglon is a paronomasia on the
Hebrew word ‘egel, you can see that
the consonants are the same, these three letters, this is an ‘Ayin, a Gimel and
a Lamed, and it’s the same consonants; remember Hebrew is a consonantal
language as most Semitic languages are, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Arabic don’t have
vowel points, the vowels were added later.
So
when you do a comparison of different words in terms of their consonant roots
you can see that there are certain similarities. Well, ‘egel, Eglon is
the diminutive, the “on” indicates something small, like you would say Tom or
Tommy, Bob or Bobby, Bill or Billy, the Eglon is a diminutive suffix and it’s a
paronomasia on the word ‘egel, which
means a bull or a calf. This is
specifically in reference to a fatted calf used for a sacrifice and it is
talking about…also it’s related to the adjective, agal which means round or rotund.
If we were to take Eglon and bring this pun over into English it would
be a word that would instantly bring to mind the term “fatty.” Now that’s not politically correct, the Jews
are poking fun at this guy. He is
obese. If you look in verse 17 we read
“and he presented the tribute to Eglon, the king of Moab; now Eglon was…” and
we need to expand the translation a little bit, it is not simply “a very fat
man,” he is “an exceedingly fat man.”
The term is bariy’ mee‘od
in the Greek, it is the adverb mee‘od
which means exceedingly or greatly or to the extreme, plus the noun bariy’ which is also a term used to
describe the fatted calf brought to the altar for sacrifice.
So
what’s happening, in the Jewish culture, you’re sitting around, you’d be
telling these stories and they’re talking about fatty, remember when fatty the
king of Moab defeated us. And so
there’s all this pejorative insulting terminology here as they’re poking fun at
their enemy and all of the words that are used here are bringing to mind just
how obese this guy was. We’re going to
see that he’s so fat that when Ehud assassinates him and drives his homemade
dagger into Ehud’s belly the guy’s so fat that it just swallows the dagger whole
and he just loses it in his stomach.
This is very graphic and some of you are going to get a little queasy at
times but remember this is the Word of God and the writher is just having a lot
of fun with this. This guy is an
exceedingly fat man.
Now
what’s interesting here is the double meanings of some of these words. The word here for bariy’ and fatness here, is also combined with the word for kill
it, in this verse where he jabs the dagger up into him in Judges 3:22 and says
the fat flows over the blade; the word is also used to describe the fat of
sacrificial animals. The subtext here
is that Eglon is being viewed as a fat obese dull-witted sacrificial animal
that God is taking out of the picture.
And you also have references, for example in Psalm 119:7, 70 and in
Psalm 73:7 that this relates to stupidity, that it’s not simply fat of body but
fat of heart, fat of mind. That’s the
phrase that is used and it is an idiom for being obtuse and stupid, and it’s
clearly played out in this scenario because Eglon as the king lets this enemy agent
come into his throne room and he sends all of his guards and everybody else out
so he’s got this private audience with the enemy. How stupid can you get; there’s no protection there. So the Jewish writer of Judges is pointing
out how stupid, and obtuse and imbecilic and inept Eglon the king of Moab is,
and he’s just poking fun at them.
But
it’s not for the sake of simply poking fun at Eglon because there’s a stronger
message underneath that. If this fat
stupid obtuse man who can’t even protect himself ruled over us then how stupid,
fat and spiritually obtuse are we? This
is exactly what happens when we get into reversionism. Now let’s briefly review the doctrine of reversionism. There are eight stages of reversionism. In the spiritual life we are mandated to
grow by means of grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Notice you don’t grow by prayer, you don’t
grow by memorizing Scripture although Scripture is used in growth; you don’t
grow by getting involved in programs or singing praise songs, you grow in grace
and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So once we trust Christ we are filled with the Spirit and as long as we
continue to take care of sins through 1 John 1:9 and advance spiritually we will
grow; as long as we are learning doctrine and applying doctrine. But at some point people go negative, they
reject doctrine and they begin to reverse themselves in their spiritual
growth. That is the meaning of reversionism,
to go into spiritual reverse and spiritual decline. It happens with individuals and if you get a large number of
individuals in a nation involved in personal reversionism then the national
entity goes into reversionism. And
that’s the exact picture we see with the Israelites at this stage.
The
first stage of reversionism is reaction and distraction; something happens in
your life and suddenly you’re too busy to go to Bible class, you’re too busy to
get involved in listening to tapes every day, you’re too busy to focus on your
personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ so you’re distracted. Or you react, you get mad at the pastor, the
pastor says something you don’t like or somebody at church does something that
you don’t like so you leave church and say they don’t know what they’re talking
about and you start reacting to doctrine and you say doctrine really doesn’t
work and come up with all kinds of excuses in order to make yourself look
good.
You
start with reaction and distraction, and then because you are no longer focused
on God as the soruce of happiness your life starts to fall apart and you start
looking for happiness in the details of life.
You look for happiness in success, in money, in materialism gain, in
friendship, social life, sex, whatever it might be, you get involved in the
frantic search for happiness. This
leads to soul poverty based on the passage in Proverbs that God answered their
prayers, that is the prayers of the Jews in the wilderness, but He sent
leanness to their soul. That’s what
happens, all of a sudden you realize that there’s a vacuum inside your soul and
you constantly try to fill that up. So
we look at it through emotion. This is
what’s happening in our nation as a whole, we’re operating on emotional
revolt. I’ve noticed in just the last
few months that whenever I watch one of those morning news shows, I put the
word “news” in quotation marks, or just about any of them, that you watch the
woman and one or two specifically, if you watch the women news people who are
conducting their interviews, they’re constantly asking such probing questions
as, well how did that make you feel, well just how hard was that, and they are
all these emotional questions and they don’t ask any issue oriented questions,
any content or policy questions, it’s more based on feeling and it just shows
that the whole orientation of our culture is on emotion. You just hear it again and again in everyday
language; listen to yourself, how many times do you ask somebody, well how do
you feel about that? I really don’t
care what anybody feels about anything, what do you think about it? Let’s engage our minds and quit engaging our
emotions.
Emotional
revolt of the soul leads to an ingrained negative volition; an ingrained
negative volition where it becomes more and more difficult to turn around and
get positive because we’ve surrounded ourselves with unbelievers, we’ve
surrounded ourselves with friends and put ourselves in circumstances and
situations and we are going through divine discipline, it just becomes more and
more circumstantially difficult to turn around and to go to Bible class and to
exercise positive volition. This leads
to blackout in the soul where we have rejected doctrine and our souls are
getting darker and darker because of the absence of truth, which is light, and
that leads to scar tissue on the soul, we become hardened towards God,
ultimately to full blown cosmic degeneracy which is where Israel is at this
point because they’ve assimilated so much of the pagan thought of the
Canaanites around them that their lives and their thinking is virtually
indistinguishable from the thinking of the unbelievers around them. And that’s
exactly where Israel is and frankly I think that’s where our nation is
today. We are so caught up with the
pagan thought forms of our day that most Christians are thinking so much in
terms of cosmic thought they don’t even realize it because it’s been so long
since they’ve heard anybody teach any level of Bible doctrine.
So
Israel is in reversionism and the point of the author here is it has screwed up
your thinking so much and your ability to perform so much, because that’s
always the result of sin in the life.
When we get involved in reversionism and we get away from the Lord, then
we start losing objectivity, we start operating on subjective impressions and
emotions and we no longer make good decisions from a position of strength and
we start making bad decisions from a position of weakness, which is the sin
nature. And whenever we come under
outside pressure, whether it’s the outside military pressure Israel was going
through or any sort of outside pressure we might be going through, either from
a job, personal problems, health problems, financial problems, whatever it
might be, when we go through those instead of handling it with the problem
solving devices and the stress busters, then what we do is we are converting
that outside pressure of adversity into stress in the soul. We have studied how stress destroys our
ability to think and before long our thinking, our cognitive abilities just
begin to shut down. We can’t analyze
the problem correctly because we can’t see it objectively any more. We’re not longer using doctrine and so one
bad decision builds upon another bad decision and the cumulative effect is
self-destructive.
And
that is exactly where Israel is and so the writer here is pointing out that
Ehud may be absolutely horrible and degenerate and he’s an old fat slob and he
can’t really do anything, he’s not very effective but he was effective enough
to defeat you militarily and to rule you for 18 years. So he does this, we’re told in Judges 3:13,
he does this in a coalition; “And he gathered to
himself the sons of Ammon and Amalek;” so these are two other tribal
groups. Now there is a relationship
between Moab and Ammon, they are cousins and they are both descendants of
Lot. We will see that in just a moment,
and Amalek is a more distant cousin.
But what I pointed out when we looked at the first series of discipline
under Cushan-rishathaim is that through all of these cycles there is always a
coalition of external enemies, that is, enemies outside the land that are
against Israel, but they always involve the same people, the Midianites, the
Amalekites, the Ammonites and the Moabites, it’s just at different times
there’s a different power that has moved into the position of authority within
that coalition against Israel.
These are the same people that are against Israel today. We’ll go back and review our genealogy of
the Arabs; where did the Arabs come from, because to understand the modern
Arab-Israeli conflict you have to understand that it has its roots in the Bible
and it’s basically a family feud. After
the great flood, give generations of Noah, down through Peleg. Peleg had a son, Joktan, and Joktan is the
father of 13 Arab tribes that came to live and dominate the Arabian Peninsula,
what we call Saudi Arabia. Then he had
a son, Nahor, who is the father of the Chaldeans and Nahor lived down in Ur of
the Chaldeas. He had a son Terah, who
had a son Abraham. He had three sons
actually, Abraham, Nahor and Haran.
Abraham had a son by a handmaiden, an Egyptian handmaiden named Hagar
and Ishmael became the father of the Bedouin Arabs. Abraham’s promised seed was Isaac, and then Abraham had a second
wife, Keturah, and he had six sons from Keturah, one of whom was Midian who is
the father of the Midianites. Now
Nahor, who was Abraham’s brother, had a son, Lot who is Abraham’s nephew. One night Lot got drunk and his two
daughters had incestuous relations with him and the result of that incestuous relationship
was two sons, Ammon and Moab. Ammon and
Moab are the progenitors of the Ammonites and the Moabites. So we can see that they are second cousins
to the Jews who descend through Isaac through Jacob. Isaac had another son, a twin of Jacob, Esau, who is the father
of the Edomites, and it is from Esau that Amalek was born, the father of the
Amalekites.
So you can see there’s just a family feud that’s going on here and
it is all related to the spiritual issues outlined in the Abrahamic Covenant. And God has promised that His seed would go
through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the Jews are descended from Abraham and it
is through the Jews that God will bless all nations. That ultimately was fulfilled in the person of our Lord Jesus
Christ who went to the cross and died there as a penalty for the sins of the
world. And because of the family feud
going back into the ancient times, this was fueled by Satan who was using these
cousins and these other families to attack Israel in order to try to prevent
the Lord’s plan of salvation from coming to pass in the Lord Jesus Christ. And he is still using all of these Arab
tribes today, all of the Palestinian conflict we see today. Ammon, that same word is found in the name
of the capital, Amman for Jordan and it is Jordan which is the modern state or
ancient Ammon and Moab. And all of this
is still Satan’s ploy to try to destroy the Jews because God has promised the
Jews that they would possess the entire land, something they never possessed
and that He has a plan for their future.
So if Satan can somehow block that he thinks he will have victory in his
war against God. But God is not going
to allow Satan to have that victory.
Now Moab, this is a map of the modern state, this is the Dead Sea,
Jerusalem is located here, and ancient Jericho is located here and this is only
about twelve miles from the Dead Sea and only about ten miles from the crossing
of the Jordan. So it’s just barely
inside Israel proper on the west bank.
God is carrying out this discipline, when it says that God strengthens
them, he his coalition of Ammon, Amalek, and Moab, that they go and defeat
Israel and they possessed the city of the palms which is Jericho. This is fulfillment of God’s discipline
warning of five cycle of discipline on His covenant nation Israel given in
Leviticus 26. Leviticus 26:14 says “If
you do not obey Me and do not carry out all these commandments, [15] And if
instead you reject My statutes, and if your soul abhors My ordinances so as not
to carry out all My commandments and so break My covenant,” this is the Mosaic
Covenant, [16] “I in turn will do this
to you: I will appoint over you a sudden terror, consumption and fever,” so
there would be health problems, “consumption and fever that shall waste away
the eyes and cause the soul to pine away.”
So that’s that stage of soul poverty in reversionism, that God would
answer the prayer but send leanness to the soul, “cause the soul to pine away;
also you shall sow your seed uselessly, for your enemies shall eat it up.”
And this is what’s happening, that they will have production,
manufacturing and they will have agricultural production but it would be taken
by their enemies. No matter how hard
they worked the fruit of the fields would be absorbed by the enemies, and
that’s what was taking place here with Moab.
If you look at the map, what was happening here is that at the fords of
the Jordan, down in this vicinity, is where cattle and other crops were moved
from the Transjordan tribes of Reuben and Gad into the central part of
Israel. So this was a major area for
the movement of goods back and forth, and trade goods, part of the caravan
route, and what happened is that when Eglon moved in and set up his summer
palace and headquarters in Jericho then he would control the fords of the
Jordan and exact an enormous tribute or tax.
I guess this is one of the first toll roads in history. They’re operating down here on the fords of
the Jordan and he’s exacting this tribute that is paid on either a quarterly or
annual basis in order to let the caravans go through and move the troops, and
that’s just a fulfillment of the promise of divine discipline there in
Leviticus 26:16. “You shall sow your
seed uselessly for your enemies shall eat it up. [17] And I will set My face against you,” so God becomes the
enemy of the nation, even though he is the suzerain who has entered into a
special covenant with them, He is going to become an enemy to them because of
their rebelliousness and their infidelity to Him. “I will set My face against you.”
This is reminiscent of the statement in the New Testament that God
hates the arrogant and God makes war against the arrogant but God gives grace
to the humble. So when we allow
ourselves to go into carnality we’re always operating on arrogance and when we
operate on arrogance God is going to set Himself against us. If you are a believer and you are child of
God then God is going to bring divine discipline into your life that may be
absolutely horrendous in order to get your attention and focus you back on the
right priorities of Bible doctrine first and obedience to God second.
So God says “I will set My face against you so that you will be
struck down before your enemies,” there will be military defeat. Notice the cause of military defeat is not
bad military budgeting; it is not the fact that they don’t have a stock pile of
weapons. All of these are other
factors.
[Tape turns] … is a
spiritual reason and the application we’re seeing again and again is the reason
there are cultural problems, the reason they lose freedom, they reason they’re
defeated militarily, the reason they have economic collapse; it has nothing to
do with the policies in force, it has everything to do with their rejection of
God. The policy that any nation adopts
politically ultimately reflects an underlying spiritual reality. And when that underlying spiritual reality
is a rejection of God and Bible doctrine then the consequences of that nation
that has enslaved themselves in their soul is going to be enslaved politically
and economically as a result of their policy, because when you’re not thinking
on the basis of doctrine, you’re thinking on the basis of paganism and pagan
thought always leads to subservience and defeat.
So that is exactly what happens here. The ultimate problem is not political and the ultimate solution
is not political. And when people run
around today thinking somehow that they’re going to solve our problems through
politics, if we just get the right party into power and the right person in the
Presidency that we’re going to solve all our problems, well you’re mistaken
because that’s not the problem . The
problem is the people and the people have rejected God and rejected doctrine. See, all we’re to get when we have this
election is we’re either going to get one man who is going to hasten the
decline or we will get the other man who won’t stop it or slow it down. So it’s a case of bad or worse but it’s not
a case of good because that’s not the problem and that’s not the solution. That’s not to say don’t vote, it is just to
say don’t put your hopes on that or get crushed when the person you think is
going to solve the problems doesn’t make it because that’s not the problem, but
we need to get out and vote and make sure that the right man gets in office.
Leviticus 26:17, “I will set My face against you, so you shall be
struck down before your enemies, and those who hate you shall rule over you,
and you shall flee when no one is pursuing you,” and that’s emotionalism,
you’re afraid all the time so you’re running away from shadows. So you see Israel’s culture at this time,
because they have gotten involved with paganism, is really no different from
the kind of culture and problems that we face today.
In Judges 3:13 we read that they came across the Jordan and “they
possessed the city of the palm trees,” which is just another term for
Jericho. Now apparently the Jews had
started to rebuild Jericho at least because there was an oasis there. Jericho is eight miles northwest of the Jordan
River, it’s 800 feet below sea level and there is a gorgeous oasis there which
provided water and sustenance for the area.
And apparently Eglon established a temporary palace there where he would
go for a while and the area was covered with date palms and banana trees,
balsam, sycamores, henna, it was a very productive area, a very beautiful area,
and he would go there in order to relax.
This city was not rebuilt for many, many years, until 850 BC which is
about 400 more years under the reign of King Ahab. When Joshua, if you remember, when Joshua defeated Jericho he put
a curse on the Israelites who rebuilt the city and that is not fulfilled until
sometime later when Heil [sp?] attempts to fortify the city in 850 BC. Eglon isn’t a Jew so the curse doesn’t apply
to him. So he refortifies the city and
establishes at least some sort of temporary residence there, sort of a Camp
David type thing I think
Judges
8:14, “The sons of Israel served Eglon the king of Moab eighteen years.” Here we run into one of the words I’ve
studied a lot, ‘abad, it’s the qal
imperfect of ‘abad which means to
work, to serve, to be enslaved to and it also means to worship in certain
contexts. The writer continually uses
this with various meanings because they moved from serving God and worshiping
to serving and worshiping the false gods and whenever they served and worshiped
the false gods that leads to political and economic slavery. And he uses the same word in order to tie
the three events together. Failure to
serve God leads to serving other gods.
Whenever you reject God something else always moves into the vacuum and
then you become enslaved to that and to other forces and other factors. Because they served the king of Moab it took
eighteen years this time for the message to get through that this is really a
bad situation, and finally they cry out to the Lord
Judges
3:15, “But when the sons of Israel cried to the
LORD,” za‘aq which does not imply any
kind of real confession, it may simply be nothing more than Lord I’m miserable,
help. There may be no recognition of
sin at all, it is only used one time in Judges where it gives content to the
cry and that’s in Judges 10:10 where they cried to the Lord and say we have
sinned by serving the Baals and Asherah.
But they can simply be like many believers who, after going through a
certain amount of divine discipline say Lord, deliver me. And the Lord in grace still gives them a
little grace and a little blessing in order to give them a little opportunity
to turn back to Him and to confess their sins and get with the program
spiritually. So the Lord answers their
cry and He “raised up a deliverer for them,” and the word for deliverer comes
from the root word, it’s a participle that comes from the root word yasha‘ which means to save or deliver
and is the same root for the name of our Savior, Jesus. It is Yeshua in the Hebrew from the noun and
verb yasha‘ which means to deliver or
to save and the principle here is that only God can deliver us from the
consequences of our sin.
So He provides a man named Ehud.
Now Ehud is a fascinating individual; he shows a lot of fine character
qualities but I’m not sure he shows any spiritual qualities. There is a marked absence of spiritual
references to Ehud. After this point
you don’t hear about God any more except once when Ehud invokes His name at the
very end when he tells the armies of Israel, after he’s assassinated Eglon, he
says go and attack them because God has given them into our hand. But other than there’s no mention of the
Lord, He’s completely absence from the text and the silence is deafening. And then the writer leaves God out in a
context like this he’s saying something about the individual. Apparently Ehud had military capability, he
was a good planner, he was crafty but he not necessarily had a good
relationship with the Lord unlike Othniel in verse 10 earlier, the Spirit of
the Lord does not come upon him.
And it’s interesting that in Hebrews 11 when there is a list of
judges that are listed because of their faith and trust in God, Ehud is
conspicuously absent. So it seems that
Ehud is not listed here because he has great spiritual ability. God can raise up many different people in
order to provide deliverance. We might
even say that God raised up a Dwight Eisenhower in order to lead the allied
troops to victory during World War II.
That does not mean that he is necessarily given any special spiritual
ability by God, but that God simply raised up an individual who had that
ability to bring victory. We could say
that God raised up Norman Schwarzkopf to provide victory in the Gulf War. But that is not saying anything about their
spiritual quality or their spiritual capability. It’s simply saying that that’s the man that God prepared and put
in that place in order to perform the job but it doesn’t mean that they are
necessarily even a believer; it can just mean that God has prepared a certain
individual in order to bring about His plan.
So there’s no indication here that Ehud has any real spiritual
relationship with the Lord. He is
called Ehud, the son of Gera, the Benjamite,” now Benjamite…the word plays here
are phenomenal. Benjamin, the name
Benjamin, means son of my right hand.
So we have here “Ehud is the son of my right hand, a left-handed
man.” What’s going on here, as soon as
you see something like that in the text you have to say wait a minute, what’s
the Holy Spirit trying to emphasize here.
He’s a left-handed man. This is
something unique and there’s a lot of people who write on this and say finally
the “lefties” get their day in court here and they have a hero. I’ve heard all kinds of things, but the
point that the writer is making here, especially when you compare it to other
passages like later on in Judges 20:16, also in comparison with a phrase in 1
Chronicles 12:2 where we have this same phrase, “a left-handed man,” and it
literally means shut up to the right hand.
Now in Judges 20 there’s an entire unit of Benjamite warriors who are
said to be left-handed. Were they all
born that way, is there some sort of genetic preponderance. That’s what some people say, well you know,
this was just sort of a genetic tendency among the Benjamites and shows that
they all come from the same tribe.
But it’s more than that; this phrase isn’t the same phrase used in
1 Chronicles 12:2 for being left-handed.
There is a different phrase; this one literally means bound in the right
hand, and the best explanation of this is the Benjamites had prepared a special
unit of warriors and these warriors had been trained, they had bound up their
right hands so that they learned how to use their slings and their javelins
with their left hands so that they were ambidextrous. And the purpose for that is that in combat the enemy soldiers
were all trained to fight with other right-handed soldiers. If they came up against a whole company of
left-handed warriors they would be undone because when you’re fighting with the
sword and a shield and you’re trained to strike with the sword with your right
hand and hit the shield that’s held in the left hand of the opposing person and
all of a sudden he’s got a sword in that hand instead of a shield you’re
bumfuzzled for a moment, you’re confused, you don’t know how to handle it, and
so the Benjamites had apparently put together an elite group of soldiers who
had trained themselves to be ambidextrous, and Ehud is one of those soldiers,
so he has a military background; he has been trained to use certain weapons,
and he is a very thoughtful individual and a good planner because of the way he
carries out his episode of deliverance.
Judges 3:16, he also has a certain
ability with developing weapons, “Ehud made himself a sword,” a double edged
sword, a cubit in length,” the Hebrew cubit was about 14 to 16 inches long, a little
larger than a good bowie knife, “a cubit in length and he bound it on his right
thigh under his cloak.” So when he was
searched, because they had sort of a cross draw he would be searched on his
left thigh, not his right thigh and he can get in past the guards, close to the
king and even if he makes a move with his left hand nobody is going to think
that it is a threatening move. He has
to make his own weapon. Now this is
another indication of what has taken place during this period. The Philistines and these other nations have
prevented Israel from having blacksmiths in the land; we know that from 1
Samuel 20. It’s an early form of gun
control, an early form of arms control, and the way they kept Israel in a
subservient position and a position where they could be defeated is to keep
them from having the latest technology for weapons. So it’s interesting that people like Ehud and Shamgar, have to
make their own weapons. Ehud makes his
own sword; Shamgar defeats the Philistines with an ox goad. They used very primitive type weapons. All of this is because of policies of arms
control that had been imposed upon them by these external enemies.
He comes to Eglon, he brings the
tribute, he’s in charge of the caravan, and Judges 3:17, “He presented the
tribute to Eglon king of Moab.” Then we
have a little parenthetical observation to remind us that Fatty was an
extremely fat man, “Now Eglon was a very fat man.” So Lefty now comes to see Fatty in the throne room. Now after Lefty leaves in Judges 3:18, “It
came about when he had finished presenting the tribute, that he sent away the
people who had carried the tribute.
[19] But he himself turned back from the idols which were at Gilgal,” so
they’ve left Jericho and their caravan, they’ve made it about five miles out to
Gilgal, which has important significance for a Jew. It was at Gilgal after the nation came into the land under
Joshua, defeated the Canaanites at Jericho, at Ai and in the south, they
gathered together and reaffirmed the covenant with God at Gilgal. But what’s happened now to Gilgal, this
tremendous shrine in ancient Israel to their unique relationship with God? There are not idols there, which shows the complete
reversionism of the nation that they still haven’t turned away from their
idols, they are still practicing that, even though they’ve cried out for
deliverance.
So he turns back at the idols at Gilgal
and he sends everybody else on, and he comes to the king and ye says, “I have a
secret message for you, O king.” And this implies sort of secret prophecy from
God. Just like so many people in power,
they want to know what God has to say to them and they’ll go to astrologers and
they’ll go to tarot card readers and all kinds of soothsayers in order to find
out what the future might hold. Eglon
is extremely gullible and he’s going to let Ehud come in and give him a secret
word from God. So apparently Ehud has
studied his opponent and realizes that he has religious superstitions and so
he’s going to use that against him. So
he comes in and he says, “Keep silence.
And all who attended him left him.”
He sends out all of his attendants, all of his body guards, all of his
servants and he lets Ehud get close to him.
Judges 3:20, “Ehud came to him while he
was sitting alone in his cool roof chamber.
And Ehud said, I have a message from God for you.” Now the “cool roof chamber,” there’s a lot
of debate as to what means because it’s a Hebrew word, it’s a hapax, it’s only
used one time and we’re not sure exactly what this means, whether is outside or
there some indication from looking at cognate languages that it could just be
the upper throne room, but in any case it is a private room where there is only
Ehud and Eglon. And Ehud came to him in
verse 20, “while he was sitting alone in his cool roof chamber. And Ehud said, I have a message from God for
you. And he arose from his seat.”
Judges 3:21, “Ehud stretched out his
left hand,” now this isn’t a suspicious action, “he stretches out his left
hand, reaches under his robe, grabs the sword that’s strapped to his right
thigh and thrust it into his belly.”
[22] The handle also went in after the blade,” so apparently there’s no
hilt on the dagger, and he just rams this thing, just shoves it right up into
all the folds of fat that just wrap around it and encompass it and the sword is
swallowed up into his intestines, “and the fat closed over the blade,” very
graphic, “for he did not draw the sword out of his belly; and the refuse came
out.” It’s such a nice way of putting
it, the King James says “and the dirt came out.” What happens when you die is your bowels immediately evacuate,
that means everything comes out. Now
there’s great humor here because what the writer wants you to understand and
wants the Jews to understand is this fat man who’s been oppressing us 18 years
that you’ve been so afraid of, well there’s nothing left of him but just a pile
of refuse, just a pile of feces.
Ehud is very crafty, Judges 3:23, “Then
Ehud went out into the vestibule” now we don’t know what that is either, but in
light of all the discussion here, that the slaves are outside and they think
later on, they don’t know what happened, they’re going to think he’s in the
head (for you Navy guys), that he went to the rest room, they won’t come in to the
room. So Ehud goes out into the
vestibule, and there’s some indication that this word is not really a vestibule
but some architectural feature probably related to the latrine, privy or the
head. So what he does is that this is a
private part of the throne room and he locks from the doors from the inside and
then either escapes through some door inside the chamber, some other exit, or
he goes on the roof and goes over the outside wall, but whatever the case, he
manages to get out without anybody seeing him and he locks the doors from the
inside.
Judges 3:24, “When he had gone out, his
servants came and looked,” they knock on the door and wait for the king to call
them in, “and behold, the doors of the roof chamber were locked; and they said,
He is only relieving himself in the cool room.” That’s not what it says in the original Hebrew. The original Hebrew, you do have a
euphemism, it says that “he was covering his feet.” You know when you drop your drawers they land on top of your
feet, so that was the euphemism for going to the bathroom and relieving
yourself. You “covered your feet.” So what they actually said was he’s in there
covering his feet so let’s not bother him.
Of course, the guy had evacuated all of his bowels so there’s this rich
odor that’s permeating the outer throne area so they think that’s what’s going
on here. See, you just have to live
inside the text for a while and understand all the humor.
Judges 3:25, So they wait outside, and
they wait and wait and “They waited until they became anxious;” and that’s not
what the Hebrew says either, it says “they waited until they were embarrassed,
they had just been out there for so long, they’re just embarrassed, man, this
guy is really taking his time in the can, but finally they get the key and they
open it up they go in and they find “behold, their master had fallen to the
floor dead.” That’s allowed Ehud time
to escape in verse 26.
Judges 3:26, “Now Ehud escaped while
they were delaying, and he passed by the idols and escaped to Seirah. [27] It came about
when he had arrived, that he blew the trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim;
and the sons of Israel went down with him from the hill country, and he was in
front of them.” So if you look at the
map he heads out from Jericho and heads up into this central area highlands
here, blows the trumpet and basically what the text says is again a little bit
of a mistranslation, “pursue them,” he really says “charge,” and off they
go. He gathers the forces that are up
in this area and they come down and they bypass the troops at Jericho, an
excellent military maneuver and they seize the fords of Jericho. And that way they trap them inside the land
and they’re able to take the Moabite army apart piece by piece.
Judges 3:28, “He said to them, Pursue
them,” that is “Charge, for the LORD has given your enemies the Moabites
into your hands. So they went down
after him and seized the fords of the Jordan opposite Moab, and did not allow
anyone to cross. [29] They struck down
at that time about ten thousand Moabites, all robust and valiant men; and no
one escaped.” So this is a more in
depth picture, they’ve been up in the area of Jericho, and they just come down
here and seize the fords and then when the Moabites try to get across they set
up an ambush and they wipe out ten thousand of them.
The result, Judges 3:30, “So Moab was
subdued that day under the hand of Israel. And the land was undisturbed for
eighty years.” As a result of military
victory they now have freedom in order to pursue day to day life and two more
generations will go by before they forget God and abandon Him and go into
another cycle of discipline. Now the
point of application for us is to remember that we’re in the same position Israel
is. When we compromise with the enemies
within, the sin nature, then that makes us susceptible to all of the ideologies
and religions and philosophies and rationalizations of the pagan culture
surrounding us. And once we allow
ourselves to operate in the sin and under the power of the sin nature then we
become slaves to the sin nature according to Romans 6. Once we become slaves to the sin nature then
we will become enslaved to the external ideas and forces and thoughts of the
cosmic system.
That leads to an enslavement of our soul
that is only broken by turning back to God.
We have to begin with 1 John 1:9.
No matter how bad we’ve messed up, no matter how great the failure, no
matter how heinous the sin, God will forgive us. Christ paid the penalty, there’s no sin too great for the grace
of God. That’s great optimism because
it means we can still recover if we’re still alive, and then we can continue to
learn doctrine, begin to apply it to the problems and all of the horrible
situations we’ve created for ourselves, and then we can advance forward in
peace and stability just as Israel did.
But the issues in life, we must realize, are ultimately spiritual;
everything else is a symptom of our spiritual condition.