Othniel, Ehud and the King Who Had a Gutful

Well, last week we started the series on the book of Judges. I hope that you've caught up if you haven't watched it last week, and we saw some of the historical context into which these events of the judges in Israel's history, Israel's very early history happened. This morning, we jump ahead a few spots to Judges chapter three. That's about a generation or two after the book of Judges has started. And we're going to read the story of the first two judges in the history of Israel.

The first two judges who were not quite kings, that's why they're called judges. They were leaders though of the people of Israel who oversaw the political, military leadership, and the spiritual leadership, really, of the nation of Israel in its infancy. We're going to read from Judges chapter three from verse seven to the end of the chapter, verse 30. Judges 3:7. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.

They forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Asheroth. Therefore, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and He sold them into the hand of Cushion Roshetham, king of Mesopotamia. And the people of Israel served Cushion Roshetham eight years. But when the people of Israel cried out to the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer for the people of Israel who saved them, Othniel, the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother. The spirit of the Lord was upon him and he judged Israel.

He went out to war and the Lord gave Cushan Roshetham, king of Mesopotamia into his hand. And his hand prevailed over Cushan Roshetham, so the land had rest for forty years. Then Othniel, the son of Kenaz, died. And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. And the Lord strengthened Eglon, the king of Moab against Israel, because they had done what was evil in the sight of the Lord.

He gathered to himself the Ammonites and the Amalekites, and went and defeated Israel. And they took possession of the city of Palms. And the people of Israel served Eglon, the king of Moab, eighteen years. Then the people of Israel cried out to the Lord, and the Lord raised up for them a deliverer, Ehud the son of Gerah the Benjamite, a left-handed man. The people of Israel sent tribute by him to Eglon, the king of Moab.

And Ehud made for himself a sword with two edges, a cubit in length, and he bound it on his right thigh under his clothes. And he presented the tribute to Eglon king of Moab. Now Eglon was a very fat man. And when Ehud had finished presenting the tribute, he sent away the people who carried the tribute. But he himself turned back at the idols near Gilgal and said, I have a secret message for you, O king.

And the king commanded silence, and all his attendants went out from his presence. And Ehud came to him as he was sitting alone in his cool roof chamber. And Ehud said, I have a message from God for you. And he arose from his seat. And Ehud reached with his left hand, took the sword from his right thigh and thrust it into his belly.

And the hilt also went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not pull the sword out of his belly, and the dung came out. Then Ehud went out into the porch and closed the doors of the roof chamber behind him and locked them. When he had gone, the servants came and when they saw that the doors of the roof chamber were locked, they thought surely he is relieving himself in the closet of the cool chamber. And they waited until they were embarrassed. But when he still did not open the doors of the roof chamber, they took the key and opened them, and there lay their lord dead on the floor.

Ehud escaped while they delayed, and he passed beyond the idols and escaped to Seirah. When he arrived, he sounded the trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim. Then the people of Israel went down with him from the hill country, and he was their leader. And he said to them, follow after me, for the Lord has given your enemies, the Moabites, into your hand. So they went down after him, and seized the fords of the Jordan against the Moabites, and did not allow anyone to pass over.

And they killed at that time about ten thousand of the Moabites, all strong, able-bodied men. Not a man escaped. So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel, and the land had rest for eighty years. So far our reading. So we see two judges in our passage this morning, Othniel and Ehud, or Ehud, however you want to pronounce it. Othniel is the first judge, and he is a model leader.

Othniel is in many ways a model figure. He comes from a godly family we see. His brother is called Caleb. Some of us may recognize that name because he is mentioned elsewhere, earlier in the Bible, as a man who served under Moses and Joshua. We might best remember him as being one of the young spies that was sent by Joshua into the promised land to go and scope out what the cities were like, what enemies lay in the new land.

And you remember that these twelve spies came back to Joshua and said, all of them except for Caleb, we can't go in there. The cities are too well fortified. They have too high a wall. The enemies are too big, they are giants, they are giants in this land. And Caleb, the only one faithful, says to Joshua, we don't need to be afraid, God is with us.

Caleb is shown to be a faithful man. And now by the time we get to this part in the book of Judges, a few generations have passed. Othniel is probably an older, wiser man by now, and he is the younger brother of this faithful godly man, Caleb. Othniel comes from a faithful family. And he is described in these opening verses as a spiritual, faithful, good leader. Verse nine says that he is God's chosen deliverer when they fall to the enemy that is attacking them.

That word deliverer, incidentally, literally means saviour. Othniel is a saviour. And we see, amazingly, that he is a man that is so blessed and used by God in verse ten that the spirit of the Lord is upon him. He is filled with God's very presence. And as we read the book of Judges, you see that he is arguably the greatest judge of them all.

The first and the greatest. Why? Well, there's nothing negative said about him at all in the account of his life. Each subsequent judge, however, has some flaw, sometimes a fatal flaw. Ehud, who we read about today as well, the one that comes after him, is a good, brave man, but he is sneaky and deceptive.

He does things under the cover of darkness and with some deception thrown in. There's the female judge, Deborah, who is a capable leader, but is weak militarily and needs outside help, needs to make allies and friends. Then at the end of the long history of the judges, we find the famous strong man, Samson. Samson with the long hair. Samson has a huge fatal flaw, which is his sexual promiscuity.

His intermarrying with the enemies. These are examples of how these judges have their personal flaws, but Othniel is an exception. Nowhere in his account do we read anything negative about him. He is the perfect deliverer for Israel. Othniel is raised up by God, he destroys the enemies of God's people, and there is peace in the land, the Bible says, for forty years.

That is one generation. Then we read this sad verse, and it's a verse that is then repeated throughout the book of Judges again and again. We read it in verse twelve, and the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. You know, we often read these verses and we shake our heads and we think, how can these Israelites, having heard and seen such a great deliverance by God, how can they experience God so powerfully and yet so quickly desert Him? Turning away from Him to do evil in the sight of the Lord.

Well, it's a reality that's actually not too unfamiliar for us, is it? Because a movement away from God doesn't take a day, a week, or a month. A movement away from God where a generation leaves God behind takes many little choices over many little moments. How does this happen? Well, a generation begins to overlook the basics.

A generation is lost when one generation who has learnt the great salvation of God, the great power of God, and they fail to pass it on to the next generation. This is such an important reminder for us when we overlook the basics of prayer in our family. When we overlook the basics of Scripture reading, of church involvement. Now, missing that once, twice in a week, probably no big deal. Spread those little compromises out over months and years, one micro compromise after another, and before long, you realise your family has drifted irreversibly away.

And we have all sorts of reasons. We can say, well, the church has really disappointed me. Church really hurt me. We can also say, our life is very busy. You don't know how much I have to do in my week.

Someone will say, someone hasn't said hello to me today after church. We have hundreds of reasons for why we allow ourselves and our families to drift, but sooner or later, this is the reality. You find yourself thousands of kilometres adrift from the shores of God's kingdom. And apart from God's miraculous intervention, attempting to then turn around and start paddling back to the shore for yourself and for your family, well, it's almost impossible. The Christian walk is a marathon, not a sprint.

There's a book written by the man Eugene Peterson. He wrote the paraphrase of the Bible, the Message. He writes a really good book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. A long obedience in the same direction. That is what Christian discipleship is. Long obedience in the same direction.

In this book, he writes about how he personally, as a pastor, had to discover and rediscover the basics of Christian faith, Christian life. Even as a pastor, he writes, I had to learn that my primary pastoral work had to do with Scripture and prayer. He says, I was neither capable nor competent to form Christ in any other person, to shape a life of discipleship in man, woman, or child. That is supernatural work, and I am not supernatural. His, he says, was the more modest work of Scripture and prayer, helping people listen to God speak, and then joining them in answering God as personally and as honestly as we could in lives of prayer. This turned out to be slow work, and from time to time, impatient with the slowness, I would try out ways of going about my work that promised quicker results.

But after a while, it always seemed to be more like meddling in these people's lives than helping them attend to God. More often than not, I found myself getting in the way of what the Holy Spirit had been doing long before I had arrived on the scene. And so I would go back feeling a bit chastised to my proper work, Scripture and prayer, prayer and Scripture. And so in a pattern that we will see and will come back to again and again in the coming weeks, in the book of Judges, we find one faithful generation that don't live up to these faithful habits and routines. They don't teach these lessons to the next generation.

In one way or another, they don't look after their kids. They don't raise up new leaders. And this is what happens, the kids walk away from God. And so it's a reminder for us that doing the basics, like being in the word, teaching our family to pray and praying with them regularly, coming to church regularly, switching on a TV in the morning on a Sunday morning to watch a sermon. These are the boring, slow, basic things we must do to protect against backsliding.

But because they walk away from God, we see God hands them over to their enemies. In fact, this not just happens. We see that God strengthens the hand of Eglon, king of the Moabites. God strengthens his hand. God makes Eglon able to beat Israel. And the hard-hitting bit of detail mentioned here in verse 13 says that the enemies took possession of the City of Palms.

The City of Palms is another name for Jericho. Now remember two generations ago, Jericho is the first city that is conquered by Joshua and the Israelites in the new land. Israel are not advancing, they are going backwards. This is the painful reality of this little detail. An enemy by the name of Eglon.

Now that just sounds like an evil king's name. Hey, Eglon. Eglon rules and reigns over the Israelites. They are forced to bend the knee, the Bible says. And it takes them eighteen years before they cry out to the Lord, it says.

The nation of Israel, they cry out to God. Verse 15 says, and we see this little glimmer of hope. God gave them a deliverer. God gave them a saviour, a man named Ehud. And then it adds again another ominous detail, he was a left-handed man. And so we come to Ehud, the unexpected saviour.

Now there's a little bit of debate about this, this little mention of his left-handedness. In the ancient world, there is a there was generally a suspicion of left-handed people for some reason. For some reason, it was considered a negative thing to be left-handed. In fact, this is a view that was pretty common up until even recently. My grandad was left-handed.

He was trained as a carpenter. He hammered nails with his left hand. And his teacher would not accept that, and he would have to learn how to use his right hand to do his carpentry. To be right-handed is somehow regarded as being superior to being left-handed in Ehud's time. Now, but this is where scholars then also debate, because every man would have been taught how to use their sword right-handed. Why does Ehud use a left hand?

Well, they say that he was probably disabled in his right hand. He probably had a crippled hand or some sort, maybe he didn't have a hand. And so he would have had to use his left hand. Now whether that is true or not, what we see here in this detail is that there is an unexpected saviour being set up. He's an unexpected hero.

Because many people would have considered a left-handed man useless. And the Bible says this is God's choice. Now, Ehud is portrayed as a crafty and cunning man. He has a plan to deal with this enemy king. He fashions for himself a double-edged sword.

As the Bible says, that is a cubit long. Now that is about this big, it's about 45 centimetres. So really, it's a short sword, if you want to call that, or really, it's a dagger. He makes himself a double-edged dagger. But here's the kicker.

Because he is a left-handed man, he has to use, he has to strap his weapon on his right leg in order to draw it. So he has a dagger on his right thigh. He also hides it under his clothing, the Bible says, so it is concealed. Ehud has the enemy king in his sights. Now under a foreign king, Israel would have had to pay weekly or monthly tribute to this king.

So they would have brought him food or livestock or gold. And Ehud says that he will go and help with doing this. He volunteers. After the payment is given to the evil king Eglon, Ehud and the group start walking back home. But at one point, and it's sort of late in the day, in the evening, it says that Ehud turns around, and by himself, sneaks back to the palace.

Entering the palace, he says to the king, King Eglon, I have a secret message for you. The Bible says that the king sends his servants out of the room, trusting this man. And this is where things get interesting. Commentators make the point that Ehud would have been searched. Surely, you don't let, sort of the people that you are subjecting, the people that you are subduing, just let anyone in to the throne room of the king. So they would have probably searched him.

But because Ehud has either a crippled hand, or they assume no one fights left-handed, they search perhaps just his one thigh, his left leg. They let him through into the throne room of the king, or in fact, into the personal chambers of the king. The king Eglon sends his servants away, so he is unguarded, undefended against Ehud. Ehud finds himself alone and there's a dagger strapped to his leg. And then with a seriously cool one-liner that would have made James Bond proud, or Jake Peralta from Brooklyn Nine-Nine for the young guys here.

Ehud says, O king, I have a message for you from God. And he pulls that dagger and he drives it into the belly of the fat king. That is indeed a good message, a strong message. Now I wouldn't be surprised if George Lucas, when he developed his character Jabba the Hutt for Star Wars, used King Eglon as his inspiration. Because his death is just as epic as Jabba the Hutt's death.

Eglon is so fat, the Bible says, that the blade is swallowed up by his belly. The blade sort of drives in and it swallows up even the hilt of the dagger. Adding insult to injury, the king empties his bowels. The ESV bluntly puts it, dung came out. There is such a mess.

There is the smell is so bad that Eglon's guards think that he's gone to the toilet, and they don't dare to go in. The Bible says that they wait, and that they wait, and that they wait until the point of embarrassment before realising something is wrong. Meanwhile, Ehud escapes in the cover of darkness. He then runs down the mountainside, he rallies the men of Israel, and he and an army attack the Moabites as they are reeling from the assassination of their king. And it says that they killed, in verse 29, about ten thousand of the Moabites. Listen to this, all strong able-bodied men and not a man escaped.

So in this way, Ehud becomes the next judge, the next leader of the people of Israel. He rescues Israel, and he establishes another eighty years of peace in the land. Ehud is an unlikely saviour. Now, what does this mean for us? Well, I've heard all sorts of ways to try and interpret this. I heard about a sermon that said Ehud is a lot like us, or we are a lot like Ehud.

We may have low self-esteem because, you know, there may be some sort of deficiency we feel about ourselves, and Ehud pushed through that, and he made his deficiencies work for himself. Others will say, well, we have to make sure that we are healthy and not fat like Eglon. You know, we can we need to be good Christians are fit Christians. Be slim for him. But the hero of the stories in the book of Judges is never the judges.

It is always God. God is the hero in these stories. It's not a story about self-esteem. It's not a story about weight loss. It's a story of an unlikely victory through an unexpected saviour, through unexpected grace.

The entire book of the Judges points us towards a far greater saviour that is coming. These saviours save, but they only save for one generation. And we'll see over the course of the next few weeks, as we look at impressive men and impressive women like Ehud, and Gideon, and Deborah, they are indeed many saviours of God's people, but we will see they don't save for very long. They don't change people's hearts for very long. And in fact, if you read the whole Bible, your attention keeps being drawn towards the need for a greater saviour, someone who will rescue His people completely.

And so Ehud is really a foretaste of Jesus. But Jesus is also so different to all of these many saviours like Ehud. Unlike Ehud, Jesus doesn't use deception. He doesn't use the cover of darkness. Unlike Deborah, He doesn't need help to fight His enemies.

He fights alone. Unlike Gideon, He doesn't display selfish ambition. He doesn't have the rashness of Jephthah or the sexual weakness of Samson. Jesus is the perfect saviour. And yet, these judges also point us to Jesus.

They give us a foretaste of Jesus. And in this instance, what we see in Ehud is how unexpected God's salvation will be. Like Ehud, Jesus is an outsider. Like the unexpected left-handed saviour Ehud, Jesus is the most left-field saviour of all. Remember Isaiah 53, that great prophecy in the Old Testament of the Messiah that would come.

Isaiah 53 verses 2 and 3 sums up this unexpected saviour. It says, He would have no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him. Nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. That is why in the New Testament, when Paul is explaining, you know, the cross, why did we need the cross? In First Corinthians 1, Paul would say that God used the foolish idea of a man named Jesus dying on a cross to be the saviour of the world.

He would use that as His rescue plan. This left-field solution for mankind's eternal salvation, Paul writes, is foolishness. It is foolishness to those who are perishing. It is foolishness to those who don't accept it. But Paul adds, the foolishness of the cross is the deepest wisdom of God.

And so from the story of Ehud and, in fact, the rest of the Judges, we see the unexpected nature of God from Scripture. You begin to know you can expect the unexpected from God. God loves to show His power, not through Hollywood stereotypes. God loves to frustrate the proud, the people who know what's going to happen. He chooses broken people in humble situations, and He saves His people through humble saviours.

But this story also says something, not of the character of Jesus, but also of His victory. It says something about the enemy who has been conquered. And this is our last point. The fat king who suffers a mortal wound. Why do we get this detail about how King Eglon dies?

Why does it need to be so visual and so graphic? Well, it's no accident. It was intentionally written. It was intentionally put on paper with every bit of gory, smelly detail to humiliate this king. But also to give Israel the pride and the strength to resist their enemy.

The greatest shame of this ancient world into which this book was written was to die a humiliating death. And Eglon really did. Time and again, Israel would come back to this story to draw strength, to marvel at how great a salvation they had been given. How crushing was the defeat God had given to His enemy. And friends, this is the story that should give us strength as well.

Because it reminds us of Jesus' victory over our enemy, Satan. Colossians 2:15, this is what it says. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, Jesus made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. These powers and authorities, these are the spiritual supernatural forces of evil. And Paul says, Jesus took them.

The ESV translation says, and He put them to open shame by dying on the cross. Jesus disarms every single one of His enemies, and not only that, He makes a public spectacle of them. And so like Ehud humiliates, crushes Eglon, Jesus crushes Satan. And so for this reason, we don't fear Satan. We don't need to fear him.

My heart is sad when I hear of Christians that won't go into certain homes, won't interact with certain people because they fear Satan. We don't fear Satan. Satan is the fat, smelly, ugly enemy that Jesus Christ has crushed on the cross. May there not be a single timid Christian in Open House Church. Because even as the Bible calls Satan a prowling lion, the reality is he is bleeding out on the floor of his own throne room, lying in the excrement of his downfall.

And why do we need to hear this? Why is this Old Testament passage still important for us? Well, just as the Israelites would come back to this and say, what a victory our God has won, we say the same. Just as the same courage that filled their veins to take on ten thousand strong and able-bodied men, we say, our God has won. Our enemy is dead.

We have courage in our veins. Many of you will know of my friend from Afghanistan. I won't mention his name. He's been to our church on several occasions. At one time, as he was sharing the gospel and delivering Bibles in Afghanistan, he was captured by the Taliban.

And not just any Taliban, he was brought to the house of the local Taliban leader. And he was kept in a prison or a tiny room overnight with a promise that he was going to be executed the next day. He was committing blasphemy, he was converting Muslims, he was going to die. Can you imagine the weight of that moment? But this leader comes into his room that morning with a gun in his hand, with two bodyguards on his left and his right.

And he says to my friend, is there any reason why I shouldn't kill you today? It's sort of like saying, any final words? And with supernatural, supreme confidence, my friend said to him calmly, if you wanted to take my life today, and my Saviour would not want you to, you wouldn't be able to even with that gun in your hand. And he said, and if you wanted to save my life today, and my Saviour wanted to take it, nothing you could do could save me. The man was stunned.

No one in his long vicious history had ever said anything like that to him. And he asked my friend to tell him about this man, this Saviour. Hours later, this man gave his life to the Lord Jesus. To this day, he is a secret Christian in the Taliban. He gave my friend his clothes, new clothing, put a ring on his finger, gave him his bodyguards and his car to take him out of that Taliban country.

We don't fear our enemies. What power does Satan have against our Saviour Jesus? In his famous hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, the one I alluded to earlier, Martin Luther put it this way in verse three, the prince of darkness grim. We tremble not for him. His rage we can endure, for lo his doom is sure.

One little word, one little word shall fell him. Satan is the fat, smelly fallen king who has suffered a fatal wound, crushed by our capable, yet unlikely Saviour Jesus. And so friends, is this Jesus not worth telling our kids about? Is this deliverance not worth meditating with your family about? Sharing with our friends about?

We have our young people here, we have little Adeline here, young people thinking about starting a family. Why would we not take active steps to keep those basics of Bible reading, prayer, church attendance, fellowship, small groups, all those things as priorities in our lives? We can draw strength from our Saviour, Jesus. Ehud said to the people, follow me, for the Lord has given your enemies into our hands. Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, we thank you that your enemy, our enemy, has been given into our hands. Thank you that we have absolutely nothing to fear. Thank you that we may draw strength from the likes of these judges who have gone before you, who have given us beautiful, visual, graphic ways, a demonstration of what you have done for us fully and ultimately on the cross. Lord Jesus, we pray that our hearts may be moved, that we may commit ourselves, not just even today, not just even as we are convicted at these words, but every day, of every week, of every month, in every year, a long obedience in the same direction. And then Father, for those of us who know of family and friends, brothers and sisters who once walked with you, who have walked away.

Father, we also know that even in these hard situations, even when humanly speaking, there is no hope. Oh God, you are the God of the unexpected. You are the God who can do the impossible. You're a God of incredible mercy and grace when we don't deserve it, when they don't deserve it. Father, please forgive them.

Father, please pour out your Spirit into their hearts. Help them to understand. Help them to be stunned by the confidence we may have in Jesus Christ. Help them to be stunned that there is a God who knows them, every part of them, and yet loves them, and is willing to forgive them. We bring ourselves, we bring these friends, we bring our church to you in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.