A Crappy Exit

But he shouts to us in our pain. He's trying to get our attention. Up here. Do you see what you're doing? Difficulties and trials are oftentimes allowed by the good hand of a loving God into your life in order that you might turn back toward him. So many people have said this before. You don't know that God is all you need until God is all you have. It's something about getting to the end of our rope that we look up and we discover who's holding it. That it's a good God who loves us. He's not out to punish us. But even in shocking suffering, his whole purpose is to cause us to look back to him, the source, the meaning, what your life is made for, designed for.

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The Story of Ehud

He gave King Eglon of Moab power over Israel because they had done what was evil in the Lord's sight. After Eglon convinced the Ammonites and the Amalekites to join forces with him, he attacked and defeated Israel and took possession of the city of Palms. The Israelites served King Eglon of Moab eighteen years. Then the Israelites cried out to the Lord and he raised up Ehud, son of Gera, a left-handed Benjamite as a deliverer for them. The Israelites sent him with tribute for king Eglon of Moab. Ehud made himself a double-edged sword eighteen inches long. He strapped it to his right thigh under his clothes and brought the tribute to King Eglon of Moab, who was an extremely fat man.

When Ehud had finished presenting the tribute, he dismissed the people who had carried it. At the carved images near Gilgal, he returned and said, "King Eglon, I have a secret message for you." The king said, "Silence," and all his attendants left him. Then Ehud approached him while he was sitting alone in his upstairs room where it was cool. Ehud said, "I have a message from God for you." And the king stood up from his throne. Ehud reached with his left hand, took the sword from his right thigh, and plunged it into Eglon's belly. Even the handle went in after the blade and Eglon's fat closed in over it so that Ehud did not withdraw the sword from his belly, and the waste came out. Ehud escaped by way of the porch and closed and locked the doors of the upstairs room behind him.

Ehud was gone when Eglon's servants came in. They looked and found the doors of the upstairs room locked and thought he was relieving himself in the cool room. The servants waited until they became embarrassed and saw that he had still not opened the doors of the upstairs room. So they took the key and opened the doors, and there was the king lying dead on the floor. Ehud escaped while the servants waited. He passed the Jordan near the carved images and reached Serah. After he arrived, he sounded the ram's horn throughout the hill country of Ephraim. The Israelites came down with him from the hill country, and he became their leader. He told them, "Follow me because the Lord has handed over your enemies, the Moabites, to you." So they followed him, captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Moab, and did not allow anyone to cross over. At that time, they struck down about ten thousand Moabites, all stout and able-bodied men. Not one of them escaped. Moab became subject to Israel that day, and the land had peace for eighty years.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

It does seem like not a lot shocks people anymore. Several years ago, Jerry Seinfeld said as much in one of his stand-up acts. He says it's harder and harder to shock audiences. And maybe we're past some days of shock jocks like Howard Stern on the radio, or Jerry Springer and shock reality TV. Jerry Springer's been off the air since 2018—kind of ran its day. And maybe we're just not shocked by anything anymore. But I hope, as you hear this passage, and some of you giggled when you heard this, that's the right response to much of this. There's a lot shocking in this passage. And maybe one of the most simple things I want you to hear this morning is your Bible's funny. The Bible is filled with some humor here and there. There's a lot in this passage—puns, play on words, lots of jokes throughout. But this is really a shocking passage and intended to be so.

This morning, about three points. Let's see if we got them up here on the screen for you: Shocking suffering, a shocking savior, and shocking salvation.

So shocking suffering. In each of these accounts in the book of Judges, there's a group of people who come and oppress the Israelites. And here, that people is Moab. Now at this point, there should be an audible gasp that goes up from the room.

And obviously, you've forgotten your Hebrew because Moab is this insignificant nation with sad beginnings and should never have been able to oppress Israel. Moab, the country originated from Abraham's nephew Lot. Lot got drunk one night, as the story goes. His two daughters slept with him, and the oldest one became pregnant and named the child Moab, which means "from daddy." Not a nice name, and not a great start for a nation. This is a nation that was on the other side of the Jordan River, modern day Jordan, and was a small and insignificant people.

We do know a couple of names. Last year, when we went through the story from Numbers, we maybe remember a man named Balaam. He was a Moabite. Or Ruth—a whole book in the Bible about this woman, a Moabite. Again, she's insignificant, and she's grafted into the line of Jesus. Kind of shocking because the Moabite people were insignificant. They were tiny in number. They were weak. And here we get this story that they have been oppressing God's people for eighteen years. For the first people hearing this, it would have been an audible gasp from the congregation.

It's like in sports when a tiny team beats a big powerhouse. Some of you will remember 2007, Nick Saban's first year coaching Alabama, and Alabama loses to this no-name school, University of Louisiana Monroe. Nobody's ever heard of them. Shocking that this can happen. Or maybe several years ago, NCAA tournament 2008, Georgetown gets beaten by this little tiny school called Davidson College. That's not the same. Davidson had somebody on their roster. Right? Steph Curry. Every guy my age has his only jersey Davidson ever produced. That should be for my Moses sermon. I said, sorry. Wrong. Back to Moab. Or maybe David and Goliath. Anyway, Moab shocks Israel by subduing them for eighteen years.

And to make it worse, they are led by Eglon. No reaction to that one either. Okay, you've forgotten your Hebrew this morning. So in the ancient Near East, people were led by a king who was more like Braveheart than Jabba the Hutt. This is Jabba the Hutt—this is a very large person. He was never leading the people out to war. Again, the shocking thing is this man should never have been subduing Israel. And to make it worse, Eglon in Hebrew—his name is probably a nickname—it means "fat cow." That's what the name means. It's shocking.

The Pattern of Evil and Idolatry

Now this passage begins with this double statement: "Israel did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Israel did evil in the eyes of the Lord." It doesn't say explicitly here what that was, but it's really clear from the passage before. Last week we talked about how Israel kept going back to the idols of the surrounding cultures. Most notably, we talked about Asherah, the Phoenician fertility goddess, and then Baal, the god of weather and seasons, the god who made your crops grow. These were very enticing to the Israelite people.

But there's another reason why we know that the evil they did in the eyes of the Lord is about idolatry. There's a hyperlink right in this text. There's a hyperlink, and it's the name Eglon. Because there's another famous place in your Bible where some people make a golden eagle—a golden calf—and they worship it. Exodus chapter 32. Moses is with the people at the base of Mount Sinai, and God says, "Moses, go up on the mount. I'm going to give you my law." So Moses leaves, and he's gone for a while. And while he's gone, the people go to Aaron and said, "Make us a god to worship." They take off their earrings and their necklaces and their gold bracelets and give them to him, and he melts them down and forms a golden calf, and the people worship it. He says, "People of Israel, this is the god who brought you out of Egypt." And they're like, "Oh, yeah. It is." And Moses comes down and is like, "Oh, no. It's not." He takes that golden calf and destroys it, grinds it into dust, sprinkles it on the water, makes the people drink it so they can taste the bitterness of idolatry.

That's what's being hyperlinked here in Judges 3. The people again have gone after other gods, have moved toward idols, have turned away from God, and worshiped other good things. I remind you from last week, we talked about how in an ancient Near Eastern, subsistence-level farming culture, how important children were for your future. They were your workforce in the present. They're your retirement plan in the future. How important your crops were to you. A single season where no rain comes could devastate, could wipe out a people. These were very enticing.

Sin is not just doing bad things, but the thing we're gonna see over and over in Judges is that sin is a worship disorder. It's worshiping good created things and demanding of them something only God can give you, of wanting from them something only God can give you. The reality is we're made in God's world, and God is incredibly generous.

Recently, we watched the movie Free Guy in my household starring Ryan Reynolds. It's a story about a video game sort of based on Fortnite. Ryan Reynolds plays an NPC—a nonplayable character, somebody you cannot get on the game. They're one of those extra people who are just wandering around the city. But the twist in this story is that this NPC guy decides not to keep acting like an NPC. He begins to make his own decisions. He begins to exercise his own volition and preferences, and he becomes sort of alive.

Now there's another parallel story because outside of the game, there are people—the creators, the coders behind this game. One of the coders, Millie, is playing the game, and she begins to interact with Guy, and she finds him incredibly appealing. She begins to fall in love with a character in the middle of a video game, and she doesn't understand what's happening to her. And she kisses him in this one scene. And Guy backs up from her and he redirects her. He says this:

I love you, Millie. Maybe that's just my programming talking, but guess what? Somebody wrote that program. I'm just a love letter to you. Somewhere out there is the author.

This entire world that we live in, the things that you love the best, the good gifts that you cherish—the vacations, the meals, the things that you enjoy—these are all designed by the author, by the creator. They're a love letter over and over saying, "I'm the giver. What you most want is me." This is God's story. The story of all the Bible. All of it points back to himself.

Idolatry, though, is losing sight of the connection between gift and giver. Idolatry is looking to good things, created things to give, to deliver on only what God can give. And it's funny in the Bible—God makes fun. He mocks our idols. So in two places, in the Psalms and also in Isaiah, God says this:

The idols of the nations are like silver and gold. They're made by human hands. They have mouths, but they cannot speak. They have eyes, but they cannot see. They have ears, but they cannot hear nor is there breath in their nostrils. Those who make them will be like them—foolish, dead—so will all who trust in them. — Psalm 115, Psalm 135

That's what's being hyper demonstrated in this passage. God is showing how foolish our idolatry is, how weak, what a sad substitute it is. Because look back at Eglon, the fat king of Moab. To be subjected to a king like this, for the Israelite people was just laziness. But is it that us? Have you ever been stuck in patterns where you're doing things and you're like, "I don't want to do this. This is dumb. I know this is meaningless. I know that this will not deliver" and you keep doing them? You're stuck in patterns where you're like, "I love this and I can't let go of it," and yet it's not fulfilling. It's not gonna give me life. It doesn't have enough substance to it to carry my hopes and dreams and my sense of self.

This is what humans do all the time. We go to idols. We go to little things, and we begin to imbue them, endow them with all kinds of significance. "I must have this in my life." And we end up being trapped by things, and it's a surprising suffering in our lives. The reason there's suffering is that God is trying to get their attention. "Hey, over here. Look up here." God allows—it says in this passage—he allows Moab to oppress Israel. Why? Why would God do this? It's to drive them back to God. C.S. Lewis said that God oftentimes whispers to us in our pleasures, but he shouts to us in our pain. He's trying to get our attention. "Up here. Do you see what you're doing?" Difficulties and trials are oftentimes allowed by the good hand of a loving God into your life in order that you might turn back toward him.

So many people have said this before: you don't know that God is all you need until God is all you have. It's something about getting to the end of our rope that we look up and we discover who's holding it. It's a good God who loves us. He's not out to punish us. But even in shocking suffering, his whole purpose is to cause us to look back to him—the source, the meaning, what your life is made for, designed for.

Shocking Savior

So the Israelite people cry out to the Lord, and God provides them a deliverer. Now the word "deliverer"—it's interesting—appears in your Bibles. The first six books of the Bible, it appears 10 times.

And those are pretty thick books of the Bible. If you've ever tried to read through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, those are long books. Six times. And this book Judges—20 times. It's like if you're out on a dark night and you're lost, you look for a cluster of lights. The cluster of lights in this book is all around this word "deliverer." God is a deliverer. God continues to deliver us from ourselves, from our idols. As I said last week, the Old Testament book of Exodus is so much about our justification—how God delivers us from slavery, brings us to himself. But Judges is about sanctification, how God continues that process of delivering us.

The deliverer in chapter three, of course, is Ehud from the tribe of Benjamin. So far, so good. But then you find out that Ehud was left-handed. Literally, not left-handed. Probably not a South Pole, as we say in our country. But rather, in Hebrew, it says he's diminished on his right side. It's what it says about him. He's diminished—maybe from an injury, maybe from birth—but he has no use of his right hand and his right arm.

And to make things more pronounced, there's a play on words here in this passage. Ehud, the diminished right-hand guy, is from the tribe of Benjamin. Benjamin means "son of my right hand." The right-handed guy who can't use his right hand. In their day, just like our day, you want to be the right-hand man. That's why Alexander Hamilton sings about being the right-hand man to George Washington. It means the same thing then as it does now. And here you have the surprising deliverer. The right-hand guy from the right-handed tribe—important, powerful—and yet he's diminished. Can't use it. There's irony here. It's like someone whose last name is Baker who can't make a cake to save their life. Or a cook who can't cook. Here's the right-handed guy who can't use his right hand. He's a shocking deliverer.

The Trajectory of Weakness

With Ehud, this is a very important trajectory that starts right here and goes all the way through. Because right here you get Ehud. The book of Joshua right before this begins with a military leader who is all that you think a military leader should be. I mean, confident, powerful. Joshua makes commands. He takes the hill. He knows what he's doing. But Ehud is a leader with a diminished right hand.

Next section, we'll see Deborah. Deborah pairs up with Barak, and they don't lead all twelve tribes. They only lead two of the tribes to victory. And then after that, we're going to get to Gideon. And Gideon amasses all these troops, and God says that's too many. He diminishes that group by a huge number—more than half—and then down to 300 people. And then after that, you get Samson, who fights all by himself with the jawbone of a donkey. And after that, after Judges, you get David, a shepherd boy who comes out with a slingshot.

See, this whole trajectory is like God doesn't need human power. God works in weakness. God provides a shocking savior. And of course, this ends up in the person of Jesus. An unexpected savior, an unlikely savior.

Nothing in his appearance that would make us attracted to him. He was despised and rejected by men. — Isaiah

You would never look at Jesus and say, "That's the guy. Follow him. He knows what he's doing. He's our leader." He was poor. He was weak. He was unattractive. He was powerless. A shocking savior. Finally, shocking salvation.

I mean, this story only gets better—or maybe worse—as we go through it. You can decide that later on the way home.

The Plan

Ehud prepares to meet Eglon, and he takes a short double-bladed dagger. Now in Hebrew, it says it has a double mouth—two blades—and it's a play on words. It's about Eglon, who can't keep his mouth closed when he's continuing to eat and eat and eat. This large man eating too much.

He takes this dagger, Ehud does, and secures it. And this is an important detail: to the inside of his right thigh. Why is that significant? Because nobody would check there. In the ancient Near East, your guards pat down people on the left side because if you're right-handed, you draw off your left. Only a left-handed person would draw off their right. And so here's this man. He shows up in court. He's clearly disabled. They don't even probably bother to pat him down. But they can see nothing on the side. He's got this hidden.

And as he's preparing to leave, he goes out with the delegation, and he's like, "Oh, I need to come back and give something special. I got something special for the king." The word there is a play on words between "word" and "thing"—it's the same word in Hebrew. He's like, "I got a special something for the king." And the king is like, "Oh, what is it?" And he says, "I got a word from God." So Eglon clears out the room.

He clears out the room and stands up, locks the door. Alright. What is it? Ehud draws and plunges this dagger 18 inches into the king, and it's so large that the fat closes up over the place, and the sword remains inside the guy. Right? Disgusting. And to only make it more graphic, your Bibles try to clean this up. If you look back over a bunch of translations, they're always trying to sanitize this. His bowels release. That's what we read in this passage. Awesome. You're welcome.

And it only gets more graphic. Ehud escapes the only way he can. There's only one exit. Now he's on a porch, and porch—historians agree it's a nice euphemism. They would make a private room for the lord of the fortress, and this porch on the back that overhung the walls had a hole in it. It was the latrine. This is what this was. It was the downwind side of the fortress. This was always how things were constructed. And so Ehud does his best Shawshank Redemption and climbs out the only way he can through the throne, the other kind of throne. As I'm putting this in there for my 15-year-old, this is the skippity-toilet moment of the Old Testament.

I'm not trying to play shock jock. I'm not just trying to push this at you. This is all over this passage, and it's gross, and it's disgusting, and it's intentionally so. It's meant to be shocking. I would be unfaithful to this passage to clean this up for you.

Ehud's attendants are outside the door. They can smell something has happened in the king's bathroom, that Eglon has done his business, and yet the door doesn't open. And he is taking incredibly long, embarrassingly long. They finally open the door, and there's their king dead. Mess everywhere.

And here's the point. Here's the whole point. If Israel is gonna be delivered from their idolatry and rescued from their folly, somebody's gotta go in and do the dirty job. Somebody's gotta go in and kill the fat cow king and escape through the toilet. And that's the point.

Because the same is true with us. If God is going to rescue us from our idols, from the things that we chase instead of him, somebody's gotta go in and get really messy.

The Cost of Rescue

I'm gonna give you a modern version of this. Every few years, there's a story like this. I got a bunch of these. In 2008, a man named Thomas Vanderwood from Alexandria, Virginia—his 20-year-old son with Down syndrome walks over the lid of a septic tank in the yard, and the lid breaks. Their son collapses, and he falls in. And Vanderwood jumps in after him and yells for his wife to call the authorities. And he managed to hold his son up so his son's head was above the surface, and he drowned in doing so. The authorities show up. They finally were able to pull the boy up out and do CPR and finally revive him. But, of course, the father didn't make it.

Now why am I telling you that kind of horrible story? I got lots of those. For the same reason we read Judges 3. The point of the story is that for us to be delivered, somebody's got to go in. Somebody's got to dive into the sewage and pull us out.

You know, what is the cross but the Lord of glory diving into our mess, sacrificing himself into the mess of human sin? What is the cross but God saving us who could not save ourselves at the loss of his own life? What's the motivation for the cross except for just like this story where Thomas Vanderwood does so because he has the love of a father for a child?

What we see over and over in Judges is God's rescue of his people out of the filth, of the muck, of the disgust of idolatry. What do we see in our own lives but episode after episode of the Holy Spirit pulling us out, wiping off our face, and doing CPR until we're revived?

Here's the point. You're not gonna let go of your idols until you see what a poor substitute they are. What a mess you're in. What a mess you keep putting yourself in, and how incredibly precious you are to the God of the universe, that he would send his own Son to jump in. He would send the Spirit over and over to pull you out.

And it's only when we come to the end of self that we begin to say, that's life. That's life.

The Runaway Bunny

I'm gonna close this way. This is the story of the whole Bible. This is the story of your life. I used this back in 2018, so I think I'm good to try this one again.

Are you familiar with the story The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown? It's a children's picture book. It goes like this:

Once upon a time, there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, "I'm running away."

"If you run away," said his mother, "I will run after you for you are my little bunny."

"If you run after me," said the little bunny, "I will become like a fish in a trout stream, and I will swim away from you."

"If you become a fish in a trout stream," said his mother, "I will become a fisherman."

Oh, if you become a fisherman, said the little bunny, I will become a rock on the mountain high above you. If you become a rock on the mountain high above me, said his mother, I will become a mountain climber, and I'm gonna climb to where you are. Keeps going. He says that if she keeps chasing him, he'll turn into a flower, and she's like, well, I'll become the gardener. Undeterred, he says he will become a bird and fly away, and she says she'll become the tree that he flies home to. He says next, he'll become a sailboat and sail away from her. And she says she will become the wind and blow him where she wants him to go. Then he said he'll run off and join the circus and fly on a trapeze. And then she said she will become the tightrope walker and walk to where he lands.

Well, I will become a little boy and run into a house, said the little bunny. If you become a little boy and run into the house, said the mother bunny, I will become your mother and catch you in my arms and hug you. Shucks, said the little bunny. I just might as well just stay where I am and be your little bunny. And he did. Have a carrot, said his mom.

That's the story of Judges. That's the story of Israel. And that is the story of you. The Lord of glory can't be outrun, outpaced. He is undeterred. His love is unrelenting. He won't stop.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Would you pray with me? Father, we thank you for this disgusting story. We never would have wanted to see this in our Bibles. It's hard to read this. It's hard to look in the mirror and see this of ourselves. And yet we thank you that you are this kind of God. We keep substituting you out for different versions. But Lord, we thank you that this is the way you are. Lord, we'd like to substitute ourselves in the story for somebody cleaner, somebody who's not quite a mess. And yet, Lord, we thank you that you keep coming after us. Give us faith to continue to believe that. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.

Thank you for listening to our CTK Raleigh sermons podcast. CTK is a community rooted in the depth of the gospel, refined by hard conversations, fueled by meaningful relationships, and committed to redemptive work in Raleigh. If you have questions about our sermon content or about our church in general, please visit our website at ctkraleigh.org.