Apostasy. Oppression. Distress. Deliverance. These recurring cycles described an age gone awry–an age when Israel had no king and when everyone did as he saw fit (Judges 21:25). Each cycle had a similar beginning (The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord”), and also a recognizable conclusion (“the land had peace for…years,” or “(a judge] led Israel for…years”).
King Eglon, a Moabite warrior who had recaptured Jericho, held the city in his fierce grip for eighteen years. When the Israelites cried out to God for deliverance, He raised up a series of judges. Othniel was the first of the judges, and he delivered the Israelites from the Mesopotamians. Ehud was the second, and he conquered Moab.
A descendant of the tribe of Benjamin, Ehud was daring, left-handed and strong. When King Eglon’s oppression in Jericho was really getting under Ehud’s skin, he organized a party of steel-nerved men who pretended to bring a ‘present” to the fat dictator. Conniving a secret interview in the summer parlor of the king, he afterward sent his companions on their way while he (Ehud) returned alone to King Eglon with a “secret message from God” (Judges 3:20). As the obese dictator rose to his feet, Ehud (with his powerful left hand) shoved his foot-and-a-half-long dagger so far into Eglon’s belly that the fat covered even the handle!
Ehud slipped away, after locking the door, and climbed the steep cliffs behind Jericho. He gathered together his men, seized the fords of the Jordan River through which the Moabites needed to pass in pursuit or flight, and cut them off. Ehud and his band killed ten thousand Moabites in the process (Judges 3:29), not allowing one of them to escape.
While this is an account of gruesome, coldblooded murder, the point is that God did raise up Ehud as a deliverer of His people (Judges 3:15). He sometimes uses what seems to be horrendously repulsive and dreadfully loathsome to achieve His ultimate purposes.
May/June 1994
