In an attempt to capture some of the drama of this passage, I want to attempt something different as an introduction to the text. I hope you’ll follow along in your Bibles when I get to the meat of the sermon, but I thought I’d introduce the sermon by reading a short story I’ve written. Hopefully, this will give the sermon something of the feeling of Old Time Radio where the story was told in words. Here goes:
The perspiration forming small rivulets down Ehud’s back had little to do with the heat. If these guards were as conscientious as they were supposed to be, the Israelite assassin might be in the shadowy realm of the dead long before his target. He prayed his sweat would not smell like fear. Even with his atrophied right hand, he expected the Moabites to search him for weapons. He hoped his special sword, lacking the bold hilt of the usual Israelite sword, wouldn’t be obvious under his robes. Self-consciously, he glanced at the bag of silver and gold coins strapped to his right side—tribute money for King Eglon. He rattled the coins a little to make sure he caught the guards’ attention. They knew he was there to bring the Israelite tribute to the greedy Moabite king. Maybe they would assume that no one would strap a sword underneath a bag of coins.
Of course, Ehud was wagering on another factor, too. Maybe the guards would be overconfident enough not to look on his right hip. Right-handers were used to reaching across their bodies to draw their swords from their left sides; it was too awkward to draw from the same side as your sword hand. In fact, drawing across one’s body offered a chance for an immediate parry if one was swift enough. Even looking at his right hand, relatively useless for holding a sword or much else, the guards wouldn’t normally be thinking of a left-handed swordsman. He saw one of the guards eyeing the bag of coins and simultaneously sneering at Ehud’s weak “sword” arm.
But Ehud winced when the guard smiled slyly and offered to take the bag of coins to King Eglon, himself. Ehud couldn’t just outright object to that plan; that would be tantamount to accusing the guard of planning to steal the tribute money. He immediately realized that the guard wouldn’t have made such a suggestion unless the Moabite had already judged him to be weak and unarmed. The truth was, Ehud’s weakness was deceptive. As a lefty, he had humiliated many of the best sword arms in Israel and he was certain he could take down this complacent guard along with his equally bored companion. But, if he did so, the original plan would be foiled. The plan depended upon subterfuge and subtlety, and Ehud determined to stick with the plan.
“How very kind of you,” said the Hebrew spy. “I’ve heard of your king’s fierce temper and battle-hardened reflexes. There is little I would like better than to avoid an audience with the conqueror of our nation when I bring such a small token from my people. But don’t you think King Eglon would be angry if Israel’s representative failed to submit to him in person? I can well imagine our Lord Eglon’s penalty for such a disrespectful courier snubbing his worthy presence. I’m sure he would send you and another dozen soldiers after me for the sole purpose of cleaving my insolent head from my body.”
He could see the guard had no immediate answer for that torrent of words. The Moabite had merely gambled on Ehud’s weakness and hadn’t expected resistance. As though his words were a series of sword-thrusts, Ehud struck again before the Moabite could recover his defenses. “In addition, I have been charged by our elders to bring a word for His Eminence’s ears only, a mysterious message from our God Himself. I’m very certain King Eglon will want to hear this and, lest you worry that it is bad news that will put him in a foul temper, I assure that I am unafraid of him beheading the messenger.”
Ehud hoped he had countered all of the guard’s objections. He was thankful that the other guard was silent and sullen, letting his partner take the lead. He could almost read the silent guard’s thoughts, obviously resenting the fact that his partner had wanted to keep some of the tribute for himself and angry he hadn’t thought of it first. The sullen guard stayed in position as the more loquacious one led the way through the double doors and into the roof garden.
The roof was surrounded by plants and trees of all descriptions. Ehud considered that the water needed to keep these plants alive for a week would keep a Hebrew family in water for a month…or longer. But many of the plants and trees had such large leaves that Ehud noticed there was shade covering the roof from nearly any angle. The king sat in the densest part of the shade, drinking from a large horn and had obviously just dismissed a small rat-faced man with an armful of clay tablets and broken pottery with writing on them. Ehud made his obeisance, as distasteful as it was.
“My lord,” said Ehud, “I bring to you the tribute from the people of Israel. We know your foot upon our neck; we acknowledge our unworthiness; and submit this pittance of silver and gold you have asked from us. We ask for your gracious keeping of the covenant even as we offer up evidence of our own. To the victor goes the tribute. All hail, Victorious Eglon—the Bullock-Man, the Stud-King!”
King Eglon bid Ehud to rise up and pointed to the floor beside the throne. Ehud sensed that he was to place the bag of coins there and began to untie the bag in order to place it there. Nearing the throne, however, he realized that he was not going to be close enough to put his plan into action without giving the Moabite king a chance to defend and retaliate. And, of course, should the king have time to defend and retaliate, he would have time to call for reinforcements.
Ehud neared the commanded position, halted, and bowed once again. “Oh, my lord, please do not be displeased with your conquered servant. I not only bring you this pittance of silver and gold as our meager tribute, but I bring a message from our elders. It is a message for your ears alone. It is a message from our God and it is so holy and mysterious I can only deliver it to you.”
The Moabite looked startled. Then, he smiled with a sense of self-satisfaction and entitlement that caused Ehud’s heart to race. The “bull-like” king was responding to Ehud’s obsequious stance. To Ehud’s amazement, the king stood and stepped close to him. His body language clearly indicated that he was physically superior to Ehud and the Hebrew briefly noted that the warrior-king stood taller than he himself. But the brief hesitation passed and Ehud realized that the king was actually making his job easier.
As Ehud stretched toward the king’s left ear, he began to whisper about Yahweh God who had delivered Israel from the hands of the Pharaoh. As he spoke this formulaic word with hypnotic tones, his left hand slowly pulled the sword from its hiding place on his right side. He spoke of how Yahweh God had defeated Eglon’s predecessors among the Moabite kings, but suggested that it was difficult to believe that this King of Moab could be defeated. He shared that many Israelites thought it was impossible to defeat King Eglon and now, their God had spoken.
Even as Ehud reached the part about God speaking, he jabbed the tip of his two-edged sword through Eglon’s abdomen. Seeking something vital, he felt the sharp two-edged blade slicing through the royal intestines until the blade was nearly all of the way. He felt something give and noticed Eglon’s waxen horrified face go slack. He simultaneously sensed warm liquid coursing down the sides of the blade, even as the foul stench of a latrine assaulted his nostrils when the king’s bowels relaxed. The Hebrew spy left the sword inside the erstwhile conqueror’s innards as he pushed the king back onto the throne and onto his own gross elimination. In fact, he couldn’t have pulled it out if he’d wanted to do so.
The pommel was slippery with blood and, in death, the organs had swelled enough that they held the blade and handle like a fleshy, fatty fist.
He returned to the double-doors where the two original guards were stationed and bolted them from the inside. Then, he quickly found another exit and left them to discover the stinking remains of their king at a later time. I hope Yahweh spoke eloquently enough, thought Ehud, it was indeed possible for Yahweh to defeat King Eglon the Conqueror, the Bullock Man, even with one left-handed swordsman. With every step of his escape homeward, Ehud found praise for God.
It wasn’t long, however, before the foul smell of death mixed with excretion reached the guards. The talkative one made a joke about how even the mighty had to perform the same functions as the lowest soldier and both laughed. They tried the doors and, finding them locked, decided that His Majesty must have really needed his privacy. For some strange reason, they seemed to forget about the Hebrew messenger with the withered arm. After all, what harm could come from such a pitiful specimen? Were they not conquerors of entire armies from that inferior race? Hadn’t their Yahweh proven Himself inferior to their gods?
But long before the guards discovered the foul-smelling corpse of King Eglon, the one said to be as strong as a bullock, Ehud had carefully skirted a few military bivouacs and reached the shelter of a rock on the outskirts of Eglon’s capitol. He rested in the shadow and realized he was strategically placed near the quarries where the Moabites cut stone for, sculpted, and placed shrines to several of their gods. With a practiced eye, he watched the pattern of lackadaisical guards. My God has delivered their gods into my hands, though Ehud.
He waited until he saw many of the guards rushing for the hill on which the palace rested and realized the king’s corpse had been discovered. Fortunately, the sun was setting and those working the quarries were leaving. It was too difficult to choose the stone properly in the deep hole’s early dusk. This allowed him to use the quarry’s jagged walls to get near a shrine while the guard was patrolling the opposite side. Crouching low around a corner where the guard would pass, the Hebrew spy listened for the crunching of the guard’s footsteps. As the gravel imitated the snapping of crisp matzoh, Ehud tensed—waiting below the guard’s immediate line of sight if he wasn’t looking at the ground. Yahweh be praised, the guard didn’t even see Ehud lunge upward, much less cry out when Ehud’s left hand crushed his windpipe.
Relieving the careless guard of his spear and short sword, Ehud quickly pulled him to the side of the empty quarry and pushed him over the side for the slaves and masons to find in the morning. Then, taking the spear and sword, Eglon dashed into the shrine impaled one of the novice priests attending the idol and gained the pedestal where the idol rested. To this point, Ehud’s operation had not engendered any unwelcome noise. But the stealth portion of the mission was nearly over when the Hebrew toppled the bovine statue and leaped over the broken pieces as the vulnerable portions of the statue shattered. Baal lost a horn when the statue’s neck broke against the side of the pedestal and one of the stone legs shattered as the rest of the heavy statue crashed the rest of the way to the ground. The god wasn’t totally demolished, but his worshippers would be humiliated. Ehud quickly followed his triumph over the false god by breaking an Asherah, Baal’s consort over the top of her fallen lover. With just a few extra movements, the Hebrew grabbed torches and lit hides, curtains, and everything else he imagined to be flammable.
The smoke from the conflagration covered his exit and he was well down the hill before the outraged priests and guards could reassemble at the shrine. In one day, Ehud had destroyed the images of the gods and the champion of those gods. Could anyone stand against the true God, Yahweh? Ehud was certain that the answer was negative. This was the first step in a larger campaign. If Israel trusted God and attacked this headless army, victory was certain!
Sermonic Follow-Up
In any dramatization, whether in story form or acted out, one must take a certain amount of license in representing historical events. In my retelling of Ehud’s story, I have taken three liberties of which I am aware, but I believe they are all supportable by the Scripture text. First, I am following the idea that “fat” as it is used in this text does not mean what 18th century interpreters like Matthew Henry and long-time tradition assumes it means. They take King Eglon to be an obese, out-of-shape, decadent tyrant who has brought his army into Israel’s promised territory and is rather easily dispatched by Ehud’s sneak attack. But we can only assume that King Eglon was obese if we assume that Daniel and his Hebrew brethren were obese after their vegetable and water diet described in the book of Daniel. In the Hebrew Bible, fat more often means “fit” and healthy than it means obese and unhealthy.
Second, the word that is translated as “quarries” in some translations and “idols” in other translations could be read to be understood as either. In my narrative, I place a shrine with idols next to a quarry. In that way, I don’t have to make a choice in my story—even though I personally believe the word should be translated as idols. Third, and perhaps with more relevance, we see our old familiar Hebrew verb, עבר, meaning to “pass over.” You may well remember that it serves as an instructive pun in many Bible narratives. God’s people often “pass over” obstacles like rivers or bodies of water (Euphrates for Abram, Jordan for Joshua, and the Reed Sea for Moses) in order to gain what God wants for them (land of promise or escape from slavery). The same root can also mean to destroy or tear down something in the sense of transgressing or breaking something. One writing style in the Bible (often called the Deuteronomist) uses this verb to mean “to break the covenant.” In this case, I take it to be the destruction of the idols rather than merely escaping by passing the quarries as we find in some translations. With those three disclaimers in mind, let me share with you what God has shown me in this passage.
The first thing I want you to see is that God very often uses unwelcome circumstances to get the attention of God’s people. In this case, the descendent of a distant ancestor is oppressing God’s people. King Eglon is a descendent of Lot’s disgusting incest with his own daughters. He doesn’t come from the line of God’s blessing. He comes from a sinful lineage. I’m sure there were a few people in Israel who remembered the things of God and were surprised that the descendent of such a sinful line could be so successful. Some must have wondered why their powerful God allowed that to happen.
In this sense, it’s a lot like those of you who wonder why foul-mouthed, decadent, self-centered people might get better grades than you in school, better jobs than you at work, or keep getting elected to public office in order to oppress you with nasty taxes and policies. It’s also a lot like those of you who wonder why you can’t quite win the victory over that habit that’s controlling you—whether it’s because of a desire you can’t seem to extinguish (even with God’s help), an inability to find the discipline to develop a new (healthy and spiritual) habit to replace it, or a lack of understanding how that habit may be weakening you physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. It might also be like those attitudes that are defeating you: anger, apathy, arrogance, depression, desire (particularly unhealthy desire), fear, greed, self-consciousness, selfishness, shyness, suspicion, or anything else for which you might be experiencing the Holy Spirit’s convicting power.
King Eglon might also represent the bad situation in which you find yourself. He is the boss or teacher who cannot be pleased, the neighbor or co-worker who is always antagonizing you, the financial difficulty you are experiencing, the health problem you are suffering, the person who is taking advantage of you, the setbacks you are experiencing at your job, or the relationship issues with spouse, parents, or children. Eglon represents anything encroaching in your life that doesn’t belong there, anything God didn’t really intend for you to have to go through but which you need to conquer in order to have life at its fullest.
“So,” as my buddy Terry Coleman always asks, “what are ya’ gonna’ do about it?” You’ve heard me say before that God puts you in a fix to fix you and if you get out of the fix before you get fixed, God has to fix another fix to fix you. So, how do you get out of the fix the right way? We have to make sure we’re depending on the Lord. And that doesn’t always mean that we approach problems the same way. We do need to inventory the resources God has given us, but we also need to inventory our own relationship with God. Is it possible that we, like Israel, have forgotten God to serve the other gods of convenience, mere human intellectualism, prosperity, sensuality, and success? We need to confess it, agree with God that these aren’t REAL gods, and, as Ehud eventually does, make sure we topple them from our sphere of influence—get them out of our lives.
Remember, the first part of this chapter is basically an individual’s terrorist act: assassination and destruction. However, once those gods are toppled, we see Ehud appealing to the Lord’s ability to bring victory before Israel goes against the full Moabite army and kills 10,000 enemy combatants (10 the number for human sufficiency multiplied times the number for human sufficiency to the divine power (3) or 1,000). Then, multiply it by another 10 and it is divine sufficiency or divine provision in such a way that humans can’t deny it. The 10,000 casualties represent a clear victory, divinely ordained and defined in terms of those who could oppress God’s people no more. As New Testament believers, we aren’t sanctioned for terrorist acts, but we are sanctioned to join with God in removing all of those unhealthy, destructive Eglons and Moabites from our lives. We fight against attitudes, actions, and circumstances, not people in our holy war of spiritual liberation.
The next thing we need to know about divine victories is whether we are operating from our power or God’s. Notice that God regularly leads the People of God in such a way that the “weak” resources defeat the “strong.” It is the old lady who doesn’t seem to have any resources at all that surprises the church with a “widow’s mite” donation of a life insurance settlement more often than the wealthy businessman who gives out of his plenty. It’s the younger believer with less experience who suddenly catches the vision of what needs to be done and inspires the older, “wiser” members. It is the smaller church with few numbers, financial resources, and location potential that often learns to trust God instead of its members and experiences the blessing of God. It is when we as believers feel most inadequate that God can transform us into powerful vessels of God’s Holy Spirit. But we have to be willing to die to ourselves even as Ehud took on this mission in a foreign palace that could have been a suicide mission.
Notice that almost everything we see in this story is deceptive. First, we see that the weaker party defeats the stronger party. That’s simply the way God works. God often uses human ignorance, inexperience, and weakness in spite of itself in order to demonstrate that God is the one winning the victory. I know that the worst failures I’ve experienced in my life was when I was highly qualified by human standards and so overly confident of myself that I didn’t open myself to God’s presence and power the way I needed to open to God. If we rely on power without prayer instead of the prayer of power, we’re going to be grossly underpowered.
In a similar vein, check out the following trio of deception: the weapon is concealed, a secret message is pretended, and the doors are bolted shut to conceal the body. To King Eglon, Ehud didn’t look like any possible threat. Yet, Ehud was his undoing with a weapon that couldn’t be seen. Guess what? Prayer is the weapon on our right hips that can’t be seen by the worldly. The secret message was a way to get inside the king’s guard. I think Ehud must have complimented the king in order to get him to pay attention. I don’t know that it’s so, but I think Ehud was flattering the king with the idea of a secret message in much the same way that we flatter people when we say, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but I have the inside scoop and I know I can trust you.” I don’t have much to say about the bolted doors except to say that Ehud was smart enough to have an “exit plan.” He may have been willing to die for God’s purpose of removing Eglon from the Moabite throne (and hence, removing him as a threat to Israel), but he was also doing all he could do to keep himself safe. Some people think Christian witness is always supposed to be a kamikaze mission. The truth is, God also wants to help us with our lives AFTER we finish accomplishing our missions. Very rarely are we supposed to overextend ourselves without having some idea of where God is leading us.
So, first lesson? If we are dealing from our own strength, we are probably not “on a mission for God.” We need to learn to deal from God’s strength. So, second lesson? We all have situations in our lives that are oppressive and serve to block God’s working from our personal lives and even in the life of the church. We have to get rid of those and it may not be easy. Yet, if we are open to God’s leading, God will provide a deliverer for us. As with Ehud, the left-handed judge, it may not be the deliverer we expect. It may not be someone who looks strong or smart or even extra-special spiritual. We just have to be open to God’s deliverer. Also, we must never forget that we have a secret weapon in prayer and a need for God’s plan of operation that is probably not a headstrong charge into the breach. So, think about it. What is your King Eglon? How is this interfering with your life? Who or what might your deliverer be?
Of course, we’re really just now reaching the meat of the passage, although I’ve alluded to it, as well. Look at this passage again. The victory isn’t won when Ehud knifes the oppressor. Ehud still has to escape and gather together sufficient force to win the victory. The victory isn’t even won when he gets away from the palace. I believe the victory was won when he “passed over,” when he broke the idols. The only way we can win the victory is to get rid of all the false gods in our lives and depend totally upon God.
What are some of the false gods that need to be broken in your life and in our church? A lot of times the past becomes an idol—the way we’ve always done it or the way we used to do it. There are a lot of churches who budget by looking at past receipts and raising it by a “cost of living” percentage. That’s not faith! That’s human caution! There are a lot of churches who plan by the idea of what they think they can accomplish such that low expectations reap low results. A lot of churches are more concerned about doctrine than people. Actually, if we are deep in the Word and love the people, the doctrine will work out for itself. We really aren’t ready to face the full force of the opposition if we haven’t “passed over” or “broken” the false gods.
Finally, notice that Ehud expects God to give the victory. If we ever expect God to work effectively in our lives, we have to reach the point of expecting God to accomplish the victory instead of focusing on our own abilities, ideas, and expectations.
In closing, I want to remind you of one slightly comic aspect of King Eglon’s death, an assurance that our enemies always overplay their hands. Ehud tells him that he has this secret message and Eglon commands “Silence!” Ironically, it is that silence of overconfidence that ensures that Ehud will get away with it because Ehud kills the king (with the gross description) and the servants think that Eglon is merely spending a long time on the pot. But, of course, the “word” Ehud has shared doesn’t signify Eglon’s relief (in the sense of relieving himself), but Israel’s release from oppression. With additional overconfidence, Eglon stops SITTING on his throne and RISES from it in order to hear what Ehud has to tell him, symbolically suggesting that his rule is coming to an end (from Robert Polzin’s Moses and the Deuteronomist, p. 157). How often do our enemies and opposition overestimate their positions of strength!
