Behind the story of Ehud: God's assassin

Introduction

Today we’re starting our new series on the extraordinary characters known as the Judges, from the Biblical book of Judges.

To understand these characters, and how their stories speak to us, we must understand their context. After all, our series is subtitled, “God at work in a broken world.” How was this world broken? Well, let’s quickly rehearse the history of the world up to the time of the Judges.

The Bible’s history starts with a beautiful, harmonious creation. Adam and Eve living in a garden at peace with God, one another, and the whole of creation. But soon they decided to go their own way, and the result was chaos—relational, physical, environmental chaos.

Eventually the chaos became so great that humanity’s every thought was inclined to evil, and God chose to rescue Noah, who seemed to be the only good man, and his family from an even greater chaos that wiped the world clean: the great flood.

It didn’t take long for Noah’s descendants to fall back into chaos, and they decided to rival God by building up into the heavens. God answered their unified rebellion by introducing the chaos of multiple languages. The divided world as we see it today was born.

Some time after this, God chose a man, Abram, and then his second son, Isaac, and his second son, Jacob. He renamed Jacob Israel and sent his family to shelter in Egypt, where they grew into a great nation of people.

Eventually God called them out of Egypt, showing his power over Egypt’s mighty gods. But the people of Israel struggled to leave behind their Egyptian superstition, and God disciplined them in the desert for forty years until the unbelievers died and their children understood that the LORD is God.

Then God led them into the land he had promised them, conquering its inhabitants, and gifting it to the people of Israel.

And that’s where the book of Judges begins, with the Israelites secure in their promised land. Do they lean on God, or do they confuse his gift with something they’re entitled to? Do they stay faithful to God who has shown his love and power, or do they indulge in the exciting, sensual gods of Canaan?

A pattern

The book of Judges has a very specific viewpoint, and the whole book is written from that perspective. The stories chosen by the author are designed to express that viewpoint. The author explicitly describes this perspective in his introduction.

Judges 2:16–23 CEV

16 From time to time, the Lord would choose special leaders known as judges. These judges would lead the Israelites into battle and defeat the enemies that made raids on them. 17 In years gone by, the Israelites had been faithful to the Lord, but now they were quick to be unfaithful and to refuse even to listen to these judges. The Israelites would disobey the Lord, and instead of worshiping him, they would worship other gods. 18 When enemies made life miserable for the Israelites, the Lord would feel sorry for them. He would choose a judge and help that judge rescue Israel from its enemies. The Lord would be kind to Israel as long as that judge lived. 19 But afterwards, the Israelites would become even more sinful than their ancestors had been. The Israelites were stubborn—they simply would not stop worshiping other gods or following the teachings of other religions. 20 The Lord was angry with Israel and said: The Israelites have broken the agreement I made with their ancestors. They won’t obey me, 21 so I’ll stop helping them defeat their enemies. Israel still had a lot of enemies when Joshua died, 22 and I’m going to let those enemies stay. I’ll use them to test Israel, because then I can find out if Israel will worship and obey me as their ancestors did. 23 That’s why the Lord had not let Joshua get rid of all those enemy nations right away.

We can see that the story of Judges will be a tragedy in multiple acts.

Each act, each judge or deliverer, follows a pattern already alluded to in the introduction I just read. But the author doesn’t show that pattern with a table on a powerpoint like we might do today, instead he tells a story. A very short story that is nothing more than the pattern with the names filled in. That is the story of Othniel—the first deliverer. Let’s read that now.

Othniel

Judges 3:7–11 CEV

7 The Israelites sinned against the Lord by forgetting him and worshiping idols of Baal and Astarte. 8 This made the Lord angry, so he let Israel be defeated by King Cushan Rishathaim of northern Syria, who ruled Israel eight years and made everyone pay taxes. 9 The Israelites begged the Lord for help, and he chose Othniel to rescue them. Othniel was the son of Caleb’s younger brother Kenaz. 10 The Spirit of the Lord took control of Othniel, and he led Israel in a war against Cushan Rishathaim. The Lord gave Othniel victory, 11 and Israel was at peace until Othniel died about forty years later.

The pattern

So what is the pattern that Othniel demonstrates?

The Israelites sin by worshipping Canaanite gods

God sends an oppressor to punish them

The Israelites beg to be released from oppression

God chooses a deliverer

The Holy Spirit enables the deliverer to defeat the oppressor

Israel experiences peace for some period of time

As you can see from the Othniel story, it is nothing more than that pattern with the names filled in. The deliverers we’ll be looking at all have their stories elaborated on somehow. With Gideon we hear how God chose him as well as how he defeated the oppressor. With Ehud we only hear how he defeated the oppressor.

Another thing you’ll notice as the series goes along is that the deliverers become less and less effective. That’s part of the bigger pattern the author wants to show—left to their own devices, people get worse, not better. So Samson, almost at the end of the book, doesn’t even try to defeat the oppressors (the Philistines, in his time), despite the constant power of the Holy Spirit giving him all he needed to do that. The author of Judges wants to emphasize his theme, how everyone did what was right in their own eyes, rather than obeying God’s law.

So now we come to the story of Ehud. Let’s see what we can learn from this.

Ehud

Judges 3:12–30 CEV

12 Once more the Israelites started disobeying the Lord. So he let them be defeated by King Eglon of Moab, 13 who had joined forces with the Ammonites and the Amalekites to attack Israel. Eglon and his army captured Jericho. 14 Then he ruled Israel for eighteen years and forced the Israelites to pay heavy taxes. 15 The Israelites begged the Lord for help, and the Lord chose Ehud from the Benjamin tribe to rescue them. They put Ehud in charge of taking the taxes to King Eglon, but before Ehud went, he made a double-edged dagger. Ehud was left-handed, so he strapped the dagger to his right thigh, where it would be hidden under his robes. 17 Ehud and some other Israelites took the taxes to Eglon, who was a very fat man. As soon as they gave the taxes to Eglon, Ehud said it was time to go home. 19 Ehud went with the other Israelites as far as the statues at Gilgal. Then he turned back and went upstairs to the cool room where Eglon had his throne. Ehud said, “Your Majesty, I need to talk with you in private.” Eglon replied, “Don’t say anything yet!” His officials left the room, and Eglon stood up as Ehud came closer. “Yes,” Ehud said, “I have a message for you from God!” 21 Ehud pulled out the dagger with his left hand and shoved it so far into Eglon’s stomach 22 that even the handle was buried in his fat. Ehud left the dagger there. Then after closing and locking the doors to the room, he climbed through a window onto the porch 24 and left. When the king’s officials came back and saw that the doors were locked, they said, “The king is probably inside relieving himself.” 25 They stood there waiting until they felt foolish, but Eglon never opened the doors. Finally, they unlocked the doors and found King Eglon lying dead on the floor. 26 But by that time, Ehud had already escaped past the statues. Ehud went to the town of Seirah 27 in the hill country of Ephraim and started blowing a signal on a trumpet. The Israelites came together, and he shouted, “Follow me! The Lord will help us defeat the Moabites.” The Israelites followed Ehud down to the Jordan valley, and they captured the places where people cross the river on the way to Moab. They would not let anyone go across, 29 and before the fighting was over, they killed about ten thousand Moabite warriors—not one escaped alive. 30 Moab was so badly defeated that it was a long time before they were strong enough to attack Israel again. And Israel was at peace for eighty years.

Pattern

Before we talk about Ehud’s exploits, let’s see how he fits into Judges’ pattern.

The people sinned against God. Tick!

God sent an oppressor, Eglon of Moab, and his alliance. Tick.

The Israelites begged God for help. Tick.

God chose a deliverer, Ehud. We don’t hear anything about how God chose him, but Ehud seems prepared to do his bit. Tick!

Ehud defeats the oppressor, but already the pattern is breaking down, because nowhere do we read of the Holy Spirit empowering Ehud in any way. Clearly God delivers the victory over the army, but the author is not claiming any credit for God in Ehud’s brutal and treacherous assassination.

God delivers 80 years, almost a century, of peace from Moab.

What is the point of this pattern? It must have a point or the author of Judges would not have been so obsessive about it, right?

Does this pattern remind you of anything? Maybe us? Any and all of us, right? In fact, any people from any time! Even our kids act this way with their parents: rebel, complain about the consequences of rebellion, get rescued, only to then abandon the safety of rescue for the temptations of the world. This cycle of rebellion and rescue is built into the human heart. We cannot be rescued from it by some deliverer like Othniel, Ehud, or Samson. We need some deeper sort of deliverance. Like the rest of the Old Testament, from the Law to the Prophets, the history of Judges points to our need for a deliverer who can save us from our own sinful nature—the final judge and deliverer.

We’ll talk more about this later, but let’s turn back to Ehud.

Ehud’s Methods

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Ehud’s brutal and nasty methods.

It seems like the author of Judges wants to emphasize the ugly details. Ehud’s stabbing of Eglon makes for yucky reading. The Contemporary English Version I’ve used here is milder than, say, the New Living Translation, but it’s still ugly.

How could God use such violence? Why would God choose a person like this?

There are several things to say about this.

First, the situation for Israel is radically different from the situation for the Christian church today: Israel was a nation-state, and nation-states use violence to defend themselves. You won’t hear many people decrying Ukraine for killing invading Russian soldiers. And without elaborate international structures like the UN or the benevolent power of the USA to keep the peace, Israel existed in an environment where war was constant and brutal.

Second, part of the theme of Judges is how completely captured the Israelites were by the Canaanite culture. So is it any surprise that Ehud behaves treacherously. All historical evidence (from inside and outside of the Bible) points to this as a classic Canaanite approach. God’s choice of deliverers is limited to the people available, and when they are all corrupted, you’re going to get a corrupted deliverer!

Third, God isn’t delivering the people from their sins. They didn’t ask for that—they just want to be delivered from oppression. By using a character like Ehud, God is showing how he can deliver the people from oppression, but also showing how temporary that shallow deliverance is. As soon as Ehud dies, the people sin and war returns. The people are asking for little and showing little obedience, so they get a little in return.

There are lots of other things we could say about Ehud, but we don’t have the time. I can highly recommend Daniel Block’s excellent commentary on Judges and Ruth from the New American Commentary series.

What about us?

So, how does all this apply to us?

The first thing to note is that, if it were not for the cleansing power of the blood of Christ which gives us new hearts, we would have hearts exactly like those of the Israelites: constantly returning to sin, treachery, brutality and chaos. But, praise be to God who has rescued us from the darkness, we do have the blood of Christ, and that has rescued us from this constant cycle of oppression and misery.

Jesus, our deliverer, didn’t rescue us from political, economic, or physical oppression. Rather he set our hearts free from the tyranny of sin and rebellion. By setting our hearts free we can then live lives of freedom, even under oppression. Ultimately the freedom of our hearts will result in total freedom, but that total freedom will never be realised until all sin is destroyed, when Jesus returns again as the final Judge and Deliverer. Until then, we have true freedom because we are free from sin.

Unlike Ehud, who used such brutal, sinful means to remove the oppression of his people, we never need to sin in order to rescue others. In fact, one of the lessons of Ehud is that God can use the wickedness of brutal people to further his own kingdom. Because God can use wicked people, he never needs us to do wicked things. We can remain pure, sure in the knowledge that God will protect us. Not from death—death comes to us all. Not from suffering—suffering is one of the greatest teachers. But from compromise. From chaos. From fear and hate and jealousy and rage.

Yes, God still sends suffering into our lives. Our old bodies still want to follow the pattern mapped out by the author of Judges. God gives us wonderful things here on the Gold Coast. And our bodies want to worship those things instead of the giver of all good things. And so God sends sufffering, and we cry out to him. And our deliverer answers our cry and shows us his scars. And so, instead of heading in a downward spiral like the Israelites under the judges, we become more and more like our Lord, our deliverer, our Jesus.

We have a new and better way.

Let’s pray.

Lord, we know that we still struggle with sin, that our bodies of flesh are still attached to this world and its rebellion against you. And so we appreciate the suffering and oppression that you send our way. But we most especially appreciate that this oppression drives us into your arms, and not away from them. We thank you for delivering us from evil, and we recognise with all our hearts, that yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever, Amen.