Gooding, David: 6 - Ehud - Part 1

We begin to read this evening in the book of Judges, chapter three and verse twelve. Judges three and verse twelve. The children of Israel agended that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord strengthened Eglon, the king of Moab, against Israel, because they had done that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. And he gathered unto him the children of Ammon and Amalek, and he went and smote Israel, and they possessed the city of palm trees. And the children of Israel served Eglon, the king of Moab, eighteen years. But when the children of Israel cried unto the Lord, the Lord raised them up a savior, Ehud, the son of Gerah the Benjamite, a man left-handed. And the children of Israel sent a present by him unto Eglon, the king of Moab. And Ehud made him a sword which had two edges of a cubit length, and he girded it under his raiment upon his right thigh. And he offered the present unto Eglon, king of Moab. Now Eglon was a very fat man. And when he had made an end of offering the present, he sent away the people that bear the present. But he himself turned back from the, and please would you notice that the word should not be quarry, but carved images. He turned back from the carved images that were by Gilgal and said, I have a secret errand unto thee, O king. And he said, keep silence. And all that stood by him went out from him. And Ehud came unto him, and he was sitting by himself alone in his summer parlor. And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat. And Ehud put forth his left hand and took the sword from his right thigh and thrust it into his belly. And the haft also went in after the blade, and the fat closed upon the blade, for he drew not the sword out of his belly, and it came out behind. Then Ehud went forth into the porch and shut the doors of the parlor upon him and locked them. When he was gone out, his servants came, and they saw, and behold, the doors of the parlor were locked, and they said, surely he covereth his feet in his summer chamber. They tarried till they were ashamed, and behold, he opened not the doors of the parlor. Therefore they took the key and opened them, and behold, their lord was fallen down dead on the earth. And Ehud escaped while they tarried, and passed beyond the carved images, and escaped unto Serah. And it came to pass, when he was come, that he blew a trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim, and the children of Israel went down with him from the hill country, and he before them. And he said unto them, Follow after me, for the Lord hath delivered your enemies, the Moabites, into your hand. And they went down after him and took the fords of Jordan against the Moabites and suffered not a man to pass over. And they smote of Moab at that time about ten thousand men, every lusty man and every man of valor, and there escaped not a man. So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel, and the land had rest fourscore years. May God again interpret his word to us, each one. We begin tonight the study of the second major captivity recorded for us here in the book of Judges. And we may go straight away into our task, our first necessary task, of reconnoitering the enemy. Trying to decide what that enemy stood for, what were his ideals and ideologies, so that we might understand what enemy it was that at this stage overcame Israel. And then be able to apply the lesson of the story to ourselves today. Main enemy, then, we find was Moab, who took with him in confederation the children of Ammon and Amalek. Moab's character, in origin and in development, is not difficult to discern. The nation Moab had their origin in a man called Moab, who was both the son and the grandson of the man called Lot. He was the product of the sad, sad experiences that overtook Lot. The nephew of Abraham, who once had walked shoulder to shoulder and step by step with Abraham along the pilgrim way, who had presumably shared Abraham's original vision in Ur of Chaldee, and had set forth with him to come from Ur to Haran, and from Haran onwards into the Promised Land. But as you will remember, there came a moment in Lot's life when he had to make a decision. Because the herds that he and Abraham had collected through their sojourn in Egypt had grown so great that they could not any longer dwell together, and therefore Abraham, in suggesting that they part, gave Lot the first choice. And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw the plains surrounding Sodom and Gomorrah, that at that time in history were well-watered plains and luscious with grass. For business reasons, it was a very good move that Lot should go down to the plains of Jordan, because the man had cattle and sheep, and you cannot feed cattle and sheep without plenty of grass. It was therefore viewed from a business point of view, a very sound and sensible decision. While it is necessary to take business considerations into account in life, and constantly thus, it is very rarely safe to make the business decision the sole decision, or indeed the primary decisive factor. There was another consideration in the decision that faced Lot, namely that while the grass of those plains were very green and very luscious, and there's nothing wrong with grass, is there? The men of Sodom were sinners exceeding. Alas for Lot. The Holy Spirit does not go into the details by which he crept nearer and nearer and nearer, and at last became a resident of that city. Became almost engulfed in the judgment of God that descended on it. Was saved through the intercessions of Abraham and the faithfulness of God. But ended life living in a cave. A man that had set out from the glorious civilization of Ur of Chaldees, ending up living as a caveman. A man that had set out with Abraham, professedly moving towards the city that has foundations, that glorious heavenly Jerusalem, ending up on earth as a caveman and living like one. As the result of losing self-control. he became father and grandfather of Moab. The least said of that incident, the better. But you will not now be surprised to learn that Moab all down the centuries, if we may trust the Holy Spirit of God's record of his doings and behavior, was marked in his character by the quality and circumstance of his origin. We next meet Moab in any force in the stories of the Book of Numbers. Centuries later, when Israel were now away and out of Egypt, and pegging along the wilderness, soldiering on, pushing on in the pathway of pilgrimage, their faces towards the great inheritance that God had reserved for them. And the going was tough. Nobody pretended that it would be anything else but tough. Tramping across the Sinai Peninsula is not everybody's idea of a comfortable afternoon's employment. Yes, it was tough. When they drew near the territory that Moab ruled, the king of Moab, namely a certain Balak, decided that Israel constituted too great a threat to his own security for him to neglect. So with promises of great financial reward and position, he tried to secure the services of Balaam the prophet to come and curse him, Israel. Balaam, that old hypocrite, not averse to making a sizable amount of money in his professional career, did his best to try and curse Israel for Balaam's sake, but found it impossible to curse those whom God had blessed. And all his enchantments and his would-be maledictions were incapable of bringing a curse upon Israel. But Balaam, the rascal that he was, when he found he couldn't curse Israel, injure them by front-on attack, descended to low and evil coming, and he taught Balak. So says our Lord centuries after the event, in writing to one of the Christian churches. Balaam taught Balak how to cast a stumbling block in front of the children of Israel and encourage them to commit fornication and to eat things offered to idols. It was a cruel thing, an unmerciful, cruel Cruel strategy. strategy. Designed to attack Israel, where Israel at this stage was necessarily at its weakest. Can you not imagine it? Persisting in that difficult task, and doubtless many times weary, with a constant need to push on, persevere with all the austerity of a pilgrim's life. When here they come across the enticements that Balak, through Balaam's cunning, had deliberately put in their way. Oh, come off it, they said. Oh, you're nice young men, of course you are. Oh, oh, very good living young men. Well, we can all see that. Yes, extraordinary young men you are. Indeed, you are to be congratulated on the strength of your purpose. But aren't you perhaps a little bit, um, uh, what shall we say, a little bit too hard on yourself? And that man Moses, well, yes, he's a genius perhaps, but you know, times have changed since Moses was a boy. They had indeed, he was about a hundred and twenty something. Um, you know, I mean, that was all right for a past generation, that, that excessive strictness of the Ten Commandments, you know. Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not commit fornication. Well, that was all right maybe when people looked at things a slightly different way. But, you know, there's very few people around nowadays, uh, that take those commandments just as literally as all that. And you have to be broad-minded. No, no, no. Oh, we're not suggesting giving up religion. Of course not. But God is loving, you know, and kind to all his creatures. Oh, we don't think ourselves that he needs us to be quite so austere and strict as all that. Uh, look, why can't you have a rest at least for the weekend and, and just take things a slightly more easy? You could perhaps join with us in, we have religious services too, only we're not quite as strict as that old man Moses is. No, they weren't, indeed they weren't. Strict, Moabite strict. With their lurid orgy of fertility cult and sexual indulgence in the name of religion. And weary pilgrims tithe with their pilgrimage, fell to the attraction of a bit of ease and apparent comfort. The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play. And God has not forgotten it. That devilishly wicked and clever temptation that Balaam taught Balak to cast in the way of his pilgrim people. Already, I suspect the picture begins to build up in your mind what Moab stands for. But even so, let me, uh, turn aside just for a moment to remind you that this is not a something that we can comfortably leave to the ancient past and forget all about it. As the first century AD drew to its close, our Lord personally de- dictated seven letters to seven of the assemblies that then existed. And in one of those letters, he had to remind the angel of the assembly of the grievous peril that they were running in their church. Now has some teach the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to commit fornication and to offer things offered to idols. We must not judge those early Christians necessarily by our standards here in Northern Ireland. These were people converted from a Greek-speaking background, who, if they were businessmen, doubtless belonged, uh, to the appropriate guild. And at their guild meetings... would be required to eat food that had been offered to the patron deity of the guild. And at their guild meetings, there would be women present in plenty, but, uh, not, of course, the men's wives. The Greeks didn't do things quite that way. Men Men brought brought up in a Greek society would need to be told, for they wouldn't automatically know it. They would need to be told that fornication was a wrong thing. And evidently, in that church, there were some who couldn't for the life of them see that it was wrong and, uh, were pursuing Balaam's trick and telling people, well, it didn't really matter whether you were strict in these things or not. We have lived to see in the United Kingdom an appalling landslide in morality. We have lived to see days when bishops of the so-called church have encouraged generations of undergraduates to think that, uh, fornication is not always wrong and could be a very good thing in certain circumstances. The so-called new morality, as many have observed, is but, of course, the ancient immorality. Our Lord's words are on record to this ancient church, to remind us of all generations of the insidiousness, of such lowering of standards, and to warn us to be on our guard and to fight against them. But to return to our, our Old Testament passage. Moab we have met in his origin as Lot's son and grandson. We have met him in the wilderness, casting temptation before the Israelites and impeding their progress as children. Come centuries later, will you, to the time of the prophet Jeremiah, and let me read you what God is saying about Moab, even in that late stage through the prophet Jeremiah, and first of all, chapter forty eight and verse eleven. Moab, Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he has settled on his lees and has not been emptied from vessel to vessel, neither has he gone into captivity. Therefore his taste remaineth in him, and his scent is not changed. Perhaps it isn't the worst thing you could say about Moab, Moab, but it is another interesting side, isn't it, to his character. A nation that had been at ease and had not known a lot of trouble. While ease is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, and we all of us like pleasant circumstances, the man who has the misfortune to go through life without any troubles at all is in danger of becoming a very flabby character. Noah as a nation had been at ease, right from Israel. If we may judge, he very much enjoyed being at ease. And then, uh, says verse twenty nine of that same chapter, we have heard the pride of Moab, that he is very proud, his loftiness and his pride and his arrogancy and the haughtiness of his heart. Self-indulgence, lack of self-control marked the nation's ancestry. Looseness and laxness of living, coupled to the name of religion, encouraged him in self-indulgence in the days of Moses. His nationally had been a life of ease, and it had produced haughtiness and proudness of spirit. Let's therefore look at Eglon, king of Moab, who led the Moabite captivity over Israel in the days of the judges, and see what kind of a man he was. When Ehud visited him on the famous occasion. Hmm. He was, uh, sitting in his summer parlor. Well, he was a king, wasn't he? And it can be very hot down where he lived. He was sitting at ease in his summer parlor. Perhaps you won't be altogether surprised to learn that he was, in fact, a very fat man. You'll see you can't do a lot of that, sitting around in your summer parlor and being at ease from your youth and generally pampering and indulging yourself, but what the inevitable will catch up with you, and you will become very fat and flabby, and that's Egon had become. It is to be noticed that when God sent Eejood to dispatch this sinner, God attacked him at his strongest point, as God always does. Then he was killed, not as Sisera of the Gentiles was killed, through his brain. He was killed through his belly, his very fat belly. Like all his race, he was a typical mermaid, a man of indulgence of the flesh. Do you notice what city he was occupying when he took Israel captivity? They came up, says chapter three and verse thirteen, and possessed the city of the palm trees. Sounds such a delightful place, doesn't it? Can you imagine it? What a lovely looking place. Beautiful palms with their fronds shading the sun away, and grass and summer parlors are just the kind of place that would attract anybody to spend his summer holiday and settle there and make himself comfortable. But you know what city it is. City that they were pleased to call the city of palm trees is none other than the famous, or shall I say infamous, Jericho. God in Joshua's time had cursed it, bastion of evil and self-indulgence and vice as it had been, and God had cursed it and forbidden its rebuilding. Moab chose to take a different view of things. He liked to dwell on the other side of the matter, uh, palm trees and the pleasantness of the aspect and the grass and the well-watered plain and the summer house. To him, the place that God had cursed was exceedingly attractive. If I mistake not, in the presence of Moab, we are in the presence of an enemy that is common to man all through every century. Not now the world, as we were thinking of it under the previous captivity, but starkly the flesh. Don't we notice that in taking Jericho, Moab managed to deny a basic principle of Israel's existence? Oh, years before they had come out through the waters of the Jordan and up the other side and triumphantly marched around Jericho city, and in the name of God had stormed it. God had intervened with his divine power and brought the walls of Jericho a tumbling down. Oh, what a victory it was. And how they shouted their first victory in their entrance into the inheritance. Oh, how they blew those bugles. Ah, the years had passed, and from that initial victory, they had moved on to other victories and to deeper re- realms and reaches of their inheritance. Only to find that all of a sudden, the enemy had come up in the rear and retaken the city that they took at the beginning. That should make us all careful, shouldn't it? And circumspect. You know, my dear brother, I shall never be free from possible attack. In any realm of my being, I shall never be free from possible attack, not this side of glory. And however far we may advance and progress, we still need to watch the rear and not grow complacent and think because we defeated the enemy in our youth, he will never again attack us. Satan himself attacked our Lord and tempted him in the wilderness at the beginning of his public ministry. And when he saw he could not conquer, left him, but only for a season. And returned again in power, did he not, in Gethsemane at the end? So let us think now for a moment of what we mean, and in particular what the New Testament means, when it talks of the flesh. Yes, if the Bible talks of the works of the flesh, as it does, for instance, in Galatians and chapter five, it does include, does it not, under that heading, sins and attack us. Satan himself attacked our Lord and tempted him in the wilderness at the beginning of his public ministry, and when he saw he could not conquer, left him, but only for a season, and returned again in power, did he not, in Gethsemane at the end. Well, let us think now for a moment of what we mean, and in particular what the New Testament means when it talks of the flesh. Yes, if the Bible talks of the works of the flesh, as it does, for instance, in Galatians and chapter five, it does include, does it not, under that heading, sins of sexual immorality. But we would be very misguided to imagine that that is all, or even that that is the bigger part of the works of the flesh. The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery. Yes, and with decreasing moral standards in the United Kingdom in these last ten years, we have an upsurge, haven't we, of these last two things, idolatry and witchcraft, sorcery. They go hand in hand, of course. But also enmities and strife. Oh, my brethren. You mustn't think because you passed youth that you now are immune from the works of the flesh, for strifes and enmities are just as liable to break out in us when our hairs are gray. Nor must we think that because we are Christians in church fellowship, we are immune from the works of the flesh, for strifes and enmities can break out, and alas they do, in assembly, as much as ever they do on the terraces of a football field. Enmities, strifes, jealousies, roths, factions, divisions, heresies, envy. What an ugly brood they are. They are the central works of the flesh, aren't they? You notice I mean central to this list. Which finally ends with drunkenness, reveling, and such like. This is the great enemy, courtly. We, every one of us, shall need to be on our guard, lest in our moments of weakness, instead of resisting this enemy, we indulge him. And find that he in turn, when we indulge him, overmasters us. You say, how did the flesh come to have that funny meaning? Why does the Bible call it the flesh? After all, you say flesh, well, didn't God make flesh? He did, didn't he? It's one of those words like the world that we were considering in the past studies that began life as a very nice word, indicating a very beautiful thing, and somehow went to the bad. So flesh. When it means the stuff our bodies are partly made of, it's a very decent word, isn't it? Flesh, meaning not just, of course, that meaty kind of stuff that clothes our bones, but all the emotions and, of course, the intellect goes with you. In that sense, it is in itself neither good nor bad. Neutral, as the theologians would say. And we must not fall into the mistake of ma- imagining that our natural appetites are in themselves bad. It's not wrong to desire food, is it? Or to feed yourself. And we need to remember it because at certain stages, even in the Christian church, there were people who began to think that their natural physical urges and appetites were in themselves sinful. And therefore they lived on a starvation ration and hid themselves away from monasteries and wouldn't get married and all this kind of thing, because they imagined that the body in itself was sinful. A sad, sad error indeed. God made it, and God is still unashamed of having made it, with all its desires, healthy and natural in themselves. But then, of course, those desires have to be controlled, don't they? I may take hunger, for instance, a very healthy thing. And I'm responsible to God to work and earn my living so that I can provide food for this stomach of mine that gets hungry, and for other people's stomachs if need be as well. But if I were to allow my stomach to take control of me, then things would become bad, wouldn't they? I should go so fat that I shouldn't be able to get near the table, and in the end I might bring upon myself premature, uh, death by overeating. Overeating. A good servant is the stomach, but a very bad master. So that these good things can turn to the bad if they are not properly controlled. Ah yes, but there's a deeper meaning than that even. For we are fallen creatures. As God made mankind, he was perfect, even if innocent. And in complete and co- in complete fellowship with God, had a spirit unfallen and in perfect control of every department of his personality. But man fell, didn't he? And in his fall worked a change in the human race, a fundamental change in the human race, so much so that you and I have never seen a normal human being, normal by God's standards as he originally planned a human being to be. All we have ever seen have been freaks. People who inhabit personalities that are never completely under proper control of themselves. We are like kings in a castle when the castle has been surrounded and the servants have come up from the basement, powerfully armed to take control. And if we in one room gain mastery of them, they're very sullen sometimes. And their fellow servants in the other direction, down in the basements, begin to make rumblings and, uh, threaten revolt and goodness knows what. The flesh has usurped the place of control, or tries to. And the Bible puts it this way. The mind of the flesh is enmity with God. It's not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. Man, in seizing his independence of God, ruined himself in great part, and lost control of himself, and became at best a, a king in chains. In that deeper sense, Paul has to admit, through much bitter experience, I know that is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. Man, in seizing his independence of God, ruined himself in great part, and lost control of himself, and became at best a, a, a king in chains. In that deeper sense, Paul has to admit, through much bitter experience, I know that in me, that is in my flesh, there dwelleth no good thing. Therefore, we should notice again that the flesh, as the Bible calls it, has not to do merely with our lower passions. I can have a mind that is carnal. For instance, in one Corinthians in chapter three, Paul says that the habit of getting Christian folks and gathering them around this man or that man and developing yourselves into parties and calling yourselves party names, that he says, brethren, is carnal. It may look very religious. It may be done for very good motives to try and preserve the truth or something. But to form denominations, groups of Christians, not coextensive with all Christians, that, says Paul, is carnal. And in Philippians chapter three he reminds us of his own unconverted days, our Saul of Tarsus, when as the world would have counted him, he was an exceedingly religious man, not a man that the world would have counted guilty of sins of the flesh. Or Saul of Tarsus, with his Pharisaical, puritanical background, keeping the law of Moses in all its minutiae to the very best of his ability. A worldly man would hardly know what you meant, would he, if he said, uh, if you told him that Saul of Tartus, in his unconverted days, was guilty of the gross sins of the flesh. No, because the unconverted man's idea of the flesh is a very, very narrow thing, and sometimes ours is too, isn't it, what? And we've got to open our eyes to observe that this kind of thing too is of the flesh, to be a religious bigot like Saul of Tarsus was. Not only did he trust in his own religious works and merits, and had confidence in the flesh when it came to the grounds of approach to God, but religious as he was, his religion was a sheer bigotry, and he persecuted people of other faith. Doubtless he thought he was doing God a service, and that this was a mark of great spirituality. Thank God he lived to see that it was a shameful demonstration of the flesh. We do ourselves have to watch it, don't we? And make sure that our religious exercises and our spiritual attitudes are genuinely spiritual and led and promoted by God's Holy Spirit. For there is perhaps no, no field on earth more liable to the attacks of the flesh than religion. All the pride and naughtiness of heart. All those foolish feelings of superiority over other Christians. All those disputes and quarrels and wranglings and jealousies, all those party spirits. All the pride that sometimes can invade preachers, don't I know it. Masquerading to be spiritual service of God and standing by the truth, and could dangerously be exhibition of the flesh. Oh, my brethren, we're never safe from it, are we? Save that we learn the way God has designed for our overcoming in the lifelong battle against the flesh. You say that's been very gloomy. We hope you would be talking about the victory and sending us home with joy and gladness of heart. Yeah. God willing, we'll try to do that on another occasion. There is victory to be had. But you don't get victories accidentally. And a real victory starts by looking the enemy right bang straight in the face and recognizing him to be the enemy he is. It lowers the temperature a bit, doesn't it? It sort of depresses you to look enemies straight in the face for any length of time. But occasionally it is necessary. God give us the grace. Not so much to go out and see if we can see the enemy lurking in our brethren and sisters. God give us each one the grace to examine ourselves, to pray the illumination of God's Holy Spirit, the light of his word, that he may discover to us what there is of the flesh in our attitude. But discovering it, we may repent of it, and repenting, be encouraged to seek that glorious salvation that Christ has provided, and which does indeed work, designed for the overcoming of the flesh. So we pray God's blessing to that end, in Christ's name. O Lord, we would fain consider pleasanter subjects than this unpleasant matter of the flesh, and dwell with gladness and delights on the joys of our inheritance, and the loveliness of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. But Lord, we know it from experience that to imagine that we have left the flesh behind would be to put ourselves in a fool's paradise. And therefore, Lord, we seek thy grace, and we seek courage from thee, and we seek honesty. O Lord, make known thy love to us, each one we beseech thee. Fill our hearts with a sense of security that we have in thee. Fill our hearts with the sense that thou wilt never reject us. That in the courage that comes from knowing ourselves loved like that by thee, we may find boldness to face ourselves and allow thy spirit to expose to us in our inmost being, where we have wrongly indulged the flesh, where he has been lurking behind even our spiritual exercises, that it may be exposed and repented of. That Lord, thou mayest go on and continue thy work within us. We might be those in our day who overcome. We do praise thee, Lord, for the assurance of ultimate winning of the war. The Savior shall come. He shall transform even these bodies of our humiliation like to the body of his glory. The evil flesh shall intrude no more. But Lord, with that hope within us one day of being like him, give us the grace we beseech thee to purify ourselves even as he is pure. For his name's sake and in his name we ask it. Amen.