Judges 6 – Part B – Left-handed Ehud, Left-handed Jesus (Judges 3:12-30)

Last week re-cap:
• Reign of peace = Bible’s principle of representation. Judges die and the people underneath are exposed just as sinful, rebellious and self-worshipping as before, if not more.
• God leaves alone Israel’s enemies, and even raises them up against Israel to bring about “Crying Out” from His people.
• This “crying out” is not simply crying out in pain due to God’s punishment – this crying out is a “Contrite Heart”
• Remember David’s story of how he was aware of his sin against Uriah and Bathsheba, but he wasn’t really aware of the depth of sin. He did not know that he was sin. Then prophet Nathan came and exposed the true David, and that’s when David came to have a contrite heart.
• That contrite heart leads to Jesus!

We finished last week’s message by summarizing that God does not delight in winning against Goliath with 5 stones, or building of a grand temple for God – the things that David achieved. What God delighted in was David’s contrite heart that says “Lord, what would I have done if you hadn’t sent Jesus? Thank you!”
That was the point of David’s life, to reach that confession. That’s why the incident with Bathsheba was planted by God.
David talks about that contrite heart in Psalms 51:
<Psalms 51:7-8>
This is saying that our sins are not forgiven because of my effort and diligence, or my law abiding or my offerings, but only by the grace of Jesus Christ which is represented by the “crushed bones” (v8). Knowing this is having a contrite heart.
David describes that further in Psalms 32:
<Psalms 32:1>
And Apostle Paul borrows these words from David in Romans:
<Romans 4:4-8>
This is the gospel. But in order for this gospel to be understood by David, it took the process of fully exposing his innate and essential sinful nature in detail. And up on that place of contrition comes the grace of Jesus Christ.

With this understanding laid down, let’s now have a look at this week’s passage from Judges. The judge leaves Israel. Israel that is left behind by the judge is rolling around like filth in the world. They should have known that they were filth. But rather they gave their all in enjoying themselves by pursuing the idols, civilisations and the pleasures of Canaan. That’s called “evil in the eyes of the Lord”. They feel like they’ll just go on like that being happy, and no one’s going to step in their way. But God himself raises up Israel’s enemies and send them to Israel.
What’s important here is, what is the identity of the enemies that are trying to kill us? What makes man die? Why does death come to us? It comes to us through sin. Then who or what is the enemy that God sends to us? It’s sin.
Hard to understand right? What does it mean that God sends us our enemies, i.e. sin? And he not only leaves alone that sin, but raises up that sin and sends it to His people – how do we understand that?

We’ll go back to Genesis to understand. In revelations, in the picture drawn up of the new heaven and the new earth, there is no tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There’s only the tree of life:
<Revelations 21:1> - new heaven, new earth.
<Revelations 22:1-3> - no tree of knowledge of good and evil
As you can see in the new heaven and new earth, there is only the tree of life. The fact that this the tree of good and evil was planted in the Garden of Ede, but not in heaven, means it was merely an instrument to teach us something. And in Revelations 22 we just read, you can see that it’s called a “curse”. It’s talking about the “tree of life”, which leads us to be curious about the tree of good and evil, only to say “no longer will there be any curse”. We can see from this that the event of man taking the fruit from the tree of good and evil, and judging what is good and evil, was a direct curse from God.
Man, after coming to know good and evil, set up a system of judging what is good and evil, and work on obtaining and storing up as much of what he thinks is good, in order to be like God.
God calls that “evil”. “Evil” or “Sin”, is not just the incidental acts and deeds that you can see. Those things are merely manifestations of evil and sin. Evil includes all things associated with beings, who are supposed to be completely dependent on God, leaving that place of dependence and living independently. And all man, who have taken the fruit of good and evil in Adam, are born in that evil, live in that evil and die in that evil.
In the midst of that are the ones who have been chosen by God, and they’re called the saints (believers). But to the lives of those believers, God sends their enemies. He sends those who are twice as evil or twice as strong to boot. And from there comes the “crying out”.
Now link that to the story of David. David is a sinner. He is a sinner all his life. But he pretends to be the king. In fact, he plays that role quite well, pretending to be kind, brave, great, religious. Into that life of David, God wakes up the sin that was hidden inside and sends it to David. That scary and hideous sin within David is exposed and he becomes aware. At that moment David shouts a cry out of self-despair and self-denial. What’s that called again? A contrite heart. That is the crying out in the book of Judges.

Now we can deduce that the enemy that God sends to us is the sin inside of us. God stirs that up inside of us. He’s saying “stop hiding it”, “stop acting”. It would be easy if you understood it this way, that:
God’s exposing of the sin that we’ve meticulously hidden inside of us = enemy that God sends to us.
And He continues to push us and herd us down the path of self-despair and self-denial. In that place we meet the true judge, Jesus, and we get to cling on to him.
Think carefully about this. All the enemies that God raised up in Judges to attack Israel, including Moab, Ammon, Amalek etc. Where are they from? They are all originally from Isarel. Moab and Ammon are Lot’s descendants, and Amalek was the son of Timna, the concubine of Eliphaz, who was Esau’s son. They were all products of sin (i.e. born through sinful unions). God left alone these people next to Israel. Why? To show the hideousness of the all the things that Israel has produced and given birth to, and make them experience it for themselves, so that they’ll be pushed down the path to self-despair and self-denial, i.e. a contrite heart.
If you look carefully at verse 21 and 22 of today’s passage, you can see that even clearer. Eglon the king of Moab is a model figure representing all the Adam’s who have left God. In verse 17 it says that he had become large because of all the things that he had received and plundered from others for his benefit. That is the nature of sin. All of us who become large because they plunder others in order to protect and maintain their status as king, are called sinners.
Verse 13 says that Eglon attacked and took possession of the city of Palms right? The City of Palms here is Jericho. What kind of a city is Jericho? Jericho was a city that was conquered only by the grace of God. But that Jericho is again conquered, this time by the enemy. What does this symbolise? This is symbolising the resurrection of the humanism that relies up on the possibility, achievements and contributions of man, not relying only upon the grace of God. That is the enemy.
What is interesting is that in verse 21 and verse 22, it says that fat came out when Eglon the king of Moab died.
<Judges 3:21-22>
The word “fat” here in Hebrew is 헤레브(hereb?) and it’s word that is used a lot in the context of offerings. This word is used a lot in Leviticus, so we’ll have a look at the use of that word there:
<Leviticus 3:6-17>
The word “fat” that is used multiple times in this passage is all the same word 헤레브 (hereb?). So you can see that “fat” refers to the offerings and the law. We’ve learnt so far that what God delights in is not the offerings, but a contrite heart, and we learnt that the offerings and the law in the Old Testament does not give life. Because that is the tree of knowledge of good and evil right? “Giving offerings and abiding by the law is ‘good’ and we have the strength to do that, and the ones who do that are ‘righteous’” – is this not the interpretation of offerings and the law through man’s judging system of good and evil? But the bible, even in the Old Testament, endlessly denies man’s offerings, and foretells the need for us to cling on to Jesus through the offerings and the law.
<1Samuel 15:22>
It’s very clear here as well right? The true role of a believer is not the offerings of the 헤레브 (hereb), the male lamb’s fat, but the obedience of God’s word. So the King Eglon’s fat that came out was a symbol of the evil that needed to be removed.
But if you refer to the original Hebrew bible, after the phrase “the fat closed in over it”, is another phrase “and excrement came out as well”. This has somehow not been translated. So out of Eglon, not only the fat but also excrements came out as well. These are two things that epitomise the figure of Eglon. In verse 24, the servants say “He must be relieving himself in the inner room of the house”, which means going to the bathroom in his room. Because of the smell generated by the excrement that came out of Eglon after he was stabbed, his servants outside thought he was ‘relieving’ himself in the room.
That word for “excrement” appears the same in Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy 23:12-14, there is a command to not leave any ‘excrement’ near the Lord. It says to dig a hole and cover up the excrement. In this way “excrements” symbolise the filthy sin that cannot even be near the holiness of the Lord. But in Deuteronomy 23:15, they use a different word for excrement, and that is “에르바트 다바르 (erbart dabar?)”. Direct translation of this word is “nakedness”.
In the ancient times, the word nakedness included the nakedness of one’s lower body including the reproductive organs. This is saying that God views man’s nakedness as excrement. Why is that? We learnt in the past that nakedness is the state of man wearing the serpent’s guile, after eating from the tree of good and evil. Hence, nakedness, and especially nakedness of the lower body, points to the desires of the Adams to reproduce and prosper, after taking from the tree of good and evil in order to become like God. That nakedness of man, and the excrement that comes out of man, are treated as the same, and thrown out by God. That is why these things cannot come inside of Israel.
And the Hebrew people also called the lower body “feet” as a representative word. So the name Hebrews gave urine was “the water from the feet”.
Now do you know why Jesus washed not the hands nor the faces, but the feet of his disciples as he was explaining the meaning of salvation? Like this the fat and the excrement embodies the legalism, the Judaism and the humanism of the fallen man who’s taken from the tree of good and evil. This is also why Apostle Paul called everything else, other than the knowledge of Jesus, as excrement (rubbish). And the left-handed judge Ehud, assassinates that fat and that excrement.

If you look at today’s passage, Ehud was a representative who offered tributes to Eglon the King of Moab. It’s a similar role to the chief tax collector in Jesus’ time in the New Testament. Ehud was the one who would gather up all the taxes from Israel and offered it up to Eglon. He was a sinner. Not only that, he was a left-handed man. In those days left-handed people were treated as disabled, or abnormal people.
And even though our bibles have translated it simply as “left-handed”, the Hebrew saying is “이쉬 잇테르 야드 예미노”, which directly translates as “the man whose right hand is closed”. So when they are naming people who have no choice but to use the left-hand because their right hand is disabled, they use the term “이쉬 잇테르 야드 예미노”. Of course in Judges 20, there are the 700 left-handed warriors in the tribe of Bejamin. It seems there must have been an army within the tribe of Benjamin that constisted only of left-handed soldiers. But in the context of today’s passage, there is no doubt that Ehud had a disability in his right hand. The fact that the chief tax collector of a colony can go straight to the king of the nation without being searched thoroughly for weapons, and the fact that he held a 45cm knife (one cubit) up against his right leg without anyone being suspicious, makes you assume that he had a disability on this right hand.
The name of the tribe of Benjamin means “the son of the right hand”. The common idea in the ancient times, as well as the symbolism in the bible, is that the right hand signifies power. This is why the Old Testament makes numerous references to God shows His power through His right hand. But of all the sons of the right hand (tribe of Benjamin) comes out a left-handed Judge who is unable to use his right hand. He is a tax collector, a disabled man and a citizen of a colony, and he of all people is the one who assassinates the lump of fat that symbolises evil.
What did we say that the fat symbolises? It is a symbol of offerings and the law. The acts and deeds of man, that is, humanism. That is evil. Ehud, who was hidden away as a left-handed man among sons of the right hand, becomes the knife hidden in the right leg to assassinate that evil.
Jesus came to this world as such weak, hidden man. And in that hidden, weak manner, he stabbed the heart of evil through the cross.
If you look at verse 16, the knife that Ehud had hidden away was a double edged sword. Where else do we see a double edged sword? What did Jesus come to this world as? He came as the Word.
And Jesus who is the Word, became a double-edged sword to expose sin and stab evil it in the heart.
<Hebrews 4:12>
Through this Word, the lump of fat inside of us, our humanism, our prosperity seeking, will continue to die out. But what must happen in that process of the evil inside of us being exposed and dying out, is a sorrowful awareness of our innate and essential sinful nature. That is why from time to time God will send into our lives those who are twice as evil, like Cushan Rishathaim, and the lump of fat, like Eglon, to make us realise that we are the ones who are twice as evil and we are the lump of fat of humanism. The only thing that we can do at that time is the crying out of “Lord, save me”, and the only thing we can offer is the contrite heart of “Lord, the only answer to our lives is Jesus”.
Don’t go around ridiculously declaring you’re going to fight against the enemy that is out there. The walk of faith is God raging a war against me. We have to be continuously dusted through that war. We have to keep being destroyed. When we are being denied in that way, we begin to understand the gospel that:
“Through the hidden, double-edged Word, which initially looks foolish, through this Jesus, our sin and evil is destroyed”