Judges 6 – Part A – Left-handed Ehud, left-handed Jesus (Judges 3:12-30)
Last week through the story of the Judge Othniel, we saw the impossibility and powerlessness of man, and we learned that the true judge is Jesus Christ and the war we fight is His war of the cross.
Today’s passage tells the accounts of Ehud, which may sound a little strange to some. We may think at first that God’s war shouldn’t be conducted with such slimy trickery. But here the left-handed judge acts as an assassin to conduct a less than dignified killing as a method of war. Nonetheless, we’ll have a look at how the message of Jesus is being told through this story.
Israel suffered under the king Cushan-Rishathaim for 8 years, but through the heroics of judge Othniel, they enjoy a reign of peace for 40 years. Do you think they lived a life without sin in that period? The essence of Israel was the same. Their hearts would have still been focused on the idol called ‘me’, and they would have still been in love with the civilisations and the conveniences of Canaan. But somehow a reign of peace came upon them. A ‘reign of peace’ is a term used to describe a society or a time of peace that is sustained for a while due to the great rule of a king. Hence the cause of a reign of peace is the king.
The bible calls this the principle of representation. The principle of representation is how the fate of the people are determined by the existence of the king, regardless of the value or state of the people themselves. This is the structure and the system by which God’s kingdom operates. God’s kingdom is a kingdom whereby God pours something of His upon His people, who are nothing but dust, to allow them to enjoy the fullness of His kingdom. There, the value and strength of the people are utterly useless.
So the judge Othniel, who was the reason for the 40 year reign of peace dies. At that time Israel’s reign of peace is broken and once more Israel is exposed as a rebellious people. Again, the formula of the existence of God’s people is revealed. The fact that God’s people are nothing but rubbish outside of God’s rule, is being exposed.

The word we have to pay close attention to hear is “again”. This word appears repeatedly in Judges. Let’s have a look at just a few of these:



Like this, Israel is exposed as rubbish in front of God the very moment the judge disappears from them. This is not just Israel, this is us as well. The moment we are outside of the relationship with Jesus Christ, we are instantly exposed as rubbish. Regardless of all the backgrounds of our character, talent, level of maturity, achievements and contributions, the moment we’re removed from the relationship with Jesus, we are nothing but dead dust.
Believers come to realise this truth wholeheartedly through real experiences on their life journey. This is why we experience ‘again and again and again’ ourselves falling under sin. Through those real life experiences, we get to surely understand and acknowledge that ‘without the covering grace of the Lord, I am nothing but rubbish’.
Like this, every time Israel does evil in the eyes of the Lord, God raises up Israel’s enemies. Even in the verse 12 we just read, it says that when Israel did evil in the eyes of the Lord, God raised up Eglon the king of Moab and gave him the power over Israel, right? That Eglon king of Moab join forces with Ammonites and the Amalekites to attack Israel.
Do you know who the nation of Moab are? Moab and Ammon were the cursed children that Lot, Abraham’s nephew, had through his daughters. God allowed that pregnancy and birth at that time.
Why? To use per today’s passage. In fact, God actually protected Moab and Ammon in the past, in order to use for His purpose later on.

While Israel was marching valiantly toward Canaan, God commands them not to touch Moab. At the time, not knowing that only this command from God had saved them, Moab tried to trick Israel with money and drive them out. God raised this weak and vulnerable Moab to have power of Israel. For what? To attack His people, the Israelites. What is the result that comes about from God raising the enemies to attack His people? The ‘crying out’ to God.
God does not demand changed lives from His people, but demands their ‘crying out’ to Him. It was the same in the episode of judge Othniel, and again in the episode of Ehud in today’s passage, the crying out by Israel paves the way for the judge to come:

Through these episodes, we have a tendency to easily deduce a simple formula, but we have to be very careful not to do that. We should not simply apply this formula into our lives at face value, to think that:
• if we do evil in the eyes of the Lord then He raises our enemies up to punish us
• and if we cry out in pain because of the punishment then He will forgive us
This is the opposite of the true formula of God’s rule. Here, the ‘crying out’ is better named as a ‘contrite heart’.

Picture it this way instead. As you know by now from reading the bible and realising from real life experience, believers are not ones who have become saints because their essence/nature has changed. Even the chosen people of God are still always floundering in the midst of sin, and repeatedly witness and acknowledge themselves struggling in the pit of sin ‘again and again and again’.
This is the teaching method by God to teach us that salvation has nothing to do with our qualifications, our achievements, our contributions, but only to do with the imputed grace of God, that is, the free gift given to us through our relationship with Jesus Christ. At that moment the enemies that God had left alone and even raised up are thrown into the life of His people; and the enemies conquer and beat His people half to death. And when their role is over, the enemies become useless and perish.
In this process the crying out, that is, the contrite heart is produced in the believer’s life.
Then who are these enemies that produce the crying out, the contrite heart in us? Are the enemies that God raises up always attacking us from the outside? We’ll now have a close look who these enemies are:

If you look here, quite clearly, the sacrifice and the contrite heart are presented as two contrasting things. Man tries to reach righteousness through the deeds of sacrifice, and God is saying you reach righteousness through a broken, contrite heart – two contrasting assertions.
In order to teach this to the readers of the bible, God used King David’s sin in history. If you get to know the background of the infamous incident with Bathsheba, and if you get to know the essence of David’s crying out as a result of that incident, then it’ll make it easier to understand today’s passage as well.
David is the king. And he was someone who obeyed God’s law very well. Not only that, he was a warrior of God who defeated so many enemies. He seems like someone who looks faultless on the outside. He’s the type of person that makes you say “If God doesn’t love this person, who can He love?” But God intercedes in David’s life and exposes David’s true self.
While a war is going on David is sleeping in his palace. He comes outside after waking and he sees this beautiful woman bathing. On top of that the husband is absent from the picture. The perfect scene has been set up for sin. But that very scene was set up by God Himself. Why? You cannot understand this episode as just David’s story. This is the story of all of us.
David was a king. A king is a being who can use his power to get whatever he wants. All man, who has eaten from the tree of good and evil are all seeking that throne of a king. And in their own lives they are living as a small king, making choices only for their own benefit, battling a war for self-advancement. David appears here as a representation of all of these kings of the world (us).
A king does not let go of an opportunity to get something that is ‘pleasing to the eye and good for food’. So David indulged and fulfilled his desires. That woman became pregnant. After fulfilling his desires, in order to conceal what he did, he makes Uriah (Bathsheba’s husband) die at the hands of Ammon. You can see the slyness and the hideousness of sin.
Sin is that scary, enough to make you destroy the evidence without hesitation, in order to merely maintain one’s status and perceived cleanliness. Even if that evidence is a life. This is the true state of the person who was “loved by God” (David).
David has a son by Bathsheba. As soon as the son is born, the prophet Nathan comes to David to expose his each and every sin. David had not known the severity of his sin until then. But it was also not like David was unaffected by his sin either:

He does know the wrong he committed. So he was in pain as a result. So if David was already experiencing pain due to his sin like his bones were wasting away and all his strength was sapped, then what more did prophet Nathan have to point out? David was definitely struggling with his sin. But he didn’t deem it to be too serious. Because David only knew the sin that he had committed and was only struggling with that portion. He was numb to the exorbitant power of sin that ruled man. Before the Bathsheba incident, he even thought himself to be a great righteous man. Even when he had many opportunities to kill Saul, he took only a piece of Saul’s garment with him saying “I cannot harm the one that God has anointed”, and he was the one who came forward to build a new temple for God because the house of God was too ragged. He stood in front of Goliath relying only on God’s power, and had achieved so much as a general, defending his people. Hence his self-esteem would have been high right? Then the one sin he committed in the midst of that, may have caused him pain, but he would not have deemed it to be too serious.
To that place appears someone who reveals all the depth of his sin. Through that person David comes to realise the innate and essential nature of his sin (i.e. he is sin), and comes to have a broken, contrite heart. So in effect, the prophet Nathan appears here as a figure and foreshadow of the messiah.
If you look at Samuel 12, Nathan’s chastising of David appears like God’s chastising of Adam in the Garden of Eden:

God had made all the conditions to be perfect, but man still sins. Why? Because man died after eating from the tree of good and evil. All that comes out of a dead corpse is rotten liquid. But the proud man does not acknowledge that. So Adam, who sinned in the midst of perfect circumstances, is the figure of the true nature of all man. This is showing that man, regardless of how perfect his circumstances, cannot mature or be completed to a state of righteousness on his own accord, without the grace of God. The absolute necessity of God’s grace for all man is being repeatedly declared through these episodes.
So to the people who continue to not acknowledge the innate and essential nature of their sin, and pursue their ‘godlike’ life in this world, what does God prescribe in order to expose and instil the true nature of man? The only way is to strip man down and expose the sinful nature within. To make even themselves be shocked at their own true states. That was David’s Bathsheba incident, and Nathan appeared as the one to kindly explain the truth of that incident. That was to teach David that he was not someone who just committed small sins here and there, but that he himself was a tree of sin.
Through that God produces from David, not a ‘crying out’ asking for forgiveness for the sins he committed, but a ‘crying out’ for the overall salvation of his helpless being. The work that God does by interceding in our lives is to produce the ultimate confession that “My whole being was made out of the element called sin, and my whole being is consisting of sin”.

Now David knows the essence of sin, right? If his sin was just an incidental sin, he would have sinned against Uriah and Bathsheba, but because he knows that the incidental sin was a fruit of his innate and essential sinful nature against God, he was able to confess that he sinned against God. The lamenting and pain, the distress, and the sheer frustration of being helpless after becoming aware of one’s true self is called the broken, contrite heart. God wants this contrite heart, not a sacrifice offering, not an act of law abiding. So the purpose of our lives is not to be maturing to a level of cleanliness, holiness and greatness (sacrifice offering), but the confession that I have no answer to life without the grace of God (contrite heart).

Here you can see the same message to Psalms 51. God does not delight in sacrifice offerings. He does not delight in human deeds.
But here, instead of a contrite heart appears ‘someone’ who God does delight in. Who is that? Jesus Christ.
This means that a contrite heart is the state of complete self-denial and self-despair that leads to the desperate clinging on to Jesus Christ, the son of God. This is told in Hebrews:

It can’t get much clearer than that right? What is the contrite heart based on? The cross of Jesus Christ. So what God delights in is not fighting against Goliath with 5 stones, it’s not the building of a grand temple for God, and it is not the unification of a kingdom – all the things that David had achieved. What God delights in is the contrite heart that says “Lord, what would I have done if you didn’t send Jesus? Thank you”.