40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Judges 3:1-30 (Episode 200)

Episode Date: January 26, 2020

Israel is becoming more and more pagan and God sells them to their enemies. A left-handed man has a short sword and a message from God for a fat king. And rest seems to be the thing everyone is after. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network Houston City Event Las Vegas City Event Great Freedom Conference in Germany Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. you can go to 1517.org slash broadcast check out all the other podcasts over there also while you're over there you can go to the events page we got events coming up in 2020 city events in both houston and las vegas we're going to be in houston on february 22nd and las vegas march 21st both those are free events all you got to do is sign up and show up you can go sign up on the website or you can go look in the show notes here if you're listening to this on an app or on the on the site and click down and just click on the event sign up and come join us in houston i'll be

there chad will be there loso gretchen ronovic matt popovitz and scott keith and we're going to talk about what happens when people encounter jesus and then in las vegas we're going to be going over the entire book of galatians eric sorensen adam francisco scott keith cindy kotch blake flatley and myself so love to see you at those events also if you're in germany the great Freedom Conference. We would love to see our German listeners out there. That thing is filling up. There's a link in the show notes to that as well. If you happen to live in Germany and would like to come hang out with us, we would absolutely love to see you. That's the first weekend in May, and we're excited to go to Germany and birthplace of the Reformation and talk about

Christian freedom. So it's going to be a great time. Chad, how's it going, man? It's going well. it's going well if you follow me on facebook i mentioned about a week ago that i signed a contract book contract with 1517 on uh of all things something old testament related no way strange huh yeah no weird weird no so i'm writing a uh 365 days a whole year's uh devotional book and each each day we'll look at a particular hebrew word or phrase and unpack that and connect it to christ of course and the new testament so i have been like hammering those out i mean i use a bunch of but i mean i think i wrote the 27th one this morning yeah you know which which is like oh that's so cool that's a lot and then i but then i think yeah you gotta write 365 of

these things so i gotta wait used to go but hey at least at least i'm making progress yeah man He's still making progress. So that's what I've been working on, that and getting ready for – I'm going to St. Louis this weekend. I've got three different events coming up there. So hopefully I'll get to meet some of you guys there. The weather up there is terrible right now. It's terrible.

We had school canceled today and everything, man. There was snow everywhere and ice everywhere today. It's awesome. Yeah. I heard something about a winter storm possibly moving in the Midwest, and I thought, oh, boy, here we go. Yeah. I guess we'll see.

Oh, well. we'll make it work one way or another the real question is are you going to cover my favorite hebrew word which is what hesed of course yeah yeah gotta cover hesed did you already did you already cover it you already got it down no i have not covered that kind of what i've been doing is i started uh well i wrote out the list so i've got all the whole list written out and i'm sure i'll tweak that as i go through but what i did is basically started with genesis one right now i think i'm i just finished where am i at about genesis 11 yeah i just i wrote something about the tower of babel so i'm just kind of working my way canonically through it and then uh yeah

at some point i'll probably start jumping around a little bit yeah yes yeah but has it will be has it will show up though yeah yeah definitely all right that's good that's good that's the that's the one i'll that's the one i'll read and and let you know if it lets you know if i agree maybe i'll put it on your on your birthday maybe that's what i'll do yeah well you know if you need if you need some help with hesed i've done i've done a lot of thinking about this word so all right i will hit you up all right so we i think we are we're right up against judges chapter three yeah yeah um i'm gonna grab a couple verses from chapter two because it flows the subject addressed at the beginning of three actually begins at the end of two and i can't remember

if we talked about it last time so just kind of touch on that and then we'll we got some great great stuff coming up so we're going to meet our first judge we've actually met him before but he was kind of a side figure back in joshua as well as early in judges a guy named othniel we'll get to him and we have one of my favorite biblical stories oh i mean it's just like top one of the best it's the story of the judge named ehud and the fat king named eglon it's just like oh my gosh it's it's the best it's it's it's full of sarcasm and and wit and irony and some gruesome stuff so yeah it's it'll be it'll be fun let's do it all right so uh back at the end of chapter two we have the language of testing that is uh interwoven in the in these

verses so it says of course what we've talked about so far is that you know the israelites aren't doing of course what they were supposed to do they didn't drive out the canaanites and instead they're just kind of settling down and uh doing all sorts of things they shouldn't do like intermarrying with them and residing among them and serving their gods so understandably unexpectedly, God's anger burns. That's verse 20 of chapter two. And he says, here's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to drive out the nations anymore that Joshua left. He says, I'm going to leave them there. This is verse 22, in order to test Israel by them, whether they will keep the way of the Lord to walk in it as their fathers did or not. So there's a couple of things

I want to point out here. First of all, back to verse 20, it says, because this nation has transgressed my covenant. Now, you can't really see that in English, but there's a jab there at Israel. Typically, when the Hebrew word goy or goyim, that's singular and plural, goy is nation, goyim nations. Typically, in fact, almost without exception, when those Hebrew words are used, they're in reference to the Gentiles. So the people of God, the word there is om, that's usually referring to israel but in this particular verse israel is called goy this goy this nation so there's a there's already an implicit indication of the the gradual what we talked about before that the canonization of israel throughout the period of the judges so

they're becoming like the gentile nations in other words and they're left there uh god says these other nations in order to test Israel. We've seen this word test. It came up multiple times in the Torah. The first time we saw it was actually when God tested Abraham, Genesis 22, and said, take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and sacrifice him. So this was God testing Abraham. We also read in Deuteronomy that God was testing Israel throughout their 40 years in the wilderness to see if they would keep his way or not. That's the same language we have here in the book of Judges. Now, I looked, and I might have missed one, but as far as I can tell, there's only one case, and it's in Judges, where someone is allowed to test God without

negative ramifications. Now, like I said, I could have missed one, but it's the only one I saw. Most of the time when somebody tests God, it ain't good. It's not going to go well for those people. But when we get to the story of Gideon, remember he has the whole fleece, and one time the fleece is wet ground is dry one time the fleece is dry ground is wet well in one of the i can't remember the verse but in one of those verses it says that he was wanting to to test one more one more test and in that particular case he's not chastised so most of the time almost without exception if you test god not good god tests you it's to see if you follow his way or not and of course As we're going to see as the story unfolds, this testing leads to Israel's repeated failure.

This is why you have not to test the Lord. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I'm glad you said that because it reminded me that this is when Jesus is tempted by the devil to leap off the pinnacle of the temple. He responds with that verse from Deuteronomy, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Now, in the Hebrew, Deuteronomy is that same verb that's used here, to nasa, to test Israel. So anyway, that's why they're left, in other words, in order to test Israel. And then we jump into chapter 3, and we have a list of the nations that were left. It says, these are the nations which were left, and they are the five lords of the Philistines.

Come back to those in just a minute. and the Canaanites and the Sidonians and the Hivites who lived in Mount Lebanon from Mount Baal Hermon as far as Levoh Hamath. So all of these people are left there in order to be a test to the sons of Israel to see if they are going to follow God's ways or not. And of course, as we hear, they don't all the time.

Now the five lords of the Philistines, back to those just for a second. So you could spend probably years reading the scholarly literature about the history of the philistines where they came from who they are but it seems that at least the the consensus is that they migrated down from the from anatolia they're sometimes called the sea peoples and they uh probably the ultimate goal as they move southward was actually to infiltrate egypt but we know there were several clashes between the Egyptians and these sea peoples. So chances are they were rebuffed before they got to Egypt.

And what they ended up doing was settling there on the Mediterranean coast, which is where this Philistine pentapolis is at. So these five cities like Gath and Ashkelon and Gaza that we hear about in multiple places in the scriptures, that was the Philistine territory. So they are on the western side of Israel. And they're a pretty unified bunch of peoples, a bunch of people and very, very equipped to fight. And we're going to hear a lot more about the Philistines as we go through the book of Judges. And of course, all the way into the story of young David as well. Well, anyway, that's just kind of the beginning, the at last of chapter two and beginning of beginning of chapter three. Now, without further ado, let's meet our first, let's re-meet our first

judge. So we're at verse five in Judges chapter three. It says the Israelites lived among right away. As soon as we hear that, it's like, oh, there's nothing good. They lived among, they cohabited with the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, all these various people groups that were natives of the land. So first of all, you kind of listen to the verbs that are used okay so they lived among it's the first one and they took their daughters for themselves as wives and gave their own daughters to their sons and served their gods and then it goes on to say that the israelites did what was evil in the sight of the lord and forgot the lord their god and served the bales and the ash wrote so that's that's a lot

of piling up of verbs that describe all the various ways in which the Israelites were failing the test. They lived among these various people groups instead of conquering and executing them, which was the divine mandate. And then they intermarried, and they took the Canaanite wives for their sons or for themselves, and then they gave their Israelite daughters to Canaanite men and of course this this breaking of the of the marriage laws is very frequently a metaphor for the breaking of the first commandment for the committing of idolatry and that's exactly these two are joined they are put right together in the same verse so you have this these prohibited marriages going on and you have the prohibited service of of their gods with a net result that

they forgot the Lord, their God, and served the Baals and the Osiris. Now, we've talked a lot about remember in the scriptures. If you're a long-time listener, you know that we've talked about that over and over. Well, the flip side of that is to forget. So it's kind of what you'd expect. If when God remembers or when people remember, they always are enacting something. When you forget, you're not enacting something. So it's more, of course, than just a mental lapse. it's a it's it's it's like a refusal to do something this this particular kind of forgetting i mean the closest we come into english usually when we say forget we we mean yeah i just you know i didn't think about it it slipped my mind but sometimes we'll say like if we're we're really

mad you know we're just we're done with somebody we'll say forget you and something like that and we don't mean i'm no longer going to think about you it's like we we have rejected you forget you So you're out of my life, you're out of my mind, or whatever you want to mean. Well, that kind of captures the meaning of the Hebrew word for forget. So anyway, this is the situation that Israel is now in. We have all of these things that they're doing, which are contrary to the Torah of Moses. So what happens? Well, verse 8, this is the cycle, right?

first israel relapses into the idolatry and then the anger of god is kindled against israel it's verse eight and he sells them we've encountered that that particular word before he sold them into the hands of this guy who's a mesopotamian king which is kind of strange you think that he would sell him into like a hittite king or an amorite king or a canaanite king mesopotamia is like way to the east it's like on the other side of the jordan mesopotamia means a land between two rivers which is or land between the which is the tigris and euphrates so this is a long way off this guy this mesopotamian king he's got a he's got a long name kushan rishatayim and uh anyway he's he becomes the one who dominates israel for eight for eight years so this is this is

this beginning of that cycle that we're going to see over and over is what rebels and then god gets angry and then god hands him over to somebody else it's kind of like it's it's it's the the pattern that we that we have throughout the scriptures that god hands you over to that which you that evil desire that that you think that you want so he's like oh so you want to like you want to live with and intermarry all these other peoples okay well i'm just going to give you completely to this other person, and he's going to be your overlord. And this goes on for eight years, rather. And then the next stage happens. They cry out to God, and he raises up a deliverer, a Moshe, one who's basically a savior. He's going to be a military deliverer

for Israel. And this guy we have met before. We heard about him in the first chapter of Judges. we heard about him already back in in joshua and his name is othniel he is the nephew of caleb the uh when we first heard about him you know there's a city that caleb wanted to capture and he's like hey if any of you if any of you guys are are brave and strong enough to capture the city i'll give you my daughter ox's wife and so uh his his nephew steps up and he's like yeah i'd like to marry my cousin so he captured he captures the city and he gets oxa as his wife well this is the guy uh he's our first he's our first judge and if you remember from our earlier conversations he is he's not a native israelite sometime along the way he he was part of a clan a clan known as

the uh what were their names the kinezites and they were adopted into israel so he comes some just like caleb he comes from originally from a non-israelite tribe but this non-israelite group of people they became part of parts of the nation of israel of course caleb is one of the one of the great leaders of israel well atheneel then becomes our first judge our first deliverer and it says the spirit of the lord came upon him this is the kind of language again this is that we're kind of being introduced to this that we're going to see later in judges very often the spirit of yahweh just comes upon them or falls upon them or moves them, and as a result of this, it's kind of like the equivalent of the divine hand. The hand of the Lord does a lot of things in the Old Testament.

The Spirit of the Lord is fulfilling the same task here, and what he does is he empowers Othniel to be able to defeat the enemy. So he goes out to war, and it says the Lord gave Kushan, rishathayim king of mesopotamia into his hand and so he prevailed and then we finally get to the last stage of this rhythm of these various judges so israel sins god sells them into the hand of somebody else they cry out god raises up a deliverer that deliverer saves them and then the final the final uh part of this particular cycle is that the land has rest and in this particular the case. It has rest for 40 years, which is probably, it's kind of a round figure. The Bible often does that. Don't take all of these particular references to time with strict literalness. 40

years is kind of a generation. So for a generation, Israel had rest. Now, this particular judge is interesting in that there's nothing negative at all about him. I mean, nothing that's like made explicit about him. He's just kind of God decided he was going to use in order to deliver Israel. He's very different from most of the other judges, not all of them, but most of the judges, because most of the judges, they got all kinds of flaws and they make all sorts of mistakes and maybe they start out okay, but they end up bad like Gideon does. But Othniel is different. Not a word of criticism breathed about him, but after that, things will fall apart pretty quickly one of the things i think is interesting is that it doesn't say so the land

had peace for 40 years it says that they had rest and that that rest is a word that the the bible will use when it's talking about things being as they should be right so because it's a it's almost like when you think about rest like rest is when we do right when we have rest uh this means that we're not doing that hard thing. You're like, I just need to go, I'm going to go rest. Or you're going to go to sleep, right? Or you're feeling sick and you say, go get some rest, you know? Because you're dealing with this, I mean, ever since Genesis,

we've seen this is conflict, conflict, conflict, conflict. The word that is chosen to describe when things are good is rest. And of course, we see this in the New Testament too. Jesus talks about rest a ton. and it seems that all throughout scriptures from from the fall on that the thing that is very very elusive is rest right i mean god has to like put a day in place and like that's a day of rest right i mean it's just like something that like you cannot keep for very long you cannot keep this state of rest and i think this has implications when you start talking about the

gospel and then the gospel is this thing that is promises rest permanent rest a state of rest forever and this is why we say things like resting in christ and this kind of stuff right that but it seems like rest is the thing that you can never you get it and it's and you have it for a moment and it's gone yeah yeah that that's that's a fantastic point and it it's exemplified certainly in the book of judges because over and over god has to give him rest but then it ends yeah it's temporary and when you get to the book of hebrews i think it's chapter five um it talks about the sabbath rest talks about joshua gave them rest but not really gave them rest and psalm 95 talks about another rest and then he finally gets the point saying that christ is then our

sabbath rest it's like this whole this whole story about all this upheaval and this ephemeral nature of rest and just how easy it is to lose that that all of that was was god's way of indicating that yeah yeah it's because you don't have the perfect rest yet and and i'm gonna and i'm gonna give it to you i mean that's a talk about a gospel message for our world too you know we we have uh you know we have all of these uh these improvements in in society which you would think would give us more rest but uh very often it just kind of takes over takes over our lives and so you know people are people are craving some kind of some kind of rest and of course they're looking for it everywhere but it's only found in the same one who's always given always giving people rest

a movie i used to i watched a lot growing up as a kid because i had sisters and and uh they love this movie so there there's this movie called while you were sleeping that we used to watch all the time the dad in this in this movie tells his son the thing that you work for your whole life is this one moment where all the bills are paid and there are no crises and everyone is healthy and you get it and it's gone oh wow and this is exactly right should be deeply theological about this where it's like if i could if i could just have like everything be okay for just a second yeah i could and what he's saying is like at that moment like what do you have in that moment in that moment you have rest you're like okay i got it yeah and then something happens and it

falls apart and we all know this is how it works right that's that is exactly the way life works yeah yeah yeah which is why you know when we when you hear the gospel about the rest that we have in christ man when you when you really understand the the message that that is conveying it's such such comfort yeah because you know it doesn't matter how you know how well put together you may think that your life is well something's gonna happen it always does you know even if that rest lasts longer than a second maybe it lasts a day or whatever it might be well you're gonna get sick you know or something's gonna happen with your job or something happens someone you love something's always going to happen that that that particular rest is gonna

is gonna end as a result but uh yeah but the rest we have in christ thankfully is uh is a gift and so it can't be can't be taken yeah what the gospel does is it gives you a rest that is uh outside of yourself and is unaffected by circumstances it doesn't it doesn't shift uh based on whatever else is going on yeah it's not self-created and so it can't be self-destroyed right yeah it comes from another yeah and so i mean there's a there's a good big deal for the for israel here they got 40 years of of everything be uh you know largely speaking okay everything everything everything's as it should be yeah at least they're not under the dictatorship of a foreign power but it's always a but right you you get past verse 11 and you get to verse 12 and here's where we get

to my one of my favorite stories so verse 12 through almost the end of the chapter uh we have one we have one verse at the end that's about our third judge a guy named shamgar we'll get to him later but now we're introduced to the uh the fellow who's named ehud ehud ehud however you want to say his name now i i don't even know how to begin this story because there is so much here that uh i don't want to get ahead of myself but uh yeah there this is i think i could be wrong but i think there is more like double entendres and sarcasm and wit and irony and satire and all of that that are compressed into this bit of the story more more so than than maybe any other any other story in scripture so anyway well without further ado here we go verse 12 so again the israelites

did evil in god's sight and so this time instead of reaching all the way over to mesopotamia the lord strengthened eglon the king of moab against israel because they had done evil in his sight. So Moab, as you might remember, was actually related to the Israelites because Lot's two daughters, they had two sons, and one of them was the Moabites, the father of the Moabites. So we have the Moabites, and they live on the eastern side of the Jordan, and their king is named Eglon. Now, right away, if you're a Hebrew listener to this, you're thinking, hmm Eglon that sounds a whole lot like our word for calf like a fattened calf that would be ready for the slaughter so right away his name itself is like hmm I wonder if I wonder if something's up

here Eglon Egil uh this king and a calf well we'll see so he's he is the he is the king of Moab now what did he do verse 13 he said he gathered to himself a couple of allies the sons of Ammon and Amalek now these are the Amalekites in particular are the ancient enemies of the people of Israel they attacked their rear guard when they were when they were leaving Egypt and they're going to continue to be a menace to Israel for a long time we're still going to hear about the Amalekites when we get into the story of Saul in Samuel. So anyway, he's not alone. It's kind of a triple point here. You got Moab, you got Ammon, you got Amalek, and they go and they defeat Israel. And they possess the city of palm trees, which is probably a reference to

Jericho. Now, I'm not saying the city of Jericho was rebuilt, but no doubt there were some settlements around there so the city of city palm trees usually is is a reference to reference to jericho and how long were they under the thumb of eglon well 18 years is how long that they that they served him so a little bit longer than last time when they were under the king of mesopotamia is eight years when they're under him we have 10 years added to that so 18 long years so we have the same pattern right israel sins make god mad he sells them into the hand of somebody else So far, we know what's happening. And we know what's happening in verse 15, because what's going to happen next?

Well, the Israelites are going to cry out to God. So they do, and he raises up Ehud, the son of Gerah, the Benjamite, a left-handed man. Now, anytime, we've talked about this maybe once or twice, and we'll see a lot more occurrences as we go through the rest of the story, but I think almost every time that you have a physical detail added about a person it's significant it's one of the differences between reading the bible and reading like a modern novel you know if you read it if you read a novel there's a whole lot of description i mean you buy when they introduce characters you're gonna know how tall they are

and what color hair they have and what they're wearing and all of these particular details it's just the way a novelist fills out the portrait of the characters. Not so in the Bible. The Bible is very scarce when it comes to giving physical descriptions of people. Now, we have some exceptions to this. For instance, we knew about Esau's, the way that Esau looked. He was hairy. Well, that was significant because that was the source of his name. We'll find out later about David and the way he looked and Saul, how tall he was. So here we're introduced to Ehud as a left-handed man. And this particular description is going to become significant as we move farther on. But what I want to point out, first of all, is already you have a built-in irony here

because Benjamin, Ben-Yamin in Hebrew, means son of the right hand. So he is a left-handed man from a right-handed tribe. Now, we're not exactly sure. Let me put it this way. So the Hebrew for left-handed is a little bit ambiguous. It could mean he was just literally left-handed, just like people are today. But the word that's used there actually refers to the binding up of the right hand. And the same expression is used later in the book of Judges to describe this whole group of warriors who could sling a stone accurately with their left hand now to have just like by chance a whole bunch of left-handed stone slingers is pretty pretty impossible so what a lot of people suggest here is that actually he was trained to use his left hand so they actually

tied up the hands of the the right hands of these warriors so they would have to use their left hand, thus making them in the end ambidextrous. So that's one possible meaning of this particular phrase. But anyway, the irony is there. He's from the right-handed tribe and he's a left-handed dude. And they chose him, it says, to send tribute to Eglon, king of Moab. But Ehud has a plan it says that before he went he made himself a sword with two edges a cubit in length so about yeah around 18 inches something like that and he bound it on his right thigh under his cloak so right away you know that that Ehud is a pretty pretty uh pretty tricky kind of guy he's left-handed but he ties it on his right thigh in order to conceal it that's not the place that they

would expect him to be carrying a weapon. And he then goes, verse 17, to present the tribute to Eglon, king of Moab. Now we're told another physical detail. We know that Ehud is left-handed and now we're told that Eglon was a very fat man. Now it's even richer in the Hebrew because the word that's used there for fat is not the not the typical word that we would use to describe someone you know that a little overweight this is the word that's typically used to describe animals like someone who's an animal that's fattened fattened for the slaughter so we have a left-handed guy and we have a very short sword and we have a fat king so i wonder what's going to happen well we'll find out so he verse 18 says it came about when

he finished presenting the tribute that he sent the people away who had carried the tribute so he doesn't go there alone he has these other guys and he turned back from the idols which were at gilgal and said i have a secret message for you oh king and the king says keep silence and all who attended left him now there's another little uh uh uh irony not irony here but uh kind of a double meaning here because when the the hebrew there when he says a secret message is a secret devar the word devar can mean a message a word but it can also mean an object a thing so ehud is saying i have a secret divar for you now eglon interprets this to mean oh he's got like a you know some kind of special report some kind of special word that he's going to speak to me

but ehud means something very different he's got an he's got a secret divar for him that has two blades and that is currently strapped to his right to his right thigh but eglon he doesn't get this so uh all who attended him left and ehud it says came to him while he was sitting alone in his well somewhere my translation has cool roof chamber we're not exactly sure where this place was a cool roof chamber like upper throne room some people think it's like close to a bathroom anyway we'll get to that eventually and who says again this time he doesn't say secret message he says i have a message from god for you if you're casting this in a movie like can you imagine this is like clint eastwood like

rolling up and be like i got a message from god for you and you just know like oh this is not good this is not good i know yeah so uh eglon i mean eglon is just he's he's a little dense he just you know he doesn't you don't you've got an enemy there you don't send out all of your soldiers he sends everybody out just on the basis of what this guy says yeah i gotta i got a message from god for you and he gets up from his seat next and then ehud makes his move stretched out his left hand took the sword from his right thigh and thrust it into his belly and uh if you if you're eating right now you might want to move your plate away move a little from the table uh because it says the handle also went in after the blade and the fat closed over the blade for he did not draw

the sword out of the belly and we're not done yet sorry and the the refuse came out this was this was not a pretty scene so the the fat king actually ended up swallowing the entire 18 inches of the blade and not only that but you know things happened pretty some some pretty uh unsightly unsightly things happen when this was was going out when this was what's happening and and i'll explain the reason why some of this is included in just a minute so ehud's job is done at least at this point so he uh he sneaks out somehow the architecture here is a little confusing but anyway however he does it he gets out and he locks the doors behind him well he he takes off uh he goes out his servants came and looked and look the the doors were locked and so they come to the doors

and they say oh he's uh he's probably relieving himself in the cool room now again i don't want to get all gross on you here but probably the reason they thought he's relieving himself because there was a certain smell that was coming from the room that he was in that's why these bodily functions were mentioned earlier so they wait verse 25 until they become anxious and he doesn't open the doors is they finally like somebody find the spare keys so somebody gets the spare key opens the door and behold verse 25 their master had fallen to the floor dead so Ehud escapes while they were dilly-dallying around he goes by the idols he escapes to a place called Sarah and he's ready he's got a trumpet he blows the trumpet and he gathers together all of these

folks in the hill country and he says to them pursue them because the lord has given your enemies the moabites into your hands so they go down and they actually they block the river so the moabites can't get across and they ended up killing it says 10 000 moabites all robust and valiant men so moab was subdued that day under the hand of israel and the land was undisturbed for 80 years this time quite the story for for a lot of different reasons you know i i think this is significant because i mean this is undoubtedly written as a satire at least i'm convinced it was and it shows you that the uh that the israelites were they didn't consider like making fun of their enemies to be somehow below them they uh they did that actually with with great gusto many times

even when you get to the book of revelation and babylon falls babylon you know that great symbol of of ungodly power the saints rejoice over over this fall and of course that's you know exactly what's what's happening here now we can debate the uh all of the the ways that ehud went about his particular way of delivering israel uh but in the end he got the job done and in the end this is the book of judges and strange things happen god's uh god's ways of delivering his people are not always what you would expect it is it is true that that when when god uh you know gives people his people over to somebody and then decides to deliver them it almost seems like man this this deliverance seems like no big deal like why didn't they why didn't like that why didn't israel

just rise up and do this because it seems like again always it's always this way when god determines that now is time it's just got a complete wipe out and you think like i guess you could have done this whenever right yeah why'd you wait so long yeah uh and this is this is always done to illustrate that you know when god deals with his enemies like it's never it's never like this close fight yeah it doesn't work like that um it's it's oh it's always just a complete deliverance right um and it has to be in these situations because i mean they're they still they're living it close to each other right so you gotta wipe the you gotta you gotta have a such a resounding defeat that that this wouldn't be like some ongoing you know and then they were

in conflict for the next 10 years or something you know right yeah yeah you do see that kind of just complete uh destruction of the enemy multiple times and yeah for and for good reason as you pointed out otherwise well in six more months you're gonna have to be dealing with this problem again yeah that's not rest no and that's definitely not rest not for 80 years for sure well we covered uh two judges so far two judges and ehud yeah so we got judges one chapter yeah next uh next time we'll get to our our one verse judge we don't know much about him but we'll we'll cover him next time and then we'll get to the uh the great story of uh deborah and barack and a lady that you want to stay away from if she has a hammer and a tent peg in her hand yeah she

has a message from god for somebody she's got another message from god that's right similar in nature it's a similar results yes yes well all right guys that that is 40 minutes uh if you'd like to support the podcast you can do so by going over to 1517.org and you can go to the donate page and you can become a contributor there. Thank you so much to those of you who support what we do. Also, if you wouldn't mind going and rating and reviewing on iTunes, that really helps as well. It helps give us more visibility.

So if you've never rated the podcast over there and dropped that five-star rating, that also helps us out. It costs you nothing. It's a free way to help us out. Chad, I will see you next week. All right. See you then. We'll see you next time.