Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

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

To understand these characters, and how their stories speak to us, we must understand their context.

After all, our series is subtitled, “God at work in a broken world.”

How was this world broken?

Well, let’s quickly rehearse the history of the world up to the time of the Judges.

The Bible’s history starts with a beautiful, harmonious creation.

Adam and Eve living in a garden at peace with God, one another, and the whole of creation.

But soon they decided to go their own way, and the result was chaos—relational, physical, environmental chaos.

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

It didn’t take long for Noah’s descendants to fall back into chaos, and they decided to rival God by building up into the heavens.

God answered their unified rebellion by introducing the chaos of multiple languages.

The divided world as we see it today was born.

Some time after this, God chose a man, Abram, and then his second son, Isaac, and his second son, Jacob.

He renamed Jacob Israel and sent his family to shelter in Egypt, where they grew into a great nation of people.

Eventually God called them out of Egypt, showing his power over Egypt’s mighty gods.

But the people of Israel struggled to leave behind their Egyptian superstition, and God disciplined them in the desert for forty years until the unbelievers died and their children understood that the LORD is God.

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

And that’s where the book of Judges begins, with the Israelites secure in their promised land.

Do they lean on God, or do they confuse his gift with something they’re entitled to?

Do they stay faithful to God who has shown his love and power, or do they indulge in the exciting, sensual gods of Canaan?

A pattern

The book of Judges has a very specific viewpoint, and the whole book is written from that perspective.

The stories chosen by the author are designed to express that viewpoint.

The author explicitly describes this perspective in his introduction.

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

Each act, each judge or deliverer, follows a pattern already alluded to in the introduction I just read.

But the author doesn’t show that pattern with a table on a powerpoint like we might do today, instead he tells a story.

A very short story that is nothing more than the pattern with the names filled in.

That is the story of Othniel—the first deliverer.

Let’s read that now.

Othniel

The pattern

So what is the pattern that Othniel demonstrates?

The Israelites sin by worshipping Canaanite gods

God sends an oppressor to punish them

The Israelites beg to be released from oppression

God chooses a deliverer

The Holy Spirit enables the deliverer to defeat the oppressor

Israel experiences peace for some period of time

As you can see from the Othniel story, it is nothing more than that pattern with the names filled in.

The deliverers we’ll be looking at all have their stories elaborated on somehow.

With Gideon we hear how God chose him as well as how he defeated the oppressor.

With Ehud we only hear how he defeated the oppressor.

Another thing you’ll notice as the series goes along is that the deliverers become less and less effective.

That’s part of the bigger pattern the author wants to show—left to their own devices, people get worse, not better.

So Samson, almost at the end of the book, doesn’t even try to defeat the oppressors (the Philistines, in his time), despite the constant power of the Holy Spirit giving him all he needed to do that.

The author of Judges wants to emphasize his theme, how everyone did what was right in their own eyes, rather than obeying God’s law.

So now we come to the story of Ehud.

Let’s see what we can learn from this.

Ehud

Pattern

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

The people sinned against God.

Tick!

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

Tick.

The Israelites begged God for help.

Tick.

God chose a deliverer, Ehud.

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

Tick!

Ehud defeats the oppressor, but already the pattern is breaking down, because nowhere do we read of the Holy Spirit empowering Ehud in any way.

Clearly God delivers the victory over the army, but the author is not claiming any credit for God in Ehud’s brutal and treacherous assassination.

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

What is the point of this pattern?

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

Does this pattern remind you of anything?

Maybe us?

Any and all of us, right?

In fact, any people from any time!

Even our kids act this way with their parents: rebel, complain about the consequences of rebellion, get rescued, only to then abandon the safety of rescue for the temptations of the world.

This cycle of rebellion and rescue is built into the human heart.

We cannot be rescued from it by some deliverer like Othniel, Ehud, or Samson.

We need some deeper sort of deliverance.

Like the rest of the Old Testament, from the Law to the Prophets, the history of Judges points to our need for a deliverer who can save us from our own sinful nature—the final judge and deliverer.

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

Ehud’s Methods

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

It seems like the author of Judges wants to emphasize the ugly details.

Ehud’s stabbing of Eglon makes for yucky reading.

The Contemporary English Version I’ve used here is milder than, say, the New Living Translation, but it’s still ugly.

How could God use such violence?

Why would God choose a person like this?

There are several things to say about this.

First, the situation for Israel is radically different from the situation for the Christian church today: Israel was a nation-state, and nation-states use violence to defend themselves.

You won’t hear many people decrying Ukraine for killing invading Russian soldiers.

And without elaborate international structures like the UN or the benevolent power of the USA to keep the peace, Israel existed in an environment where war was constant and brutal.

Second, part of the theme of Judges is how completely captured the Israelites were by the Canaanite culture.

So is it any surprise that Ehud behaves treacherously.

All historical evidence (from inside and outside of the Bible) points to this as a classic Canaanite approach.

God’s choice of deliverers is limited to the people available, and when they are all corrupted, you’re going to get a corrupted deliverer!

Third, God isn’t delivering the people from their sins.

They didn’t ask for that—they just want to be delivered from oppression.

By using a character like Ehud, God is showing how he can deliver the people from oppression, but also showing how temporary that shallow deliverance is.

As soon as Ehud dies, the people sin and war returns.

The people are asking for little and showing little obedience, so they get a little in return.

There are lots of other things we could say about Ehud, but we don’t have the time.

I can highly recommend Daniel Block’s excellent commentary on Judges and Ruth from the New American Commentary series.

What about us?