The Fight of Faith

All right, we're going to read together from the book of Judges in the Old

Testament. Judges chapter 3. We'll read the whole of chapter 3. Now these are the

Judges 3 · chapter mention

nations that the Lord left to test Israel by them. That is, all in Israel who

had not experienced all the wars in Canaan. It was only in order that the

generations of the people of Israel might know war, to teach war to those who had

not known it before. These are the nations, the five lords of the Philistines,

and all the Canaanites and Sidonians, and the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon

from Mount Bell, Hermon, as far as Lebo, Hamoth. They were for the

testing of Israel to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of the

Lord, which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses. So the people of

Israel lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Parasites, the

Hivites, and the Jebusites, and their daughters they took to themselves for

wives and their own daughters they gave to their sons and they served their

gods. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. They

forgot the Lord their God and they served the Baals and the Asheroth. Therefore

the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and he sold them into the

hand of Kushan, Rishah, Taim, king of Mesopotamia, and the people of Israel

served Kushan, Rishah, Taim eight years. But when the people of Israel cried out

to the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer for the people of Israel who

saved them, Othniel, the son of Kinas, Caleb's younger brother. The spirit of the

Lord was upon him and he judged Israel. He went out to war and the Lord gave

Kushan, Rishah, Taim, king of Mesopotamia into his hand and his hand prevailed

over Kushan, Rishah, Taim. So the land had rest for 40 years then Othniel, the son

of Kinas, died. And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of

the Lord. And the Lord strengthened Yglon, the king of Moab against Israel

because they had done what was evil in the sight of the Lord. He gathered to

himself the Ammonites and the Amilokites and he went and he defeated Israel and

they took possession of the city of Palms, that's Jericho. And the people of

Israel served Yglon, the king of Moab for 18 years. Then the people of Israel

cried out to the Lord and the Lord raised up for them a deliverer, Ehed, the son of

Gera, the Benjaminite, a left-handed man. The people of Israel sent tribute by him

to Yglon, the king of Moab. And Ehed made for himself a sword with two

edges, a cubit in length, and he bound it on his right thigh under his clothes

and he presented the tribute to Yglon, king of Moab. Now, Yglon was a very fat

man and when Ehed had finished presenting the tribute, he sent away the

people who carried the tribute. But he himself turned back at the idols near

Gilgal and he said, I have a secret message for you, O king. And he commanded

silence and all his attendants went out from his presence. And Ehed came to him

as he was sitting alone in his cool roof chamber and Ehed said, I have a message

from God to you. And he arose from his seat and Ehed reached with his left hand.

He took the sword from his right thigh and he thrust it into his belly and the

hilt also went in after the blade and the fat closed over the blade for he did

not pull the sword out of his belly and the excrement came out. Then Ehed went

out into the porch and closed the doors of the roof chamber behind him and locked

them. And when he had gone, the servants came and when they saw that the doors of

the roof chamber were locked, they thought surely he is relieving himself in

the closet of the cool chamber. And they waited till they were embarrassed. But

when he still did not open the doors of the roof chamber, they took the key and

they opened them and there lay their lord dead on the floor. Ehed escaped while

they delayed and he passed beyond the idols and escaped to Sayyira. When he

arrived, he went, he sounded the trumpet and the hill country of Ephraim. Then the

people of Israel went down with him from the hill country and he was their

leader and he said to them, follow me, follow after me, for the Lord has given

your enemies the Moabites into your hand. So they went down after him and seized

the Fords of the Jordan against the Moabites and did not allow anyone to

pass over. And they killed at that time about 10,000 of the Moabites, all

strong able-bodied men, not a man escaped. So Moab was subdued that day under the

hand of Israel and the land had rest for 80 years. And after him was Shamgar, the

son of Anath, who killed 600 of the Philistines with an ox code and he

also saved Israel. This is God's Word. We are in a series on the book of

Judges, the Gospel according to Judges. We're as late in history here as about

1200 BC, sometime between 1200 and 1200 BC. It's a very ancient text, very

ancient story, very different from modern life. And in it, God in real history is

communicating to us over and over again that human beings need deliverance. So

12 times in the book of Judges, the Israelites find themselves captured by

another people group because of their sins, because of their idolatry, and God's

sins 12 times, a deliverer to save them, to rescue them out of it. And the Word

that's used for that deliverer is most often the word judge, Shafet. A judge

is not a person who sits on a bench in a courtroom and sentences people to

prison or something like that or issues judiciary pronouncement. A judge in this

book is more like a warrior rescuer, more like a warrior deliverer, somebody who

comes in and battles and saves God's people. That's the meaning of judge

throughout this book. And we've said the past two weeks, if you've been here at

all, that these are 12 very real life pictures, historical pictures, of the

fact that there is an ultimate judge that is to come. So in all 12 of these

stories, all 12 times these judges show up, they are pointing every single time

to the ultimate judge, to the ultimate deliverer, the great deliverer himself,

Jesus Christ, in the New Testament, that every single one of these stories are

ultimately about the gospel and that God tells the reality, the fact that the

gospel is coming over and over and over again throughout the Old Testament in

cycles. And that's exactly what we have here in the Book of Judges. And so what

you can do is you can come to the Book of Judges and you can look at the stories

of these judges and learn in fresh ways about the meaning of the gospel and

about what it means for us, about ourselves, about our lives, even modern

people like us can learn from a story like this. And that's because ultimately

this is about the gospel. And so in Judges 3 we have three judges mentioned,

the first three of the 12, Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar. That's a great list for baby

names if you're thinking about it. We've got to be selective. You read the

text like this and you say, what are you gonna say from a pulpit about this? But

you know, I had to throw a sermon away at the end of the study of it because

there's so much here. And just choose one and be selective. And so let's think

about what we learn about the gospel, about ourselves, from these judges. What

we learn is the test of faith, how to renew your faith in a time of testing,

and finally the messiness of Christian faith. So let's think about that first,

the test. Now if you look at the very beginning of the passage it says, these

are the nations that the Lord left quote to test Israel. And so the very first

thing we learn here is that God tests his people. And we've seen that already in

the Bible before this in Genesis 22, we learn that God tested Abraham. And

oftentimes in the Bible the word for test and the word for temptation are

actually the same words, especially in Greek. God tests his people. And then

James tells us, do not ever say that God tempts anyone to sin. And those are both

true at the same time. God tests his people and he never tempts anyone to sin.

And what that means is that God never puts us in a situation where he tempts

our inner life towards the desire to sin. God never gives you a desire for sin,

never. But he does put you in objective external situations that are tests that

do come with external temptations. God tests his people. Do you believe that? The

Bible teaches that from beginning to end that he sometimes often and often puts

us in the midst of tests. Why? Why do you take a test? You know, I know that right

now I think I don't yet fully understand the secondary system of

hires and all the examinations. One day I will. But some people are in the midst of

that right now. Some people are taking medical exams right now. Why do you take

an exam? Many of us have had exams. We've all had exams in our lives. What's a test

for? At its best, a great professor, a great teacher, will give you a test

because they want for you to be able to show what you know, to show this is what

I know, this is what I learned, and for you also to see what you don't yet know.

So a test exposes you, but it exposes you in the best ways when it's given at its

best. It seeks to grow you up by showing you and being able to show you in

confidence. Here's what I know and then saying, but here's what you don't yet

know. And so it's an opportunity, test for opportunity to grow. God does that for

us. God gives us test in our lives in order to grow. This is an Old Testament

thing and a New Testament reality. James 1-3, no friends that the testing of your

faith produces perseverance in order that you would become complete and

mature as a Christian. So many of us may right now be in the midst of the test.

What is the test? How do you know? Often you don't, you don't know, but what

could that be? We learn about it right here. What is the test? The test that

appears here is really the same test that happened and come into our lives that

God sends. What is it? In verse 4 and 5, the testing of Israel here is that God

has placed and left these Canaanite people groups all around Israel for their

testing. Now what does that mean? That is not fundamentally about ethnicity.

There's a temptation to see it that way, but that's not at all what it's about.

Instead we learn what it's about in verse 6. Verse 6 says, their daughters took

for themselves wives. So the daughters of Israel married the men of the Canaanites

and the women of the Canaanites married the daughters of Israel.

And so the issue that he brings us to here is about marriage actually, and

that's just an illustration for us when it gets connected to our lives. You see

what he's saying? It's not about ethnicity. We see this in marriage. In

marriage there's a holism, right? Marriage is so holistic, isn't it? When you marry

somebody, James pointed this out last week, if you are a Christian, a devout

father of Jesus, a Christian, and you marry somebody that's a Hindu that worships

the gods of Hinduism, there's going to be real difficulty in marriage about that,

right? Hinduism requires household gods, for example, and in the ancient world the

polytheism of all the Canaanites meant worshiping regularly, daily, by tribute,

sacrifice, household gods, and public gods of all kinds. And so the people of

Israel are in the world, they're in the midst of people groups that are

polytheistic, and they're marrying one another, and the holism of marriage

requires typically somebody to convert to the other faith, typically, quite often.

And that's exactly what takes place. You see down in verse 7, the people of Israel

do what's evil on the side of the Lord. What did they mean? They forgot the Lord.

They had intermarried so much. In other words, they had become integrated with

the people groups around them by way mostly of religion. And so by religion

they came to worship the gods of all the people all around them all the time. And

so we have the word in verse 7, they worshiped Bales and Asheroth. That's

male gods and female goddesses, that's what that's referring to. And the anger

of the Lord's kindled against them because though they're in the midst of

people groups, it's not a problem of ethnicity, no, not at all. It's a problem

of being exclusive, of worshiping the Lord, the true God, the God of the Bible,

in the midst of temptations, in the midst of pulling all around you to chase

after all sorts of other types of gods. That's the issue here. Now we know it's

not about ethnicity because the third judge in Judges chapter 3 who gets two

Judges 3 · chapter mention

verses is a man named Shamgar, a son of Anath. And we don't know anything about

him except that the name Shamgar and Anath are very probably Canaanite

names, meaning that God raised up a deliverer from the Canaanites. Why? Because

Shamgar very clearly followed the true God, the true Lord, right? It's not about

ethnicity, it's about religious integrity, it's about the

holism, the exclusivity, the fact that God wants our worship in

the whole of our lives, the whole of who we are. Now that teaches us the test. The

test is the same here as it is for us today. And what is the test? Now let me

give you one more detail, make it a little more specific in order to answer.

And that's when you get to the Othniel story from verses 7 to 11. We learn that

because of this idolatry, because of serving male and female goddesses in

the context of polytheism, worshiping and chasing false gods of all kinds, that

they are given over by God to a man named Kushan Rishiatayim, verse 8, king of

Mesopotamia. Verse 8, there's lots of humor and sarcasm in this passage, as you

might have saw when we read it. We'll come to the majority of it in just a second.

But right here it already shows up in verse 8 because it says in Hebrew,

Kushan Rishiatayim, king of Aram Nahariim. So it rhymes in Hebrew, they

didn't translate it exactly like that. King of Mesopotamia is how they

translated it, but his name very literally means Kushan the double wicked, the king

of the two rivers, or the double river, the doubly wicked king of the double

river, that's what it says. And what that tells us is that the double river in the

area Aram is the Tigris and the Euphrates at its edges, and that tells us

that he is from Babylon. This is the king of Babylon, so that means that the

very first people group that oppress Israel because of their idolatry are the

Babylonians, and all throughout the Bible, there's a big narrative arc

throughout the Bible where Babylon is the symbol of all that's wrong with the

world. It's the symbol that really stands in for the world, the flesh, and the

devil, the world under the grip of sin. And you see what God's doing, he's saying,

if you choose idolatry, if you choose to chase after things that you love in this

world more than God, I will give you over to Babylon. You've chosen Babylon. And

you see, that's the test. The test comes to us all throughout the Bible, Jeremiah

29, the Sermon on the Mount, to be salt and light, John 17, what is it every time?

It's go and be in the world, but not of it. That's the test. Go be in Babylon, but

never of Babylon. Jeremiah 29, when you're in the midst of Babylon, seek the

shalom of Babylon, but never be of the idols of Babylon. It's the test, it's

always the same. It's the same for us as it was for them. Go be salt and light in

the world, but never chase after the values, the idols of the culture all

around you. Always be both in it and distinct simultaneously. Be exclusive

towards the Lord, the God of the Bible, and yet before the people in the city

that God has put you. That's the test. That's basically the generalization of

the test, and it comes to us in all sorts of specific ways and so many ways

throughout our personal lives. What do we learn here as we move, we need to move

on? Here's what we learn. We have a command that is also a test in our lives.

To be on the one hand, be in the world and not of it. That means be in the world

friend, go and be in the city. And yet as Paul puts it to the Corinthians, a

dearly beloved flee from the idols. He told that to the Corinthians, go be in

the midst of Corinth, be a part of it, be salt and light, and run from the idols.

That's the first thing we learn here. The second thing, the second thing, when we

go and do that, we've entered into the test. And when we've entered into the

test, we've got to know that when we are being in the world but not of it,

sometimes, sometimes it's almost impossible for us to not be of it in

certain ways. What do we learn in Judges? If nothing else, that God's people go

through cycle and cycle and cycle of being in Babylon and becoming Babylon.

And God has to come every time and rescue them. That it really is a struggle for us.

That we're called to that and we're fighting and we're striving and

sometimes we're struggling with the idols that surround us all the time.

We have to constantly be told by the Lord. We have to constantly be renewed, be

delivered, that we're always in the midst of the test and struggling with the

test. And so let me read to you from Ralph Davis. When I have to preach morning

and evening, I end up having to rely on whoever I think really is most helpful

on a passage. And Ralph Davis is most helpful on Judges 3. And this is what he

says. You can be baptized. What this passage teaches us is you can be baptized,

catechized, or whatever background. You can be a Christian of any kind, of any

tradition. And at the same time you can be presently enslaved by an idol. You can

be a Christian, baptized, catechized, and enslaved by an idol in your life. And

that's exactly what's happening to God's people over and over again. Now the

third thing, the last thing before we move on, maybe you're there right now. In

some sense, you're there right now struggling with an idol, being in the

world and becoming of it, struggling with becoming of it in some way. And let me

say, what this passage also tells you is that God will not leave you there. And

here's what Ralph Davis says. He says, even here in the Lord's anger you find

hope for Israel and for us. So what does God do? In his anger at their

idolatry, he gives them over to it. He lets them experience oppression when we

choose idolatry. And here's what Davis says. He says, the Lord's wrath is the

heat of his jealous love by which he refuses to let go of his people. He

refuses to allow his people to remain comfortable in their sin. And so, serving

Kushan Rishi Atayam, it may not sound like salvation. And it isn't. But if being

given over to the consequences of our idolatry forces us to lose our grip on

our idols, it may be the beginning of our salvation. You see, what he's saying

here is that sometimes the beginning of being rescued, of being delivered, is

actually to see how much our idol cannot save us, cannot fulfill us, cannot help

us, how much it's going to leave us empty. Sometimes that's exactly what we

need. You chase money in this modern economic world and you lose it and you

have to lose it to sometimes realize, Mammon cannot save me, not really. And

C.S. Lewis says, only when romantic love ceases to be a God in your life can it

cease to be for you a demon. You know, you chase romantic love as your God and

the breakups happen and the relationships fall apart and the

relationships struggle or they don't fulfill. And you know that romantic love

has become something that it's never meant to be. And that's exactly what we

learned here, that God refuses to allow us to sit comfortably in the idols that

we chase. Now secondly, how then do you find renewal in the midst of the season

of testing? How do you find faithfulness in your life in the midst of testing? The

most important thing we learn here is to just to look at the deliverer, see the

object of your faith, the deliverer. That's the big thing. So E.H.U.D. E.H.U.D. story. 40

years Israel had a rest after Othniel delivered them and then later under E.H.U.D.

the same thing happens. They're in the world and they become of the world.

They worship false gods, idols of all kinds and so God gives them over to Moab

this time. Now Moab is a name of a man, Moab. He was a son of Lot. He's Lot's son

by way of his own daughter in the book of Genesis and also he that happened

again with his other daughter and that produced the Ammonite people. And so the

Moabites and the Ammonites both team up here to oppress Israel. And it's very

important just to mention this, try to do this anytime, this kind of historical

fact or data comes up. We have a fragment, not a fragment, a whole piece of

stone called the Mesha Stelae. The Mesha Stelae is a one-meter stone. I

think it's at the Louvre. I forgot to look this up recently right now. And it is

from around the year 900 from Moab. And it is a piece that refers to the

events of 2 Kings chapter 3 but written by the Moabites. So we have a text that

2 Kings 3 · chapter mention

describes exactly what happens in 2 Kings 3 in the Bible written by Moabite

Han and we learn a lot about the Moabites. They refer to the lineage of

David, the tribe of David in the Stelae, this stone. And they refer to their God

that we know the Moabites worship throughout the Old Testament, Kamosh.

And Kamosh was like Molek. He required sacrifice to the highest degree, to the

worst possible forms. And this is the type of people group that are capturing

Israel here. And we learn about Eud. Eud is a left-handed man. Now what is going

on? Why this little notion? He's left-handed. And it's because as far as

we can tell, the commentators mostly say, that left-handed training was

basically like special forces. So we see these left-handed warriors coming up

throughout Scripture on occasion and they're unusual. And it seems from both

the Bible and extra biblical data that when you were trained as a left-handed

warrior, it was like the special forces being dropped in. You know, you can fight

with your right hand, you can fight with your left hand, you can do both. This is

the redemption for all of us left-handers in the room. Left-handed people, special

forces in the Old Testament. That's what he is. He's some kind of particularly

specialized warrior. And he's chosen by the people of God Israel to be their

judge, to be their leader. And we're told here also that he creates a double-edged

sword for himself, which is also unusual. Most of the time the swords were

blunted on one side with a sharp side just on the other. So most people were

right-handed in their fighting and they would carry their sword on their left

side and draw it like this. But we're being told in this passage, E. HUD is able

because he fights with his left hand as well to put a sword hidden on his

right side. Now the reason that that's important too is because we think that

most often in security checks in the palace, you would almost always only

check the left side where you would keep a sword if you were

right-handed because it was so unusual to fight left-handed. And that's very

important to see in the text. Now Eglon is this king of Moab. He's a man, we're

told, of wild overindulgence to put it kindly. The text takes it more

bluntly than that. The implication here is that what has happened is that this

man has put Israel under 18 years of starvation. That's the idea. He's an evil

oppressor. And you can think if you've read the book Dune or know the story of

the Vladimir, the Baron Vladimir, the Harkonnen Lord type figure. He's a

man of wild overindulgence that just seeks to oppress everyone. And that's

exactly what's happened here. He's the head of four other kingdoms, Ammon, the

Amelokites, and he is the head over them all, oppressing Israel. He's the head of

the snake. He's the head of this serpent, this evil serpent of oppression. And the

tribute that is brought to him, the sense of the text, is that it's food. And so

it's so large we learned that multiple people had to carry it in. The people are

paying tribute. He's requiring taxes basically as the people's food and

they're bringing them and he's eating it. Now the assassination, this is where we

get to it. How can you, how can you, what do you do in the midst of the test? And to

find that out you got to look at what happens here. A stranger it is, an ancient,

but it tells us and this assassination, Eglon goes up into his cool chamber and

this is a spa of some kind up on the roof with open windows breezy area. And in

verse 20 we're told that we're told that Eihad says to him, I have a word of

God from you. Another important facet here is that a word of God, from God for

you, it's the generic word for God. It's not the name of the God of the Bible. And

so Eglon thinks that he's saying I have a word from one of the gods for you. And

that's because we learn Eihad had gone out to the center place of idolatry and

pretended, if you will, to pay homage and then came back and said I have a word

from a God for you. And so he's, Eglon doesn't understand, he thinks

that the idols have spoken, that there's some important word for him. And so he

dismisses all of his servants and he's in this spa, this cool chamber and it's

there that Eihad draws this two-edged sword and sticks it into Eglon's belly

all the way in, it says. And there it is, Eglon dies in the most messy and brutal

way in the midst of his own spa. Now look, if you look at it, we didn't have time to

look at Othniel's delivery, but Othniel is a man of the tribe of Judah and he

delivered the people of Israel. And you know what the people would have sang about

it? They would have said Othniel, the son of Judah, the lion of the tribe of Judah.

You see, Jesus Christ is the better Othniel. And when you come to Eihad, you

say what is going on here? And you see, Eihad came and killed the head of the

snake, crushed the head of the serpent, and how did he do it? He did it with a

double-edged sword. And when you come to the New Testament, you learn that the

Word of God in Hebrews goes forth into the world as a two-edged sword, a sword

that's sharp on both sides. And the Word of the Lord in Hebrews is not just the

Bible, it's talking about Jesus Christ Himself. And you turn to Revelation

Revelation 1 · chapter mention

chapter 1 and there's an image of Jesus Christ and there what is coming out of

His mouth, a sword with two sides sharpened, a double-edged sword. And you

see that Eihad, he delivers judgment, the Word of the Lord comes literally in

judgment by way of this double-edged sword. And Jesus Christ comes into the world,

the greater Eihad, to destroy the serpent, to crush the head of the serpent. The

head of the serpent thought, the serpent thought that he had him. And yet Jesus

comes in and brings judgment by his two-edged sword right into the heart of

the evil serpent. And Jesus Christ is the better and greater Eihad. And we learn

right there what it means to be delivered. We learn what it means to

persevere in the midst of the test that may be going on in your life. And here it

is, first, you do what they did. They were in the midst of the test, they knew

their idolatry, and that says that they cried out to the Lord. And that's it.

Tonight you might be in the midst of the test and you're struggling with some

idol and you're able to identify it. And the first thing is just to cry out to

the Lord and be honest with them. The second thing we see here is then you got

to look up and you got to see the deliver, that there really is a deliver in

the middle of history that came to crush the head of every serpent. The ultimate

serpent himself and every single little idol that looks like mimics the serpent

in the midst of our lives. As soon as you do that, you know, verse 28, as soon as

that happened, he went out to the people and said that the head is dead. I've

crushed the serpent and he says, now follow after me. You cry out to the Lord,

you see the deliverer and you follow him. And that path of renewal is actually the

exact path we all have to take over and over and over again in our lives when

we're in the midst of struggling with a particular idol that we're facing. Ralph

Davis says, deliverance is an act of holy, vicious violence by which Christ

wrenches his people out of the clammy clutches of the Prince of Darkness

himself. When you do that, you have experienced the sword of Christ, the

two-edged sword, not as the sword of judgment, but as the surgeon's scalpel

that enters you to cut you in order to heal you again. Now, that's the way out.

No left-handed Savior can ever break us free from our true tyrant. But there is

one with nail-scarred hands who can and who does and who will tonight for you

if you're in the midst of the trial of idolatry. The only tragedy we can face

in our lives is if having the Savior, we don't cry out to him. We don't seek

deliverance because he wants to deliver. Now lastly, let's close with an epilogue,

the messiness of the Christian faith. We could stop there, but I just want to say

a note about the messiness of the Christian faith. If you've been tracking

just a couple minutes, if you've been tracking with this story so far, you'll

know that you'll have seen. When we read it, when we've talked about it, it's

messy. And I didn't point out all the mess that you could have

read about in the passage. It's very literally messy. The Bible is not

prim and proper. It teaches us real religion for very real problems. And

the messiness and the disorder and the ugliness of our sin brings a life of

messiness for us quite often. And the Bible, the Word of the Lord, the actions

of God into history come and situate right in the midst of human mess. God

comes all the way down. He comes right to our earthiness and our messiness that

we brought into this world. You know, you read a passage like this and you just

got to say God deals with real problems in real ways. And when you go through the

Bible, you see this. You see a God who gets his hands dirty, who gets deep into

our lives, the lives that we, the world that we have dirty that we have made a

mess of. And from the temple all the way to the cross, we see the cost and that God

will come all the way down. So let me just say a word about

eglons, very ugly death here. The servants think that he is locked in the

chamber because he's on the toilet. So it says literally in Hebrew, they were

embarrassed because they thought he was quote covering his feet. That is a

euphemism. It's the same euphemism that Americans use like bathroom. You know,

the bathroom, the restroom, it's a euphemism. It's not literal. And that's

exactly what the Bible says here, that he was covering his feet, a euphemism. And

the commentators when you read them will say, this is sarcasm, it's irony, it's

meant to be funny in a way. And Ralph Davis says this, as modern people, let me

say, I'm saying this and then I'll quote Ralph, as modern people we struggle

sometimes with the violence, the messiness in the stories of the Bible,

don't we? And that's a very real thing, that's a very important discussion to

have in detail about every single one. But if you're, you've got to take yourself

out of the modern context and remember here, we have Israelites who for 18 years

have been oppressed and taxed to the bone under King Eglon. And in Israelite,

living in persisting poverty, ecking out some sort of borderline existence in the

hill country of Ephraim, well then you won't be surprised but rather will

understand the devastating humor in the biting satire that's written into the

Hebrew of this narrative. God has delivered them from a tyrant who

stole all their food and he's done it in the most ironic way. And that means

that we've got to be willing to see, I think, as modern Christians with our eyes.

The poverty, the enslavement, the fact that they were being taxed to death and

starving and that God comes to save them all the way to exactly the place

where they are in a way that makes sense. This story shows us that, that God deals

with messes. Let me draw two conclusions. One, we've got to be as porous and as

earthy as the Bible is. This is the Bible. The Bible talks about the messiness

of human sin and Christians in ministry have to know that human sin really is

so messy and that ministry sometimes often follows that and gets really messy.

And that means I think this passage is inviting us again to say if you're a

person of faith that's stepping out into the world to walk next to sinners

knowing yourself that we can't be easily offended. We can't be easily shocked. We

can never be surprised by sin and all the ways it gets into the bones of

humanity. It's a call to be honest about the messiness of the world and God's

people, the church, this church family is a place for sinners in need of redemption.

Not a place for the righteous, not the righteous, not the righteous, oh, but

sinners. Jesus came to call and that means ministry is always going to come

with messy bits and we can never be surprised by that. The second thing, the

final thing, comfort. The Lord deals with the dirty. The Lord deals with the messy.

Jesus Christ came to touch the leper and that is the glory of this passage that

God deals with the dirty mixed up affairs of life in which all of us find

ourselves sometimes. And so one final quote from Ralph Davis and I'll give him

the final word because I don't think this quote could be much better. Here we

are. This is a paraphrase. Some of us in family situations that we have messed up,

some of us in family situations that have been messed up by others. Some of us in

emotional trauma, some of us in grief and sorrow are in the clutches of temptation.

Life seems to be a mass of twisted coat hangers and disconnected doorknobs. And

the glory of this passage is that it tells us that the Lord is not a white

gloved standoffish God out there somewhere in the remote left field of the

universe who hesitates to get his strong arm dirty in the yuck of our lives. The

God of the Bible does not hold back in the wild blue yonder somewhere waiting

for you to pour Clorox over the affairs of your life before he will touch it.

Whether you can comfortably put it together or not, he is the God who

delights to deliver his people even in their messes and likes to make them

laugh once more. He is the God who allows weeping to endure for a night but he

sees, he will see, that joy will come in the morning. We have a God who delights

to deliver us in the midst of our messes and longs to make us laugh again. Let us

pray. Lord we thank you for E. HUD the deliverer who points to a much greater

deliverer who came to crush the head of the most evil serpent. So we sing and

celebrate tonight Christ the victorious Christ the victor and we thank you God

that you don't stand far off but you come all the way down into the mess of our

lives the sin all the things that the broken world has become and you deliver

you heal you restore you save and sometimes you do that in mighty acts

the acts of a warrior. So we thank you we thank you ultimately for how this

points us to Christ and we ask Lord that it would make us into people who are

ready and willing to walk along others who are in the midst of a hard

circumstances messes that have come about through the complications of human

behavior in the midst of sinful world and so make us like Jesus in that way Lord

and we pray that in Christ's name. Amen.