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
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
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
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
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.