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Context No. 1219 of 4322 · Judges

Context · Reflection

Judges 3:26-31: in context

26Ehud escaped while they waited, passed beyond the stone idols, and escaped to Seirah. 27When he had come, he blew a trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim; and the children of Israel went down with him from the hill country, and he led them. 28He said to them, “Follow me; for the LORD has delivered your enemies the Moabites into your hand.” They followed him, and took the fords of the Jordan against the Moabites, and didn’t allow any man to pass over. 29They struck at that time about ten thousand men of Moab, every strong man and every man of valor. No man escaped. 30So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel. Then the land had rest eighty years. 31After him was Shamgar the son of Anath, who struck six hundred men of the Philistines with an ox goad. He also saved Israel.

Ehud, the left-handed judge, has just assassinated the oppressive king of Moab and escaped. He rallies Israel with a trumpet blast, seizes the fords of the Jordan to cut off the enemy's retreat, and strikes down ten thousand Moabites, and the land has rest for eighty years. Then, in a single verse, the passage notes another deliverer: after Ehud came Shamgar son of Anath, who struck down six hundred Philistines with an ox goad, and he too saved Israel.

What links these two deliverers is how unlikely they were. Ehud was left-handed, an oddity in his day, and it was precisely his left-handedness that let him hide the dagger where the guards did not check. Shamgar had no army and no proper weapon; he fought off six hundred Philistines with an ox goad, a farmer's pointed stick for driving cattle. Neither was the sort of hero you would expect God to raise up, and neither had the resources you would think a deliverer needs. And yet God saved Israel through both, through a man's disability turned to advantage and through a farmer with a cattle prod. It is a pattern God delights in, using the unlikely person and the unlikely tool, so that the deliverance cannot be credited to human strength or fitness. Shamgar gets a single verse and an ox goad, and he saved Israel. The lesson is that God is not waiting for the impressive person with the right equipment; he uses left-handed men and ox goads, whoever and whatever is at hand, and the smallness of the instrument only makes his hand clearer. What God can do through you does not depend on your having the expected gifts or the proper tools.

Do I disqualify myself from God's use because I lack the expected gifts or the right tools, when he saved Israel through a left-handed man and a farmer with an ox goad?

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