Ask little kids what their favorite Bible story is, and they’re likely to give you an answer from the Old Testament. Noah’s ark. David and Goliath. Daniel in the lions’ den. Jonah getting gobbled up by a giant fish. We remember stories like this because they’re so fascinating and strange. But somehow, one of the most colorful stories of the Old Testament is passed by, time and again. I’m thinking of that left-handed hero, Ehud.
Even though most people don’t know Ehud, he actually provides three essential (but surprising) keys to spiritual success.
1. God’s Savior would come in weakness.
The book of Judges opens with Joshua, a mighty general, leading a strong Israelite army. But once Joshua dies, Israel’s leaders begin to look very different. Ehud is one of Israel’s first judges, and something is wrong with his right hand. Most of our English translations just call him “left-handed,” but scholars point out that he’s actually described as a man who “can’t use his right hand.” Either at birth or through some accident, Ehud was disabled. So he’s not a traditional warrior. Still, in the end, he leads the Israelite army to defeat Eglon’s army.
The next couple of judges, Deborah and Barak, are only able to muster two out of Israel’s twelve tribes. Up next is Gideon, and his army gets even smaller: he doesn’t even have a whole tribe to start out with, and God whittles his attacking force down to 300 men before they fight Midian. By the time we get to Samson, one of Israel’s last judges, there isn’t an army at all. Samson fights all by himself.
Do you see the trajectory? The entire book of Judges goes from strength to weakness, from salvation through many to salvation through one. And all this points forward to the most unexpected and “left-handed” savior of all—Jesus Christ. He achieved victory for us all by himself. And he would do it through weakness, not through strength.
The Jews of Jesus’ day weren’t expecting a Savior to come in weakness. Like King Eglon standing before the weak and lowly Ehud, they didn’t see it coming. No one expected a Savior who wouldn’t even own a home and would be executed as a criminal.
And people miss him today, because they’re looking for a different kind of Savior. When skeptics say, “I would believe in Jesus if he had ended all suffering,” what they are saying is, “He was just too weak to be a savior from God.” But what if he had a different way of defeating evil? What if our main problem was never suffering on earth, but separation from God? What if the real tragedy wasn’t that we suffer with cancer, but that we die in the first place? As long as we are distracted by smaller problems, we’ll never see the Savior who swallowed up the largest problem through his sacrificial, strength-through-weakness, death.
2. God saves us now through the “weakness” of faith.
This is the flip side of salvation. God saved us through the weakness of Christ’s sacrifice, and we accept it through the “weakness” of faith.
Whether we’re religious or not, we are all trying to save ourselves somehow. We all know that something isn’t quite right, and so we desperately try to fix our broken lives. Religious people do that by working to get God’s approval. But irreligious people do it, too: looking to money for security, looking to romance as a source of happiness, looking to career success for significance. These are all ways we strive for freedom from the bondage of futility and dissatisfaction and meaninglessness and pain.
But God’s salvation didn’t come through strength of effort. And it’s not received through strength, either. It’s a gift. And to the world, that looks weak. It looks foolish. But God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, what is weak in the world to shame the strong.
3. In God’s Kingdom, availability is more important than ability.
Ehud was an unlikely candidate for a military hero. Without a strong fighting arm, no one expected anything from him. But he was willing to yield himself to be used by the Spirit of God. And that shows us that availability is more important than ability.
God’s kingdom is not advanced today through human strength, but through willing vessels. This was the lesson Jesus tried to teach his disciples when he multiplied a young boy’s Hebrew Happy Meal to feed a crowd of thousands. He wanted them to realize that he could do more in a few minutes following the Spirit than they could do in a lifetime without Him.
Our service to the King isn’t about winning the world for God; it’s about yielding ourselves to the Spirit of God and letting him work through us. It’s about obedience.
So you may not feel like you are much. But God can use you. God does his work in the world through ordinary people, obeying him in ordinary ways: faithfully serving as a mother, faithfully sharing Christ with a friend, faithfully caring for your neighbors, faithfully giving to the cause of missions. God takes our weak acts of obedience and infuses them with Spirit power.
What keeps us from God is not the left hand of our weakness, but the right hand of our strength. So it doesn’t much matter if you’re able. It only matters if you’re available. Because a weak left hand yielded to God can conquer far more than the strong right hand of your own ability ever could.
For more on this, be sure to listen to the entire message here.
