Ehud the left handed Super-hero

 

God was very displeased with the Israelites because they kept doing wrong things even though he had told them not to. Imagine how your parents or teachers would feel if you keep doing bad things even when they told you not to. Well God was very upset with these Israelites so He punished them by allowing the King of Moab to have power over them. What this meant was that instead of ruling themselves and having their own rulers and living in peace, Israel now had to do whatever this king wanted, not only  did he order them around, he now owned everything they had, so he could just take things away from them. To make matters worse, this king did not do it in a very nice way either, instead he teamed up with two other kingdoms, the Amalekites and the Ammonites, two bad groups to help them. These people were no match for the Israelites so can you imagine, three against one? Well you can figure out what happened, they overpowered the Israelites.

 

Now this king made the Israelites his slaves for 18 years, that’s a very long time to be someone’s slave. The Israelites were very sad, and they cried out to God to help them. Now do you think God ignored their prayers? No he didn’t instead he sent someone to help them, he sent them their very own super-hero.

 

This super-hero was called Ehud, he was from one of the tribes of Israel, this tribe was called the tribe of Benjamin. Now the special thing about Ehud was, can you guess? I hoped you guessed right! He was left-handed. Now this was a very surprising fact giving that the name of Ehud’s tribe, meant “son of my right hand”.

 

Now the Israelites sent Ehud with a tribute to King Eglon. This tribute was an annual payment that had to be made to the king.

 

Now our super-hero made a double-edged sword which meant the sword was sharp on both sides. This sword was about as long as your mom’s arm and he strapped it to his right thigh under his clothes. This was very clever because the king’s soldiers wouldn’t expect him to have a sword there as most soldiers were right handed. After doing this Ehud went and presented his tribute to the King who was a very fat man. After Ehud presented the tribute, he sent all his men away and said to the king that he had a secret message for him. The king announced that everyone should be quiet and sent all his servants away.

 

While the king was sitting alone in his summer palace, Ehud came up behind him and said, I have a message from God for you, on hearing this, the king started to rise from his seat and it as at that point that Ehud reached with his left hand and took the sword from his thigh and plunged it into King Ehud’s tummy.  The sword went in with such force that even the handle went in but the king was so big that the fat covered it.

 

Ehud then shut the doors behind him, locked them and walked away. After he had gone, the king’s servants found the doors locked but they thought he (the king) might be using the toilet so they just waited. After a long while when it started to get embarrassing waiting for the king to come, out they used the key and to their surprise they found the king dead.

 

During this time, Ehud escaped and went to a place called Seirah. On arrival he blew the trumpet so all Israel could hear him. When all the Israelites had come together, he told them how God had given their enemies the Moabites into their hand. That day, the Israelites took back possession of their land and killed 10,000 of the Moabites. That day, Israel became the masters of Moab and they had peace for 80 years.

 

God does answer prayer. Sometimes he makes us wait, sometimes he sends angels but sometimes just like the children of Israel he sent them their own left handed super hero to deliver them.