Shamgar

There’s an old saying: “There’s nothing new under the sun.” It shows up in Ecclesiastes, but I have no way of knowing whether it originated there. But we all say it because it really does seem as though history repeats itself.

Judges kind of proves the point. Israel sins, God hands them over to a pagan nation for judgment, Israel cries out, God sends a deliverer. Here’s a perfect example, from Judges 3:31:  “After Ehud came Shamgar son of Anath, who struck down six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad. He too saved Israel.”

Ehud was the guy who stabbed the fat Philistine with the short sword. Shamgar came after him, killed his six hundred Philistines, and faded into obscurity. Everything we know about Shamgar is in this one verse; he was just a place-holder between Othniel and Ehud, who came before him, and Deborah, who came after. All of them had the same job, although the rest got a little more ink than Shamgar.

It all seems pretty futile, doesn’t it? Why did God put up with it? Why did he bother sending all those deliverers?

Another saying is that those who don’t study history are doomed to relive it. I think that saying is relevant to the purpose of this book of Judges in the Old Testament, with its boringly repetitious plot and seeming lack of progress in the story line. Judges describes human nature, with its tendency toward worldly things and its forgetfulness about God’s grace.

So I study it. I know that I could very easily be one of those Christians doomed to relive the basic plot line of Judges over and over again. I can learn from my own pain, or I can try to learn by reading of the pain of Israel.

The Old Testament lets us walk beside God’s people as they learned to know God. There’s a lot to learn about God and my relationship with him in Judges.