For the next three Sun­days at Wil­lows Pres­by­ter­ian the “kids spot” is going to be filled with my favourite sto­ries from the Bible.

I’m kick­ing it off with Ehud and the Moabites. Ehud is cool because he’s dis­abled (left handed) and a ninja. I’m going to use Brick Tes­ta­ment pictures.

In the Bible there’s a book called Judges.

It’s about some peo­ple God uses to save his peo­ple from their enemies.

They’re not spe­cial peo­ple — most of them are nor­mal peo­ple, just like us.

In fact — some of them weren’t even nor­mal — one of them was left handed — are any of you left handed?

His name was Ehud. Being left handed wasn’t much fun. He was dif­fer­ent to the other sol­diers in Israel’s army.

When Ehud was a young man Israel was being treated very, very badly by a very, very, very fat king called Eglon. Eglon demanded that the Israelites pay him lots of money so that he wouldn’t do nasty things to them.

Ehud and the Israelites didn’t want to serve this king — they wanted God as their king — so Ehud came up with a plan.

He made a short sword and put it on his right thigh under his cloak — because in those days guards didn’t expect to see many left handed peo­ple they only really looked on the right.

He marched in to see fat king Eglon with the pay­ment from the Israelites…

…and he told him that he had a secret for his ears only.

The bad King Eglon sent his peo­ple out of the room.

And Ehud took out the sword — and buried it in his tummy.

King Eglon was so fat that the sword dis­ap­peared.

And Ehud snuck away. Like a ninja.

The guards thought the king was in the toi­let — so they didn’t dis­turb him.

Ehud got back to the Israelites and they attacked the fat dead king Eglon’s army and killed them all. They were free from the bad king Eglon and free to serve God — their king.

Ehud had saved God’s peo­ple — even though he was left handed.

The Jesus bit

We are a bit like Israel — we need God’s “judge” to save us from a bad king that’s rul­ing our lives. We are being ruled by our sin. We want to push God to the side and treat sin as the fat ugly king of our lives.

We need to get rid of this fat ugly king just like Ehud did. And you know what — we have a ninja sav­ior too. Jesus is a bit like a ninja. He dealt with sin in a sneaky way. Peo­ple were expect­ing a strong and pow­er­ful sav­iour who would come and kill sin.

Do you know how Jesus got rid of our sin?

This was some­thing a ninja would do. It was sneaky — because peo­ple weren’t expect­ing it. And it was effective.

We need to stab sin in the heart. In fact, the Bible says that if we want to fol­low God we should cut the sin­ful parts out. It doesn’t mean
with a sword.

We need our own sav­iour to cut that sin out — we need Jesus.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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