Transcript
Just out of curiosity, how many of you have ever heard the name Shamgar? Shamgar. If you've heard the name Shamgar, raise your hand. Zero. So I don't need to ask the second question. How many of you have ever heard a sermon on Shamgar?
As I was thinking about it, I realize that over the course of my life I've listened to hundreds of sermons, not only here at Victor Street but also in other churches. Oftentimes we listen to several sermons a week. While I was at the seminary, to the very best of my recollection, I never recall hearing a sermon about Shamgar.
Not surprising that you haven't heard of him, because his name is only mentioned twice in the Bible. I'd like you to turn to one of the verses where he is mentioned. You will find it as the last verse of the book of Judges, chapter 3. Judges chapter 3 and verse 31.
After him was Shamgar the son of Anath, who killed six hundred men of the Philistines with an ox goad, and he also delivered Israel.
Now let's read the second verse, the second and last verse in which he's mentioned, which is in chapter 5 of the book of Judges, verse 6.
In the days of Shamgar, son of Anath,
In the days of Jael,
The highways were deserted,
And the travelers walked along the byways.
Village life ceased, it ceased in Israel,
Until I, Deborah, arose,
Arose a mother in Israel.
Here's a story about the holiday season that none of us would want to experience. On December the 1st of last year, two 25-year-old men, Richard Enzo and David Sommers, both of them of Maui, Hawaii, set out by boat on a fishing trip that was intended to last for two weeks.
Then on December 7th, Enzo telephoned his father to inform him they were coming home, because David had fallen and dislocated his shoulder. As they were sailing back home over the waters of the Pacific Ocean on December the 9th, their forty-eight-foot-long sailing vessel named the Lady Ora was struck by a severe storm.
Both men heard a big bang. The ship began to take on water immediately, and in a matter of moments it had sunk. Now the two men found themselves on a tiny, covered, inflatable life raft drifting in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. They were paddling toward shore.
During the next few days their life raft was battered and tossed by a series of severe storms that first swept down through the Hawaiian Islands. They experienced rain, rain, rain and more rain, along with large waves and lightning for days on end. They were drenched and didn't dry out.
They caught as many fish as they could. They tried to catch rainwater to drink. Meanwhile the Coast Guard spent five days searching a 205 square mile area looking for them and never caught sight of the raft or the two men.
Time passed and what they calculated was Christmas Day. They both spent some time thinking about their families. A few days later they each scratched a message on their plastic panel in case they were never found.
Richard Enzo scratched a message like this: “Sorry to cause so much grief. I hope David and I make it, but if we don't, give my love to the family.” Summers' message on his plastic bottle said, “If I don't make it, I hope to see you in my next life.”
While time went on and on, what they figured was New Year's Day, they suffered a new reverse. This time their life raft was overturned. They were able to claw back onto the life raft, but they had lost most of their supplies and they had lost their oar.
Now it was necessary for them to blow air into their leaking life raft every 20 minutes to keep it afloat. Needless to say, the process of doing that wore them down and exhausted them.
But on Monday, January the 6th, this past January the 6th, the skipper of a fishing boat named Kyokai sighted the life raft. He went toward it. He rescued the men and they were pulled out of the Pacific Ocean suffering from severe dehydration after nearly a month adrift on the waters of the Pacific.
Enzo got on his cellular telephone to call his brother Kevin. Later Kevin said it was a total shock. I almost hung up on it. But he admitted later that he had never given up hope of finding his brother.
His mother, Enzo's mother, for whom the boat had been named, said every day it got harder and harder. I didn't think they could survive that long on a life raft. Summers himself said this. He said, “I don't know how much longer we would have lasted. I don't know how much longer we would have lasted.”
My good Christian friends this morning, there are occasions in our lives, and sometimes they come during the holidays and a lot of times they come at other parts of the year. But there are occasions in our lives that we are so hard pressed by troubles and difficulties and stress and frustration that we are tempted to say to ourselves, “I can't take anymore. I don't know how much longer I can last.”
And if you happen to be going through a period like that in your life, or if perhaps a period of that kind comes to your life in the new year that lies just ahead, I want you to remember the very inspiring words of the Apostle Paul who said this:
We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed. We are perplexed, but not in despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed.
Those very inspiring words of the apostle Paul lead me to the topic that I want to discuss with you for a few moments this morning. And the topic is this: hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed.
Now that's kind of a long title, don't you agree? Therefore I'd like to repeat it to you. It's the title of my message to you today: hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed.
Almost all of you in the audience this morning are aware that when I came to Dallas for the first time more than 43 years ago, I had had no experience with gangs as far as I know. Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, didn't have any gangs. But if they did, I never ran into them.
But after a few years here in Dallas, I got some firsthand exposure. Because the story I'm about to tell is familiar to many of you, I won't dwell too much on the details. But the story goes like this, a true story I might add.
Years ago I was at Old City Park with about two or three of my Hispanic friends. One of them, who shall remain nameless this morning, tossed a stone in the direction of a departing gang of white boys who were about to leave the park. That changed their mind about leaving.
They turned around and started in our direction. As they did so, they fanned out in a very big semicircle. I presume to cut off some of our possible escape routes. I was able to sum up the situation immediately. Not good. Not good.
And it immediately got worse, I guess, because I was the oldest member of the group I was with. I was mistaken for the leader of the group. The white boy who was apparently the leader of the white gang stood about three yards in front of me.
And I kid you not, he was beating his chest and he was saying, “Come on, let's fight! Come on with us! Fight!” Now as most of you who know the story know, I had my right hand in my pocket.
In between challenges to fight, this guy said to me, “You have a knife in your pocket, don't you? I know you've got a knife in there.” Now of course I thought it would be very poor strategy to inform him that all I had in my pocket was a hand. And that if I pulled it out it would probably shake like a leaf.
So there I stood with my hand in my pocket, trying to be as calm as I could, praying I might add real hard, and assuring this guy and assuring the other members of the gang that we really, really did not want any trouble.
Now just to my rear and left there was a tiny, slender Hispanic boy named J.R. and he was face to face with the biggest member of the white gang, a guy who looked so big, at least as I recall it, that he could have passed for the Incredible Hulk.
J.R. picked up immediately on my idea that we didn't want any trouble. In the most obnoxious, nasty tone that I could possibly imagine, he said to this big guy and to the rest of the gang, “We don't want any trouble, you understand?”
And I thought to myself, “J.R., that's exactly what we'll get unless you shut up.” Now you understand that I was witnessing to the guys at City Park in those days. And I thought it wouldn't look good for the preacher to be the first to turn and beat it out of the situation.
So I stood there for what seemed like an agonizingly long few minutes. I needn't have worried because when I looked back over my shoulder, my loyal and devoted friends were already walking away with their backs to the scene of the confrontation.
I took that as my cue to exit. I turned and I walked away slowly, wondering if they would gang up on me from the rear. Fortunately they did not.
But the reason I'm telling you this story is that on one occasion when I can definitely say that I felt hard pressed on every side, with hostile white guys to my left, to my right, and in front of me, I was certainly hard pressed on every side.
But you know what? My little brush with danger sounds like a walk in the park. It sounds like an afternoon at the beach compared to the crisis that came to the man named Shamgar.
Did you observe in the passage of Scripture we read a moment ago that there came a time when Shamgar found himself face to face with 600 Philistine enemies? Now folks, I'm pretty sure that these 600 Philistine soldiers did not line up in single file and offer to fight Shamgar one by one.
I know they didn't do that. And I'm quite sure that they tried to come at him from every which way they could. And if the topography of the scene of battle permitted it, I'm sure they tried to surround him completely.
And that is why I think that Shamgar is one of the best illustrations in the whole Bible of what it means to be hard pressed on every side. Hard pressed on every side.
Now there's one thing we have to remember when we are talking about Shamgar. We are obviously not talking about a well-known celebrity in the land of Israel. Did you notice that he is introduced to us in the most minimal of ways?
He is introduced to us as Shamgar the son of Anath, which is a little bit like saying I'm Zane, the son of Z. C. Hodges. It was a minimal introduction. Now the previous judge that we read about, Ehud, we know that he was the son of Gera. We know that he was from the tribe of Benjamin. We know that he was even left-handed.
But all we really know about Shamgar is that he was the son of a man named Anath, about whom we also know nothing at all. And therefore I would suggest to you that Shamgar is a man who is almost anonymous. Almost anonymous.
God calls him out of a life that we know nothing about. God allows him to win a victory. And then he goes back into his obscure and anonymous life.
Now I'm betting there are people right here in this audience who've listened for years to stories about revival and all the amazing things that people in the Bible did. And you have probably said to yourself, those stories don't have any relevance to me.
I'm not Superman. I'm not a superhero. I'm not some big shot in the Christian church. I'm just an average Jack or an average Joe. And I come from a perfectly average family. Those stories don't relate to me.
And if you've ever tended to feel that way, I want to offer you a membership in the club. The club I call BHA. A club and that stands for “heroes almost anonymous.”
You see, God has the capacity to reach into the most obscure places and touch the most unknown and insignificant people and throw them out and use them for His glory. And then He can send them right back into the obscurity from which they came.
And one of the lessons that we can learn from the story of Shamgar is this. That you don't need to be somebody to become somebody for God. Did you hear that? Can I repeat that for you? Would you try to wrap your mind around it?
You don't need to be somebody in order to become somebody for God.
It was once a lieutenant in the United States Army who was stationed in Japan. He was very impressed with the maid service that was rendered to his officers' bachelor quarters. Nevertheless, he had an expensive Nikon camera. And he always took the camera and hid it in a certain place in the room as soon as the maid left. He didn't want her to be tempted to take the camera.
But one day he forgot to hide the camera and left it out on the bed. And when he came back it seemed as if his worst fears had been realized. The camera was gone. It was no longer on the bed.
But after he looked around for a while, guess what? The camera was back in its secret hiding place. The maid had found the thing. And the attendant secret was not a secret to the maid at all.
And yes, my friends, maybe you are the best-kept secret in the whole United States as a Christian person. But if you have the capacity to trust God, God knows where you are. And God can pull you out of your obscurity. He can pull you out of your anonymous background. He can pull you out of the ordinary family. And He can use you to accomplish victories for Him.
Well, did you notice the way that Shamgar won his victory? When he was confronted by these six hundred Philistine men who were probably all heavily armed, he pulled out of his scabbard his bright, gleaming, sharp two-edged sword and he slashed to the left and he slashed to the right and he slashed in front of him. And people fell to the left, right and center.
What's that you're saying? You don't see anything in our verse about a sword? You're right. There's no sword in that verse. I was just trying to find out if you were awake.
Well, listen to this. Shamgar did not win this victory with his short two-edged sword. He did not win this victory with his powerful bow or his deadly arrows. He did not win this victory with his javelin and his spear.
The Bible says that Shamgar killed six hundred Philistine men with an ox goad. Say what? Say what? Six hundred Philistine men killed with nothing more than an ox goad? That's pretty impressive, don't you think?
Now you know it doesn't really take a rocket scientist to figure out what Shamgar did for a living. I bet you figured it out. He herded cattle. And if you herded cattle, your most valuable implement was an ox goad.
Archaeology has discovered that the ox goad may have been something like an eight-foot pole with an iron tip on the front. And if you had a particularly stubborn, slow-footed ox, you know what you did? You stuck it in the rear with your ox goad. And that motivated the ox to move just a little bit faster.
And I'm pretty convinced that as a result of his experience as a herder of cattle, that Shamgar had become an expert with the ox goad. I can imagine Shamgar behind a big herd of cattle. And there may be a couple dozen right in front of him. And he goes like this, poke, poke. And faster than I can follow, he's poked two thousand cattle with his ox goad. You can hardly see his hand move. He was an expert at this.
Now I admit to you that we really do not know the circumstances of the battle. But let me use my imagination a little bit. Did you notice that in Judges chapter 5 we're told that in those days the highways were deserted in Israel? And that people used to bypass them?
The reason for that obviously was that the highways were dangerous. There were apparently robbers and marauders who swept down on people who traveled the highways and took away whatever was valuable from them. And these six hundred Philistine men were probably a band of Philistine marauders.
So here's what I imagine, folks. Shamgar decides he's going to drive his herd of cattle somewhere. And he decides he's going to use the main road. And he's driving them down the highway using his ox goad.
There's a Philistine lookout hidden up on the mountainside. And when the Philistine lookout sees him, he runs back to the commander of the Philistine forces and he says, “Commander, commander! That's what I have seen. I have seen a Hebrew herding cattle. And there's only one keeper with it. And he's only got an ox goad.”
And the commander says, “Great! Just what we're looking for.” And he turned to his men. He said, “Men, get up! Put on your armor! Gird your sword at your side! There's a herd of cattle coming down the main road. Herdsmen! We're going to sweep down on that. We're going to kill him. We're going to slaughter his cattle. We'll have a big feast. And then we'll load the rest of the meat back up in our boats and carry it home to our families and to our friends. Come on men! This will be as easy as taking candy from a baby.”
Now I'm using my imagination. But I kind of think it must have happened something like that. And I guarantee you, I guarantee you that the Philistines never, never expected to encounter what they actually encountered when they swept down on Shamgar.
Now you know the nice thing about having odds of six hundred to one is that all six hundred men can't get at you at the same time. And therefore even if they surround you completely, they have to come in waves.
And I can imagine these Philistine soldiers surrounding Shamgar. Guess what he does? Stab, step, step, step, step, step, step, step. First thing you know there's a pile of bodies all around him.
And the rest of the Philistine soldiers are trying to stumble their way over the bodies. And it's stab, step, step, move forward, move forward. Now I have suspicions the last two or three he had to chase them. But he got them.
And when the battle is over, my friends, when the smoke cleared from the conflict, only one man was standing. And it was not any of the six hundred Philistines. It was Shamgar, the expert with the ox goad.
Now if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ this morning, if you have trusted the Lord Jesus Christ for the absolutely free gift of everlasting life, if you know for sure that you are going to heaven, did you know that you have an ox goad? Did you know that you have a weapon? Did you know that you have something to fight the battles of life with?
The Bible calls it the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And in order to be triumphant when you are hard pressed on every side, you need to know how to use God's word and apply it to your life and situation.
May I be honest with you? In all the years that I've been with Victor Street Bible Chapel this has probably been our best year of Bible reading, because some of us have followed the program that has been outlined. And we've read all the assignments that have been given to us.
But even then, I'm betting, I am betting that still it is true of a majority of us that we spend more time in front of a television set than we do reading and studying our Bible.
I'm not going to embarrass you this morning. But when was the last time that you sat down and for thirty minutes, just thirty minutes, you studied a passage of Scripture to find out how that passage of Scripture applied to your life?
If I asked you to raise your hand to that this morning, would you be able to say yeah, I've done it sometime in the last three months or sometime in the last six months or sometime in the last year? Or would you have to say I haven't done it for so long I can't even remember the last time I did it?
And you know what else? Our best teaching takes place right over there at the Lord's table. And we have people who come to Victor Street who would never come to the Word table or hardly ever come to the Lord's table.
And I'm going to tell you something. The people who come regularly to the Lord's table probably know two or three times more about Scripture than the people who never come do.
Do you think that Shamgar would have won this battle if he had watched television while he was herding his cattle? Do you think again? Think again.
Well we have a powerful weapon. But we absolutely have to learn how to use it.
A convict by the name of Robert Henderson was once jailed on charges of car theft. He escaped what seemed like an almost impossible prison situation. As far as the evidence could be told, he had only a small piece of steel from an old lock and several short pieces of lumber.
Given what he did, he broke out of a solitary confinement cell. He smashed through a steel mesh grating. He squeezed his hundred and seventy pound body through an opening about five and a half inches by thirteen inches, which he had sprung between two one-inch bars.
He scaled a ten-foot fence made of barbed wire and steel. He climbed over a wall that was thirty-one feet high. Not bad for a man with a piece of steel and just a few short pieces of lumber.
And you know the devil likes to shut us up in our ignorance and keep us in the dark about the Bible so that he can play with our minds and toy with our lives and tempt us. And we don't even know we're being tempted or we don't have enough power to know it's a temptation.
And I think if you've opted in that kind of a prison, folks, it's time to break out. It's time to grab your ox goad. It's time to move forward and to fight the battles of life, acquiring skill and ability to use God's word to win the battles you need to win.
And guess what? Guess what? After he won this battle the nation of Israel benefited from it. We read, “and he also delivered Israel.” And we should not take this to mean that this is something he did in addition to killing the six hundred Philistine men.
The Hebrew text makes it clear he's being compared with Ehud. And just as Ehud delivered Israel by defeating the Moabites, so Shamgar delivered Israel by defeating the Philistines.
Now that admitted to you we don't have and I bet we'd already know Shamgar's background. But I want to say this. We have some clues in the Bible that allow us to make an intelligent guess.
You see from Judges chapter 5 we learned that somehow or other Shamgar is associated with Deborah who operated up in the north. We also learned that there was a city in the tribe of Naphtali they called Beth Anath, which means house of Anath. It may have been named after Shamgar's family.
And there is every good possibility that Shamgar was from the tribe of Naphtali. But here's a surprise. The Philistines were way down south. They settled in the south coast of Israel. But they were sea people. And at this particular time they were probably engaged in piracy. They were probably moving up and down the coastline of Israel and attacking the ships that sailed down that coast.
And putting into land and raiding villages and raiding highways and doing everything they could to despoil the people of Israel.
And I want you to try to imagine the husbands and the wives of the Philistine raiders who had gone out on this mission. There they are down in the south with their children and their friends. And they're waiting for the raiders to come back.
And all they can think of is what did they go bring back this time? Maybe gold, maybe silver, maybe clothes, maybe meat, maybe grain. And they wait and they wait and they wait. And the raiders never come back.
Now the Philistines were bound to find out sooner or later what happened. Because even though they didn't have radio and television in those days, the message must have trickled down from up north.
And sooner or later it was being whispered in the streets of these Philistine cities. You know what happened to those men? They're all dead. And they were all killed by one man with an ox goad.
Now the Philistines, like most people, were very superstitious. At a later time they got scared when the Ark of God came into the camp of the Hebrew army. And I can just hear the leaders say, “Oh this is bad. Our men were defeated by a single Hebrew with an ox goad. There's no way they could have been defeated like that if there's not a powerful God up in that part of the country.
Hey, we're smart. We won't send any more raiding parties up to that part of this land. We're not gonna challenge that mighty deity up there again. We're not going to let our men be slaughtered again.”
And I'll tell you what I think. I think that by defeating this huge raiding party from the Philistines, that Shamgar rescued his people from being raided by them for a long, long time.
Now maybe that's not quite the way it happened. But one thing I do know is that when we win our personal victories, those victories can be used to the benefit and deliverance of other people.
If we learn how to use the word of God, we can teach other people how to use it as well.
I had dinner on Friday evening with a young friend of mine, a young black man, very dedicated to the Lord, very desirous of serving him. A young fellow that knows a lot about the Bible and preaches and sings to the glory of the Lord.
But earlier in the week he had called me and he told me over the phone that he was having a lot of problems. Some of those problems were at work. And in particular he was having problems in his marriage.
And he told me, he says, “I think really what I need to do is to leave and go live by myself.” And I was disturbed when I heard him say that. And so I said, “Well let's get together and let's talk about it.”
And so we met on Friday. And over dinner he explained to me the nature of his problems. And then I said to him, “Look, there's no way that you can biblically walk away from this marriage because your wife hasn't been unfaithful to you.
Now what you need to do is to apply the Scriptures to your relationship to her. You can't change her. God alone can change her. But you can change yourself. And the husband is commanded to love his wife as Christ loved the church.
And that means expressing your love to her by the way you do things, by the way you say things, by what you do say, what you don't say, by what you do and what you don't do.”
And I said to him, “If you ever want to be a successful minister to other people, this is a battle that God has given you to win in your own home. And if you can win this battle in your own home, you can help other people. Because many, many Christians have difficulties and troubles in their marriage.
We've had plenty of them. We do have plenty of them here at Victor Street Bible Chapel.”
And you know I was very pleased by the response this young man gave me. He said, “You know, since talking to you earlier in the week, these very things are the things that God has been bringing to my mind.”
And he said, “By telling me these things you have reinforced for me the things that I already was beginning to feel that God wanted me to do.” And when we parted it was evident he had a strong determination to go back to his marriage, to use his ox goad, to use the Scriptures, and to win the battle of his own home, win the battle of his own marriage, in order that he might later serve other people with effectiveness and success.
And yes folks, my young friend was hard pressed on every side. But he was certainly not crushed.
There was a very intricate machine one time that stopped functioning in a very busy factory and halted all production in the factory. The owners of the factory called in their own machinists to see what was wrong. And they couldn't figure it out. They couldn't get the machinery started again.
So someone suggested that they call in a specialist, a master mechanic. And the master mechanic came and he surveyed the machine for a little bit. Then he asked for the very smallest hammer that they could bring to him.
And they brought him a very small hammer. And then using the hammer he tapped a little bit in a certain area of the machine. And then he said, “Turn it on again. It should work now.” Lo and behold, it did.
Now later on he sent a bill for one hundred dollars to the company. That doesn't sound like much to us today. But back in those days that was considered a big charge.
And the top brass of the company wrote him a letter and asked him to itemize his bill. So he sent them an itemized bill in the same amount. This is how he itemized his bill:
One dollar for tapping. Ninety-nine dollars for knowing where to tap.
Now I think sometimes things seem to break down for us, don't they? But sometimes things don't seem to work. And that's when you need to know where to tap. That's when you need to know how to use your ox goad.
It's great if you have a Bible on your shelf somewhere at home. But in the crises of life it doesn't help you unless you know how to use it, how to apply it, and how to live it.
So may I suggest that you go out of here and start practicing with your ox goad? Because that's the secret of Christian victory. And even though the time may come when you are hard pressed on every side, you will never, never, ever be crushed.
Shall we pray? Father, thank You for Your word. Make us experts in using it in the battles of life. Teach us the path of victory, we ask in Christ's name. Amen.