The book of Judges is not for the faint-hearted. It is full of blood and violence and is often very disturbing: shocking in fact.
The stories it contains are not nice tales of how God’s people lived good lives that give us examples we can follow. With a few exceptions, it does the exact opposite. The stories reveal how flawed God’s people are, how far from him they are and how much evil is contained within the human heart.
A negative spiral
The book is structured in such a way to show a repeated cycle of: Israel’s sin, God’s judgement (coming through oppression from other nations), Israel crying out to God and God raising up a leader (one of the judges) to deliver them which leads to a period of peace. This negative spiral is summarised in chapter 2 and then demonstrated repeatedly between chapters 3-16, with numerous judges being used by God. But this spiral gets worse and worse, with the stories becoming more gruesome and horrible, particularly in the last chapters (judges 17-21) until we read the last verse of the book which says:
In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit (Judges 21:25)
So what’s this disturbing book doing in the Bible and why are we going to spend 10 weeks studying it? Let me answer that in three ways…
The dangers of half-hearted discipleship.
It’s very easy to become complacent as a Christian, to be luke-warm, not giving God our whole lives and not rooting out the idols in our lives. We learn throughout the book of Judges that Israel’s failure was due to their lack of obedience to drive out the nations around them and they therefore mingled with the nations, adopted their practices and worshipped their gods. They didn’t fully reject God but nor did they fully accept him. They were half-in and half-out. But the book teaches us that God wants to be Lord of our entire lives. Tim Keller writes:
This halfway discipleship and compromise is depicted by the book of Judges as an impossible unstable compound. God wants all of our lives, not just part.
We are going to be studying the book of Judges to take the warning from the book seriously, lest we fall as they did.
The hope of God’s grace in all the mess
Is your life ever messy and complicated? Do you ever get things wrong, sometimes very wrong? Or as you look at the world around us and the challenges we face here in Ireland (with homelessness) or in Europe (with Brexit) or around the world (with wars, the threat of terrorism and world leaders making big threats) does it not feel like things are out of control? Can it not lead you to think ‘what’s the point, why bother?’ Does it not leave you sometimes cynical and despairing, saying to yourself ‘I can’t make a difference to all this mess’? Well, may the book of Judges encourage you. Despite appearances, God is still in control. He is still working out his sovereign plan and is still committed to his people and his world. As the book of Romans so powerfully puts it:
But where sin increased, grace increased all the more. (Romans 5:20)
In all the mess, confusion and disturbing and shocking stories we hear every day, the book of Judges reminds us that this is not new and this is not something that God cannot handle. He is not pleased with it for sure (the book makes that clear, he comes in judgement many times) but he is also working through it all and his beautiful grace can be seen more clearly against the darkness, which leads me to my third reason for the book and our series…
The need for the true saviour-king
The story of Judges pre-supposes and continues the story of the Bible so far – of God rescuing Israel out of Egypt, bringing them to himself, making them his people, giving them his law and then giving them the promised land. And God does all that so that Israel might be a holy nation and therefore be a light to the nations around them and bringing God’s blessing to the ends of the earth (see Genesis 12:1-3, Exodus 19:4-6 and Deuteronomy 4:5-8).
But the book of Judges shows that the next generation after Joshua failed miserably in this task and therefore it brings us to a need for a king. The following books tell us about the origin of King David (Ruth) and the origin of the kingship (1-2 Samuel). Judges acts as a bridge between Israel as a nation with no king to Israel under a king from the line of David. Judges highlights the need for a true leader to come who could deliver Israel from themselves and their sin and lead them into righteousness. The book points us forward to God’s provision of a saviour-king. Ultimately, this true saviour-king is Jesus. He is the flawless one who can heal us from the evil within our hearts and be the leader in our lives, enabling us to be a light to others.
We are going to be studying the book of Judges to see how, as with all of the Old Testament, it leads us to know, love, serve and enjoy Jesus (Luke 24:25-27). He is the flawless one that we, a flawed people, look to for deliverance.
Our Series
We will spend 10 weeks in the book of Judges seeing what we can learn about our hearts, God’s grace and Jesus our saviour-king. Here is how the series will be broken down:
- May 19th – Half Hearted Discipleship (Judges 1:1-3:6)
- May 26th – Ehud (Judges 3:7-31)
- June 2nd – Deborah (Judges 4:1-5:31)
- June 9th – Gideon Part 1 (Judges 6:1-8:35)
- June 16th – Gideon Part 2 (The Summer Party)
- June 23rd – Abimelech (Judges 9:1-10:5)
- June 30th – Jephthath (Judges 10:6-12:15)
- July 7th – Samson Part 1 (Judges 13:1-16:31)
- July 14th – Samson Part 2 (Judges 13:1-16:31)
- July 21st – A people without a King (Judges 17:1-21:25)
Please do join us at 4:15pm every Sunday at Synge Street Secondary School, Portobello.
Finally, I cannot recommend highly enough to watch this 8 minute video from The Bible Project summarising the structure and themes of the book…it’s magnificent!