Why You Should Consider Studying and Preaching the Book of Judges
I fell in love with the book of Judges years and years ago. During college even, when I was a camp counselor at a Christian sports camp for a summer, I would read as a bedtime story about Ehud shoving his sword into the belly of a fat king until the king’s poop spilled out. The kids loved it. So did I.
One of the first few summers in my current church, my co-pastor and I preached through Judges. It was—as my father often says with a kindly smirk—memorable. I’ve written blog posts about the book and preached it at retreats. I’ve preached it on Christmas Eve. Seriously. It worked well, too. In fact, tomorrow I’m preaching two messages from the book of Judges to a local Christian school. (Yes, it’s the older students, but I think the book can be preached to younger students too, especially when using a children’s Bible like this one.) I guess I’m like Sam-I-Am and could preach Judges in a boat and to a goat, in the rain and on a train, and in a tree—it’s so good, you see.
Yesterday the website For The Church published the longest collection of words I’ve ever had published, nearly five and a half thousand of them, which is basically the size of a large chapter in a book. The words are a “preaching guide” to the book of Judges. But you don’t have to be a preacher to make use of the guide. You can just be a regular Christian who wants to know God and the gospel better.
My preaching guide in Judges is part of their series to offer guides through books in the Bible. Their preaching guides have a sort of template to them, and the last section always suggests reasons you should preach through the book (or, as I said, study through the book). Below you’ll see my answer for why you should study and preach through the book of Judges. I hope you enjoy the excerpt.
If you’d like to read the rest of the preaching guide, you can do so here. (The list of all the preaching guides is here.)
And if you know a pastor or Sunday school teacher who might benefit from my guide on Judges, please pass it on to them as well. Everything is free.
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Why should you preach through Judges?
Those who live in the Rocky Mountains or on the Hawaiian shores can behold beautiful scenery as easily as they can walk to their back porch. For most of us, however, tracking down mountain vistas or ocean sunrises takes a lot of work. From a preaching standpoint, the vistas seen from Ephesians 2 or Romans 8 tend to be more accessible and thus more often traveled by preachers and beheld by congregations. Yet for those willing to break a sweat and endure some soreness, the vistas that open in the book of Judges are just as fearfully and wonderfully made—you just might have to wade through a swamp or hack through a jungle before you can see them. In short, you should preach Judges because the book offers modern readers scenery that we didn’t know we needed until someone has shown us. These “views” include but are not limited to those I have listed below. Knowing these breathtaking views exist and hiking with your people to see them is reason enough to start the journey through Judges. And as you go, you will discover other sights both terrifying and awesome, sights you didn’t know you needed until God showed you that you did.
The book of Judges shows us the purpose of divine rumble strips. Rumble strips are annoying. They shake your car and rattle your teeth. If you have young boys in the back of your car, someone might yell, “Who farted?” In other words, rumble strips get your attention. So do smelling salts. So do defibrillators. God often goes to great lengths to get our attention when we, his people, are tempted to sin. “When new gods were chosen, then war was in the gates” (5:8). For his glory and our good, thankfully the invasive love God displays in Judges, he still displays now. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The book of Judges shows us that sin is fundamentally illogical and only partially explainable. To read Judges slowly and carefully is to also become confused. He did what? But why? And she said what? But why? Often, you can deduce probable answers to many of these questions, and yet even when the questions are answered, you still might not know the deeper reason for why people do what they do. For example, consider some of the unanswerable questions from chapter 19. Why wouldn’t anyone take the travelers into their house? How could it be that an angry mob demanded violent, homosexual acts in an Israelite city? Why would a man offer his virgin daughter to the mob to be devoured? Why would the Levite allow his concubine to be handed over? What was a Levite doing with a concubine, anyway? And who could cut up a woman and send her out in twelve little pieces? When you stand back and let the totality of the depravity of this passage land on you, one recognizes almost immediately that we must settle for partial explanations. This is because, in the order of the universe, sin is only partially explainable. Why would Adam take and eat the fruit? Why would sin ever have looked pleasing to his eyes? Why would anyone crucify the son of God? Why would the drunk driver get behind the wheel? Why would I ever use that tone of voice with the wife of my youth? Because sin is only partially explainable and fundamentally illogical. We really do need a savior.
The book of Judges stokes our longings for permanence. Peace and prosperity ebb and flow like the ocean tide, and all our progress seems as permanent as castles in the sand. The cycles in the book of Judges show us this. And they show it to us again. And again. And again. We need a savior who sits on the throne he will never vacate, which is what we have in Christ.
Finally, the book of Judges shows us the greatest enemy of the church is not external but internal. The book of Judges both shouts and whispers this indictment. Consider, again, the last sentence in the book. “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (21:25; see also 17:6). Positioned intentionally at the end, this statement is the ancient equivalent of bold, italics, underline, and all caps—an example of the book shouting that our greatest enemy is internal. We hear another shout in Judges 2:10 where God lays the blame for all their trouble on the fact that “there arose another generation . . . who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel.” Again, the foe is internal, not external. The book also whispers this message. For example, consider the judge Tola (10:1–2). He, like another judge named Shamgar in Judges 3:31, was a deliverer only mentioned in a verse or two. But unlike Shamgar, who delivers from an external enemy (the Philistines), no enemy is listed that Tola fought. When Tola comes to save, he saves Israel from Israel. And that is why the book, as a whole, concludes with an appendix of sordid stories likely from an earlier time in the book, stories of a greedy priest, a Levite who dismembered his concubine, and a civil war that nearly annihilated one of the tribes. It is easy to point the finger at those outside the church. The greatest threat to the church, however, is not ISIS or Planned Parenthood. It is not Hollywood. It is not atheist professors who ruin the faith of our sweet college freshmen. The greatest enemies are not secular politicians and Supreme Court judges. If we want to know the worst enemy of the church—the one that, apart from the sustaining grace of God, could eternally destroy us—then we must look in the mirror. Doing so will not be easy; it will be uncomfortable. But a long look into our own souls and our indwelling sin might catch our melanoma while it’s early. And if it does, praise God we have the gospel for our healing.
* Photo by Jan Kronies on Unsplash