Why Study Judges?

As I prepare for our study through the book of Judges this coming January, a question comes in to my mind. Why? Why should we study this book?! It’s a difficult and dark book filled with violence and abuse. Surely there are other parts of the Bible that would be better for us to focus on! 

Here are a couple of reflections that I have on why it is important to spend time studying this particular book.

1. Because God wants us to. The Bible is God’s Word to us. He is ultimately the Author of the Bible. Every part of Scripture, every book, every word in its original language is truth and can be trusted and is preserved for us because God willed it to be so. Therefore, every part of this book - yes, even the darker parts - are God’s Words and are “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man or woman of God may be complete (mature), equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16) So we study Judges because God wants us to! 

2. That we may know & love God more. Through the darkness of the book of Judges, we will see a God that is faithful to unfaithful people, a God who is full of grace to sinful people, and we will see that God is always at work even in the darkest of days. How much we need to see this truth, to know this truth, to believe this truth. We all come face to face with darkness, whether it is a personal darkness as we struggle with depression, anxiety, addiction, sickness, financial or relational collapses, or whether its the darkness that surrounds us is in our world, we struggle with the question of “where is God in the darkness”? And Judges answers that question!

3. That we may learn from the past. The children of Israel were the people of God. They were called to be a holy nation, a royal priesthood who would declare the excellencies of the One who called them out of the darkness of slavery and brought them into the light of God’s grace. They were to worship God and God alone and they were to destroy all the idols and false worship that was in the land. But they did not. Instead they assimilated with the culture and eventually became just like the Canaanites. Oh how we need to learn from this today! We live in a pluralistic society just like Israel did. We, the people of God, are a holy nation, a royal priesthood, a people belonging to God and we are scattered in a world that is filled with people who don’t know and love God. The temptation for the Church is the same as it was for the people of Israel, to assimilate into the culture. Judges serves as a sober warning of what will happen if we marry ourselves to the culture and it is a call to contemporary believers to return to God and cling to Him and His Word.

I’m looking forward to the challenge of studying Judges and I hope you will take up the challenge as well and join us in January! 

Merry Christmas and I will see you in January