Students often ask me: “Why would you choose to study the book of Judges?” I completely understand why they’d ask the question. After all, the book is difficult to read and even more challenging to stomach. My answer to them is always the same: it is one of the most relevant books for our time.
Our lives are messy. Our world is messy—painfully and overwhelmingly so. Many question whether to attend church at all because of the seemingly insurmountable brokenness they find there. Others see our cultural moment as a hopeless one, convinced that our world is worse off than it has ever been; they wonder how God’s work will prevail in such a place. The book of Judges confronts exactly these assumptions. The world of the judges is as broken as is ours. Consider even a short list of the challenges that appear on those pages that also characterize our own experience: manipulation, sexual violence, cover-ups, military occupation, slavery, political tribalism, corruption, brutality, murder, and even human trafficking. And much like in our time, God’s people—not simply outsiders—perpetrate these heinous crimes. If there was ever a book to train us to see how God works in brokenness, it is this one.
And yet, Judges is not the only book that does so. The Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, 1–2 Samuel, and 1–2 Kings) feature story after story of God’s redemptive mission unfolding among a faithless people he loves to save a faithless world he loves. In these pages, we watch God work in a very familiar way—through the mess and complications of human life. As pastors, teachers, missionaries, or ministry leaders, the challenges we face are often complex and require both an awareness of God’s ways and wisdom about how to live faithfully in his service. These Old Testament narratives contextualize God’s work in a setting as tumultuous as ours and train us both to see him at work and to respond in a way befitting our calling as Christ-followers.
These Old Testament narratives contextualize God’s work in a setting as tumultuous as ours and train us both to see him at work and to respond in a way befitting our calling as Christ-followers.
In our Master of Divinity program, we offer an entire course on the Former Prophets that trains students to read these books with exegetical clarity, literary sophistication, and an eye toward their contemporary relevance. By working closely with the Hebrew text, this course trains women and men to read attentively, so that they encounter biblical narratives in all their color, depth, and power. With this clarity, students start to recognize the world of Joshua, Deborah, David, and Josiah as their own and are better equipped to see how God’s work then informs our own lives and ministries today.
At TEDS, we delight in introducing our students to the God who has generously revealed himself in the pages of Scripture. We are committed to using every tool at our disposal to help them hear God clearly, so that they are prepared to communicate humbly and faithfully to a hurting world that God is committed to saving it.
We’d love for you to join us.
