 1 of 5
 
PREACHING SKILLSPreaching the Gospel in JudgesThree principles for drawing the good news out of a dark chapter in Israel's history.Steve Mathewson
Editor's note: Listen to a sermon preached by the author from the Book of Judges:
Is There Any Hope When God's People Fail?
To read a manuscript of the same sermon,
click here.
A few months ago, I began a series on the Book of Judges by asking every one in my congregation to stand. Then I asked the people who had never heard a sermon on Judges to sit down. The results were the same in both of our worship services. Fifty percent of the people sat down. Next I asked those who had never heard a sermon on Judges except for the Gideon story to sit. Another twenty percent sat down. Then I instructed those who had never heard a sermon on Judges except for the Samson story to sit down. Another twenty percent sat down. As it turned out, only a dozen out of several hundred had previously heard a sermon from Judges on someone other than Gideon or Samson. My final question was, "How many of you have ever heard an entire sermon series on Judges?" This question effectively whittled down the troops to a number one-hundred times smaller than Gideon's tiny army when God finished sending his troops home. Three people remained standing!
The gospel is there in latent form in the Book of Judges, just waiting to be preached!
When it comes to preaching the Book of Judges, most preachers can relate to the writer of Hebrews: "I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, and Jephthah." Judges gets ignored for a variety of reasons. Some have lost touch with Bible stories. We do well in the New Testament epistles, and well we should, but Old Testament narrative is a foreign land.
Second, we may sell short the stories of Judges, forgetting that the book is considered a former prophet in Jewish tradition.
Third, we may be uncertain about how we can preach grace and gospel in a book that a preacher-friend describes as "one dark, hoary tale." After all, scholar Daniel Block says the theme of Judges is the Canaanization of Israel.[1] Its overall message is that God's people self-destruct when they disobey God and get their values instead from their pagan neighbors.
Last month, a colleague in ministry told me he did not want to spend time preaching Judges because he wanted to concentrate on the new covenant and on the gospel. However, I am convinced that preachers can and must preach the gospel from the Book of Judges. It is a book about God delivering his people from the mess they create. Yes, the gospel appears in Judges, but in latent form.
What does it look like to preach the gospel from Judges or from any Old Testament narrative book? What model should we use for preaching gospel-based, Christ-centered sermons from the stories in the Bible that Jesus used?
The controversy over "exemplary" Bible stories
To help us answer these questions, let's begin by exploring a fascinating controversy which raged in the Reformed churches in Holland just prior to World War II. Esteemed preaching professor Sidney Greidanus analyzed this controversy in his 1970 doctoral dissertation, Sola Scriptura: Problems and Principles in Preaching Historical Texts.
One side of the controversy featured those who promoted an exemplary approach to preaching Bible stories. Basically, they argued that the characters in these stories provided models to be imitated, that is, examples to be followed. Conversely, the sins and weaknesses of these characters served as a warning. Proponents of this approach did not reject the idea that redemptive history is a unified structure with Christ at its center, but they still felt free to draw parallels between the experiences of God's people then and the struggles of believers today. They argued that Hebrews 11 interprets the redemptive history of the Old Testament in an exemplary sense. They also cited Paul's use of events in the history of Israel as "examples" (tupoi/tupikos) for new covenant believers in 1 Corinthians 10:6 and 11.
On the other side of the controversy stood those who promoted a redemptive-historical approach to preaching the historical texts of the Old Testament. This approach became known as a Christocentric or Christ-centered approach since redemptive history, argued its proponents, is the history of Christ. He stands at its center, but no less at its beginning and end. In this approach, sermons on Old Testament stories point to the person and work of Christ, the eternal Logos who is at work throughout history.
This happens without "magically producing a line from every text to the Cross or the Incarnation." Rather, a redemptive-historical sermon will show how God is at work in history redeeming his people. Christ must be central, not human beings. In 1 Corinthians 10:6 and 11, the terms tupoi and tupikos should be translated as "types," not "examples." Paul's point is that the events of Israel's history happened as a prefiguration of the events of the messianic age. As for Hebrews 11, redemptive-historical proponents argue that just because a New Testament writer uses an element in an Old Testament narrative as an illustration, it does not follow that the illustration is the "specific intent" of the Old Testament text.
| 
Printer view
back to top
