What do we learn from the book of Judges?

In the sermon this week, I talked about the game of “Guess Who?”, a simple two-player board game. Each player starts off with a board full of flippable cartoon characters with different names and chooses one of those characters. The goal is to figure out which one your opponent picked by asking questions. You can ask any question you want, but since you alternate, you want each question to eliminate as many of the potential characters as possible. So, for example, if about half the characters have hats and half don’t, the question “Does your character have a hat?” would eliminate half of the board. The game therefore proceeds through negation—with every question you eliminate possibilities, getting closer and closer to the truth.

I’m never entirely sure if my sermon illustrations are helpful, but I thought this game was a good illustration of how the Book of Judges operates with reference to the establishment of the monarchy. Instead of laying out a lengthy positive description of the ideal king, the book of Judges provides us with a multitude of king-like figures. By their example, both positive and negative, we can get a picture of what the king should be. Each time, we ask, “Is the king like this?” The answer is mixed—in some ways yes and in other ways no. Some of them are closer to the ideal; some are further away. But each one gives us information! They contribute to building out the picture of the ideal king.

All the judges share a weakness—they do not live forever, nor does their authority outlast them. In Gideon’s day, they attempt to overcome this by establishing his house as ruling over the whole people—a hereditary position. Gideon refuses for reasons that are obscure, but after he dies, his son attempts to take up leadership under his mantle and kills all 70 of his brothers save one. He, in turn, is rejected and killed, and so the whole line dies. Gideon, it seems, was right to refuse it. The shortness of a man’s life is a weakness of the judges, but the solution of establishing a house does not work either.

The judges share positive traits as well. All of them are chosen and called by God (Abimelech, the anti-judge, is chosen by man). They all establish their judgeship through an act of confrontation and violence. All of them are set against the opponents of God’s people. All three of these will be seen in the line of David when he comes.

These are all men of faith as well—the foundation of their actions is always a trust in God’s power that is for them. This trust, in its most generic form, is the belief that Samson has in his great strength—he is quite casual in making use of it, but he recognizes it as a gift from God. The rest show a more particular and focused trust, set on the call of God against their enemies. In Hebrews 12, the author says that Jesus suffered with eyes on “the joy that was set before him.” God had made promises to Jesus regarding his work, and Jesus shows faith in these promises through his life of obedience.

This is really the heart of what I want our congregation to get out of this book—through the judges we see the outline of the king, and through the king, we see the outline of the King—Jesus Christ. The judges are a shadow of a shadow, pointing us toward Jesus.