W. Robert Godfrey

So there are these remarkable women, positive and negative, and the whole book is just a book full of fascinating figures and fascinating stories.

But as we'll see as we go along, we have to understand what's happening in the book as a whole

to really appreciate the message and the meaning of each part of the book.

And that's why I hope as we'll go along, this will be an adventure not only in figuring out the story of Samson and looking at the character of the book of Judges, but I hope it'll really be an encouragement for us as to how we ought to do Bible study.

because it distresses me the way in which many Protestants have moved away from a genuinely Protestant way of reading the Bible.

And what I mean by that is we turn the Bible into a kind of magic book.

You know, you just open it up and you find a verse and you apply it to yourself and that gives you meaning and hope.

Now that's not altogether wrong.

When I was a college kid, I had an opportunity to study in Germany for a while, and pious Protestant Germans would begin every year with a little box, and in it were little rolled up pieces of paper, and every piece of paper had a Bible verse on it.

And you had a little stick, and every day of the year, you could stick your stick in the box and pull out your Bible verse, and you opened it, that was your verse for the day.

Now, that's not a terrible thing to have a verse for the day.

It always felt a little like a fortune cookie.

But anyway, it's not a terrible thing to have a verse for the day.

But if you think there's something kind of magic about that, that this verse taken out of context will tell you what you need to know about your day, you may well get into trouble.

You all know the example that people like me always use of that.

You know, you open the Bible at random and you…

point to a verse and it says, Judas went out and hanged himself.

And you find that not a helpful verse, so you close your Bible back up and you open it up and you find a verse and it says, go thou and do likewise.

So that is not a way to read the Bible.

And so I hope this will be sort of an adventure for us to get into the Bible and think about our need to read the Bible as a book.