28. Samuel the Prophet

28. Samuel the Prophet

Welcome to the Reformed Bible Study. This lesson turns to Samuel the prophet — the hinge figure who closed the era of the judges and opened the age of the monarchy, and who uniquely among Old Testament figures exercised the three offices of prophet, priest, and king-maker. From Hannah's song anticipating a coming king to Samuel's anointing of David in Bethlehem, every scene points beyond itself to the one Anointed who holds those offices perfectly and permanently.

27. Samuel, Kings and Chronicles

Welcome to the Reformed Bible Study. Today we survey three of the Old Testament's most historically rich books — Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles — asking what they are, who wrote them, and why they still matter. Together they span six centuries of Israel's covenant life and tell one relentless story: every human king failed, the priesthood was compromised, and the nation went into exile. The failed story continues until the King the prophets promised finally came.

26. Ruth

Welcome to the Reformed Bible Study. Set against the dark backdrop of the Judges period, the book of Ruth tells the story of a Moabite widow whose covenant loyalty leads her into the lineage of David — and ultimately of Christ. In Boaz, the kinsman-redeemer who pays the full price to claim what another would not, we find one of Scripture's richest portraits of the Redeemer who assumed our debt and covered us with his own righteousness.

25. Judges, Part 2

Welcome to the Reformed Bible Study. The closing chapters of Judges offer no heroic deliverers, no foreign oppressors, no familiar cycle of sin and salvation — only two grim appendices that function as the book's final verdict on a people who have abandoned the covenant. What we find here is the inevitable logic of apostasy: corrupted worship breeds a corrupted society, and without a king who can deliver Israel from itself, the cry that frames these chapters, a longing for the one Mediator no merely human judge could ever be. It anticipates the coming of the true King — Jesus.

24. Judges, Part 1

Welcome to Reformed Bible Study. The book of Judges confronts us with a sobering paradox: a people who have witnessed the mighty acts of God and sworn covenant loyalty to him, yet who spiral downward through a relentless cycle of sin, servitude, and desperate supplication — and through it all, a God who remains faithful to his faithless people. In the two judges we examine today, Deborah and Jephthah, we see that faithfulness and foolishness can inhabit the same story, and that the Lord accomplishes his purposes through the most unlikely instruments, pointing us forward to the one Deliverer who would succeed where all others fell short.