Reformed Bible Study

29. King Saul

Welcome to the Reformed Bible Study. King Saul is one of the Bible's most sobering figures — a man who had every advantage. He was king and won an early victory. He also prophesied among the prophets. Yet he disobeyed God, pursued David relentlessly, and ended his days consulting a witch in secret. Saul's story is not ultimately about himself, but about a covenant God who, through Saul's spectacular failures, was preparing a better king.

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.