How do you get to Jesus in a sermon about Ehud? I mean, when the text you’re preaching is about a tricky, left-handed sneak who stabs a fat king and gets away because the guards are deterred by the smell, how exactly do you turn from that to the glories of Jesus?

I’m just finished up a sermon series on the book of Judges, and it’s been quite a journey. My congregation literally groaned when I read of Ehud’s exploits, they winced when Sisera got his due, and I saw lots of heads shaking when I read about the stone cracking Abimelech’s head.

One friend asked me after one particular sermon, “So, what body part are we mutilating next week?” If you’ve preached Judges before, you know it as well as I do now – Romans and Hebrews this ain’t!

Even so, Jesus tells us in Luke 24:44 that the whole Old Testament – including Judges in all its gory glory – points to Him. So as Christian pastors, we have to preach in such a way that every text takes our listeners finally to Jesus and to His cross. We have to get to the Gospel, even from Ehud. But how do you do that? It’s helped me in my preaching to know that there are two different roads to the Gospel from every text in the Bible, roads we should be on the lookout for in every sermon we prepare. One is the road of biblical theology, and the other is the road of
systematic theology.

Biblical theology has to do with the whole grand storyline of the Bible. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible tells a story, and from any given text you can always step into that narrative river and be swept pretty quickly toward the cross. Even in Judges, which has to be one of the darkest books in the Bible, you can get to Jesus very easily by seeing how the book fits into the whole story.

After all, the main point of Judges is the refrain, “In those days there was no king in Israel.” The book is an apologetic for godly kingship, even kingship rooted in the tribe of Judah. Follow that unfolding storyline, and you quickly find yourself at King David and ultimately at King Jesus, “the Lion of the Tribe of the Judah, the Root of David.”

Of course, if you’re preaching a series through Judges, though, you can’t very well make that the main point of every sermon. Even if you mention that storyline in every sermon to be sure your people understand it, sometimes you need another road to the Gospel.

That’s where systematic theology comes in. Throughout the Bible, there are certain themes that are easy to find. Sin, grace, sacrifice and salvation, just to name a few, underlie every story in the Bible, and all of these themes find their highest expression in Jesus’ death and resurrection. So when you’re preaching from the Old Testament, find one or more of these themes and then turn strongly to the cross. In Judges, for example, human sin, broken covenant, God’s grace and love, God’s wrath and His deliverance of His sinful people are all strong theological themes, and any of them are great ways to turn your listeners’ minds to Jesus and His work of salvation for His people.

It’s very easy to preach the Bible, especially the Old Testament, as if it werea book of fables – a series of stories that do little more than instruct us morally. But if we believe Jesus, we know those stories are doing much more than that; they are pointing us to Him. So whether we do it by following the storyline or pointing out the themes, our job as preachers is to show our congregations how to see Jesus, even from the story of Ehud.

Greg Gilbert is senior pastor of Third Avenue Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. This article first appeared in the April 11, 2022 issue of Towers Magazine, a publication of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is used with their permission.