What happens when God's people finally receive everything He promised them - and it still isn't enough to keep them faithful?
Conquest, Failure, and Redemption is the fifth book in a continuing study that began with Beginnings: Reflections on the Book of Genesis, and the first to move beyond the Pentateuch into Israel's historical books. Drawn from more than a decade of daily Quiet Time writing and Sunday School classes at First Baptist Church in Dallas, Eugene Han and Eunmi Kim walk through Joshua, Judges, and Ruth in sixteen chapters, tracing a single unbroken story across three very different books: a conquest won by faith and lost by compromise, a three-hundred-year unraveling into the darkest chapters in the Old Testament, and a quiet act of loyalty in a barley field that turns out to be royal history in disguise. Why does God command the total destruction of the Canaanites, and how do we read that honestly? Why does a nation that saw the Jordan stopped and the walls of Jericho fall still forget the LORD within a single generation? What is Gideon's fleece actually teaching us - and what has popular teaching gotten wrong about it? How does a foreign widow gleaning in a stranger's field end up as the great-grandmother of King David, and an ancestor of Christ?
This is not a technical commentary written for seminarians. It is a layman's companion for ordinary believers who want to read these three books slowly, carefully, and honestly - tracing the same threads of covenant faithfulness, human failure, and unearned grace the authors traced over years of unhurried reading. Eunmi's voice is woven throughout, often quieter and more personal, giving the book a second perspective alongside Eugene's.
Each chapter includes:
- A close, readable walk through that section's text, grounded in careful study but written for everyday readers
- Cross-references that trace how a theme in Joshua, Judges, or Ruth echoes through the rest of Scripture, from the Psalms to Paul's letters to the words of Christ
- Honest engagement with the hard parts - holy war, hardened hearts, a national descent into moral chaos, and the silence of God amid it - without flattening them into easy answers
- Reflection and discussion questions, ideal for personal devotion or small-group Bible study
The book is arranged in three parts that mirror its title:
Conquest (Joshua), tracing the fulfillment of God's covenant promises one battle at a time;
Failure (Judges), tracing Israel's six-cycle descent from victory into anarchy; and
Redemption (Ruth), a single quiet story of faithfulness that answers the whole preceding darkness with grace. Whether you are reading through these books for the first time, leading a Bible study, or continuing the journey begun in Genesis, this volume offers sixteen chapters of careful, faithful reflection on what it costs a people to receive God's promises - and what it costs Him to keep loving them anyway - with a forward look at where the story leads next, to the prophet who anoints Israel's first kings.
