‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
89th teaching
10.13.2014
“The Twelve”
Review:
Last week was the second entry
in our short series “Making Sense of the Old Testament, part II”. Our goal was
to provide some understanding and shed some light upon the Old Testament before
we move on into the New Testament. We now know that an understanding of the Old
Testament is necessary for an understanding of the New—remember the metaphor of
the Bible as a house that fits together: the Old Testament being the walls and
foundation of that house, and the New Testament being the ceiling and roof of
that house, completing it. It’s like the climax and conclusion of story
completing the beginning of the story. Therefore, before we get into the Life
of Christ in the gospels, we need to see what the backdrop of the gospels is as
seen in the Old Testament. Not only do we need a solid grasp of the Old
Testament to appreciate the New, but we also acknowledge that we have a sore
lack of understanding the Old Testament: a lot of us wrestle with it and find
difficulty reading it and making sense of the stories. If that’s true for us,
than the Old Testament represents a huge portion (around 70%) of God’s Word
that almost completely baffles us. It ought to be a challenge to us to overcome
this challenge and get to know the Bible better by tackling the spot we have
difficulty with.
In part I of “Making Sense of the Old Testament”
we covered two sections of the Old Testament: the Pentateuch, that is the first
five books of the Bible, aka the Five Books of Moses, and then we covered the
Historical Books, that is Joshua through Esther. Last week, with part II, we
covered two more sections. Do you remember what they were?
Describe the Writings to me. What do you now know
about Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs? What about the Major
Prophets, what books are included here? What do you now know about Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel and Daniel?
End
of Review
Since
we’re covered four of the five sections of the Old Testament—the Pentateuch,
the Historical Books, the Writings, and the Major Prophets—we have only one
section left to go. What section would that be?
The Minor Prophets.
Turn to Amos 8:1-12
“Thus the LORD God showed me: Behold, a
basket of summer fruit. And He said, ‘Amos, what do you see?’ So I said, ‘A
basket of summer fruit’. Then the LORD said to me: ‘The end has come upon My
people Israel; I will not pass by them anymore. And the songs of the temple
shall be wailing in that day,’ says the Lord GOD—‘Many dead bodies everywhere,
they shall be thrown out in silence.’ Hear this, you who swallow up the needy,
and make the poor of the land fail, saying: ‘When will the New Moon be past,
that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may trade wheat? Making the [measurement]
small and the [payment] large, falsifying the scales by deceit, that
we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—even sell
the bad wheat?’ The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: ‘Surely I will never
forget any of their works. Shall the land not tremble for this, and everyone
mourn who dwells in it? All of it shall swell like the River, heave and subside
like the River of Egypt. And it shall come to pass in that day,’ says the Lord
GOD, ‘That I will make the sun go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in
broad daylight; I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into
lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on every waist, and baldness on every head;
I will make it like mourning for an only son, and its end like a bitter day. ‘Behold,
the days are coming,’ says the Lord GOD, ‘That I will send a famine on the
land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words
of the LORD. They shall wander for sea to sea, and from north to east; they
shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but shall not find it.’”
We’re reminded that one of the
difficulties in studying the Minor Prophets is the language and imagery used by
them is very specific, very appropriate to their ancient time and place and way
of life. At the beginning of the chapter, the prophet Amos is shown a vision of
a basket of summer fruit. Why? It’s because summer fruit in their mind in that
time represented fruit that would not keep long. It represented time being
short, just as time was short for Israel and God said “the end has come”. He’s
visually comparing the nation of Israel to quickly rotting fruit that would
soon be thrown out. That’s easy to miss without taking some time to think about
it, but that’s precisely what needs to be done with these books.
But the passage I’d really like to
draw you attention to is there in verse 11. With all of the terrifying
judgments warned about through the prophets, even here in Amos with the
description of people wailing and mourning in the temple, with dead bodies
piled up everywhere, darkness, hair falling out, earthquakes and so on poured
out on these people who mistreated the poor and ripped people off… the most
chilling of all the outpourings of the wrath of God is in this: “I will send a famine on the land, not a
famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord…”
A famine not of food or water, but much more subtle and more horrifying: a
famine of the word of God. Where food and water could still be had, and had
aplenty, no one would be able to hear the words of God. Of all the judgments of
God, that is perhaps the most frightening and we’ll return to that thought
later.
The
title for tonight’s study is: “The Twelve”.
If the Old Testament is largely
confusing to us, then at the absolute center of that confusion lies the Twelve
Minor Prophets. When we look at the Minor Prophets, we see blurred faces and
strange words. They seem funny, peculiar, dated and foreign… they are almost
utterly alien to us. Though they are the shortest of all the books in the Old
Testament, they are ground zero for confusion, bafflement, mystery and ignorance.
We know next to nothing about them. Heck, good luck even finding some decent
materials on them: commentaries, bible studies, sermons… even google images are
scarce on these twelve books.
Thus in approaching the unknown
territory of the Minor Prophets, we’re really approaching the heart of the
unknown, like explorers taking the first steps toward space travel, or plunging
into the uncharted depths of the deep-sea abyss. And yet, what I think is most
striking about the Minor Prophets is their social relevancy, even in our modern
era. True, these books were written two and a half millennia ago, yet if you’re
careful to read them, you’ll find that their encouragements, challenges and
warnings are as appropriate in our time as they were in their own, perhaps even
more so as the end draws nearer.
I say this because I think we’re
cheating ourselves out of a fuller knowledge of God, we’re cheating ourselves
out of instruction, encouragement, ammunition and understanding to live the
Christian life by not understanding these twelve writers in God’s Scripture. I
don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Anyone from Hosea to Malachi may have
something very potent and shocking to say to you, something very specific because of their brevity, as potent or
shocking or specific as the original message was to their original audience,
and we miss out on that by not taking the time to understand the Twelve. That’s
true of any part of Scripture, and I believe most of our struggles in the
Christian walk come from a lack of biblical literacy, but can it be any truer
than with the Minor Prophets, a fifth part of the Old Testament that lies
hidden right under our very noses?
It was not my first intention to
dedicate an entire night in the Minor Prophets… I had originally thought that
“Making Sense of the Old Testament” would take just one night. But in light of
the important things we’re missing out on in the Minor Prophets, I think it’s
incredibly appropriate that we take some pause to examine them.
Here are our points for tonight:
1.
Who are the Twelve?
2.
Their Timeline
3.
Their Untold Tales
First we’ll look at the twelve men
themselves and get some idea of what kind of people they were, then second
we’ll see how they each fit into the timeline of the Old Testament, then third
we’ll look at the actual content of their writings, their stories.
1.
Who are the Twelve?
In the original Hebrew Scriptures, the
twelve minor prophets were grouped together as one single book since they were
so short. That single book was known as Trei
Asar in Aramaic: “the Twelve”, sometimes referred to as the Book of the
Twelve. And once again, they are called the minor prophets because of the
shortness of their writings, not because they are any less important. We may
think of them as unimportant and ignore them quite often, but let us not think
that way anymore, certainly not because of their collective name: minor prophets. It is not a minor thing
to miss out on these books.
In fact, because they’re so short,
many of them can be read in a single sitting. There are a lot of variables that
make the minor prophets difficult reads, but they did at least give you this:
they are short books. I’d encourage you to pick one of them, maybe one you’re
not familiar with at all, and read it tonight or tomorrow night. They’re short.
Read them.
The Twelve occupy an important place
in the Old Testament: they are the last books before the New Testament and I
think it would be helpful to start thinking of them as bridges into the New
Testament from the Old. It is true that other versions of the Bible in the
past, in other languages, have been ordered differently with the Twelve placed
earlier in the series of books, but in our modern Bibles, the twelve minor
prophets come right before the New Testament, appropriately because they
consistently pass judgment on the Old and look forward to the New. The Minor
Prophets are concerned with the warnings, indictments, condemnations and
judgments upon Israel and Judah and also the prophecies that anticipate the
coming of the Messiah, as seen in the New Testament. So start thinking of them
as a kind of bridge between the two testaments.
But what about the men themselves, the
actual minor prophets and not just their writings? We find that they come from
various ways of life and they appeared at various times. Though many of them
never met each other, their collective works fit together and that’s amazing
because of how different they each are.
If you take the time to read them,
you’ll find that they each have their own flavor, their own colour, their own
personality and way of speaking. It’s sometimes difficult for us to think of
the biblical saints and prophets as real people with real personalities and
quirks and downfalls just like our own, but that’s exactly what they were.
Hosea had a broken heart, Jonah suffered suicidal depression, Habakkuk
complained that life was unfair.
In my mind, the prophets don’t look
like men in suits, all put together, nice clothes and big smiles, hair slicked
back, sitting around at press conferences, getting their picture taken.
Yesterday, we were talking about the line from Simon and Garfunkel’s song that
said “the words of the prophet are written on the subway walls and tenement
halls”, and I think of the biblical prophets, these twelve minor prophets, as
looking more like homeless men, dirty, humbled, even humiliated, outcasts
touched not by fame or fortune, but by the despising of the people they spoke
to.
They were men not concerned with the
favor of other men but solely with delivering their messages, whether people
accepted them or not, and some of them went from place to place, wandering,
traveling, even as Jesus traveled from town to town, getting dust on their
feet, their hands, their faces, under the cracks of their fingernails. They
were probably worn down men. Heck, even Isaiah the prophet had to demonstrate
as a symbol of the terrible judgment to come by walking naked and barefoot for
three years. Imagine what he would look like! Filthy, leathery, burnt. These
men were not the glamorous prophets of the 21st century. Makes me
wonder if one of these prophets walked into our group right now, would we let
them sit down and listen to me fumble through their own writings or would we
kick them out?
We all know the phrase “Don’t judge a
book by its cover”. If you did, if you made passing stereotypical judgments on
every person you passed by, you would walk right by Superman, thinking he was
just another Clark Kent. Kent doesn’t look like anything to write home about,
while Superman makes you believe a man can fly, yet you’d never know that the
dorkiest guy in the office is also the archetype of all superheroes.
But if there are any books that cannot
be judged by their covers, it’s the Minor Prophets: both the men and their
writings too. They were super-men with burning eyes and burning words, and they
were individuals. I hope we shall see that when we come to examine their
writings.
2.
Their Timeline
Briefly, I just wanted to take a look
at where each of the Twelve fit into the timeline and storyline of the Old
Testament. If you take down some of this historical information and quickly
reference it before reading any one of the minor prophets, then at least you’ll
have that historical basis upon which you can understand their writings.
We can break up the minor prophets
into two groups according to their timeline: pre-exilic and post-exilic. Either
the minor prophet you’ll read is pre-exilic, he lived before Judah’s exile into
Babylon, or he’ll be post-exilic: he lived after Judah’s exile into Babylon.
The Babylonian Exile stands as one of the most dramatic events in the history
of God’s people and we can order the minor prophets neatly by seeing on which
side of that great event they fall on.
Consider this chart: It’s one of the
simplest I could find, but I’m sorry if it’s difficult to read.
At the bottom, in brown, you’ve got
your timeline of years.
The purple line represents the line of
Israel’s kings in the north, ending with the fall of Samaria.
Then in blue you’ve got the line of
Judah’s kings in the south, ending with the fall of Jerusalem. Thus the
timeline of the minor prophets begins with the Historical Books in II Kings and
ends with Nehemiah (you can see Ezra and Nehemiah, the last of the Historical
Books, in yellow at the end of the timeline).
In green, you can see the generally
long ministries of the Major Prophets: Isaiah is earliest of the major players,
then Jeremiah, Daniel and Ezekiel on into the Babylonian captivity.
And in red, you’ve got the names of
the Minor Prophets; the span of their red bars represents the length of their
ministries, when they were actively preaching and prophesying and demonstrating
to the people. You’ll notice that the timeline begins with Jonah. Jonah was the
earliest of the Minor Prophets, the most far removed historically from the
destruction of Israel and Judah, so it makes sense that he’s concerned not with
Israel and Judah’s downfall but with the downfall of the Assyrians in Nineveh.
Ordered chronologically according to
this timeline it’s Jonah first, then Joel, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Zephaniah,
Nahum, Habakkuk and Obadiah… all of them are pre-exilic prophets because they
lived prior to the exile into Babylon. After that, the three post-exilic
prophets lived: Haggai and Zechariah and Malachi. Therefore, when you read
Haggai you know to place him after the great tragedy of the exile was over, or
you know to read Habakkuk just before that exile occurred. You can place them
historically, and that will help you tremendously in understanding the
specifics of their message: the historic backdrop of their message. (Joel’s
dating is the one I’m most unsure about on this chart)
You can also see that some of them
were contemporaries. Some of them may have known each other and worked together
as a team such as Haggai and Zechariah encouraging the people during the
rebuilding of the temple and city walls after the exile, or Joel and Amos might
have known each other with Joel concerned about the invasion of locusts and
Amos, a farmer, being affected by that same invasion of locusts, or Hosea and
Micah might have known each other, Habakkuk and Obadiah may have shared a cup
of tea.
Anyway, I hope that is helpful, to
provide some historic framework for understanding where to place each of the
twelve minor prophets.
3.
Their Untold Tales
I’ve told you what kind of men these
Twelve were, and we’ve seen how they fit into the Old Testament storyline, now
let’s dive into their actual content. Again, like last week, turn to the title
of each book as we address them. First up is…
HOSEA
Who is Hosea? Hosea is the prophet
of a broken heart.
Hosea appears as the first of the
Minor Prophets in our Bibles and his book is one of the longest of the twelve.
And rightfully so, because Hosea is about love. Remember he prophet of a broken
heart.
One of the over-arching themes of his
book is the love of God for Israel, a theme which Hosea demonstrates with an
extremely bizarre object lesson. Hosea was a pre-exilic prophet in Israel
during its decline into immorality and he has one of the most striking messages
among all of the prophets. Throughout Hosea’s writings, God uses the imagery of
unfaithfulness in marriage, an unfaithful wife, in describing His relationship
with His people Israel. He says that He had saved them. He reminds them how he
has loved them, like a man loves his wife. The love-language of Hosea is enough
to put Shakespeare’s sonnets to shame!
But the drama of Hosea comes when God
explains how He has loved Israel yet how they have turned away from Him and
went off to pursue other lovers. How can a nation pursue other lovers? Idolatry,
the worship of foreign gods. The Lord compares the idolatrous worship of pagan
deities that Israel fell into to adultery, literally Israel becoming a whore to
chase after other lovers. Consider that passion of a spurned lover. God Himself
is that spurned lover in the book of Hosea. God is characterized in Hosea as
burning in anger over the idolatry of Israel and then at the same moment
turning back to His love for them, pleading that this backsliding people return
to Him.
Now in order to make His point, God
raises up this man Hosea. And God gives Hosea the most bizarre of commands: Hosea 1:2, “Go, take for yourself a wife of harlotry and children of harlotry, for
the land has committed great harlotry by departing from the LORD’.” That’s
some stiff-sounding English, but essentially God is saying “Hosea, go marry a
prostitute and raise a family with her”.
What?!
God commanded him to take a whore as
his wife, knowing that this immoral woman would leave him. Hosea’s own married
life would become the object lesson. His marriage would be symbolic of the
covenant relationship God had with Israel, symbolic of the love God had for
Israel. The children through Hosea and his prostitute wife, Gomer, would also
be symbolic and have names that would demonstrate the continued strain upon
God’s own relationship with Israel. For example, Hosea 1:6 says they had a daughter and God said “Call her name Lo-Ruhamah [meaning
No-Mercy], for I will no longer have
mercy on the house of Israel.” Or again they had another son and God said
down in v.9, “Call his name Lo-Ammi [literally Not-my-people] for you are not My people, and I will not be your God.”
What Hosea experiences in His marriage
is symbolic of God’s relationship with His people. For Hosea experiences a
broken heart, a broken covenant, a broken marriage. Apparently, his wife leaves
him to pursue prostitution again. She was accustomed to that lifestyle. But
note the example that Hosea provides: he doesn’t get a quick divorce, he does
not go to find His wife and key her car, or burn every picture he had of her,
or write a break-up song about it, no, he goes back and calls her back to
himself again. He goes and restores her.
In chapter 3, God instructs Hosea to
go again and love his wife, even though she is committing adultery, not in the
past but now in the present. Hosea is told to go to her, find her and restore
her. He even goes the extra mile and buys
her for himself. He buys her out of prostitution, out of adultery, out of
perhaps slavery, and she becomes his again.
That is how God loves. It’s a powerful
picture of God’s unending passion for his “unfaithful wife” who He still
pursues even though she left Him for other lovers, other gods. In Hosea, you
read of the love of God for His wife, wavering between the wrath of His
judgment and the pleading for her to return to Him. Hosea is about love,
restoration, passion and pursuit.
Key-verse is in 11:8, “How can I give you up,
Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How
can I set you like Zeboiim? My heart churns within Me; My sympathy is stirred.”
I’m reminded that this is how God even
loves me. As disreputable, filthy, disgusting and despicable as that prostitute
as I am, God still pursues me. In fact, He pursued me, loved me enough, that He
would purchase me, buy me with His own blood.
That brings us to how Jesus is seen in
Hosea. Remember that? We’re seeing how Jesus is seen in each book of the Old
Testament. And in Hosea, He’s seen as the
Faithful Husband. Even when we are faithless, He remains faithful. Despite
our backsliding, still He loves us.
JOEL
Joel
is the prophet of the locusts.
In the book of Joel, disaster has come
upon the land of Judah: a plague of locusts have devoured every green thing and
stripped the land bare. Now, the people are facing famine and starvation.
In order to appreciate how much a
swarm of locusts could affect human society back then, I found this fun fact: A
one square kilometer swarm of locusts contains about 40 million individual
insects, which eat the same amount of food in one day as about 35,000 people.
In non-metric terms, a swarm of desert locusts can be up to 460 square miles in
size and pack between 40 and 80 million locusts into less than half a square
mile. Each of those locusts can eat its weight in plants each day. This fact is
crazy: Desert locust swarms can cover one-fifth of Earth’s land surface and can
threaten the modern economic livelihood of one-tenth of the world’s population,
even in our day! Imagine what damage they could do back in ancient Israel?
Imagine what such a swarm would sound like? Imagine a green field and crops and
orchard today and the next day, barren wasteland stripped of every green leaf
and bud and fruit and vine.
The prophet Joel is raised up by God
to make plain that the locusts are a judgment from God, but that there is a
time of judgment coming that will be far worse: the Day of the LORD. Joel
compares the ravenous swarms of locusts to a future army that will be far more
destructive. But beyond that coming judgment lay a time of future blessings,
the banishment of the locusts and the outpouring of God’s Spirit, a prophesy
quoted by Peter in the book of Acts to describe the pouring out of the Holy
Spirit at Pentecost. So Joel is known for two things: the locusts and the Holy
Spirit.
We’ll take our key-verse from 2:25, “So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten…”
Jesus is the Sender of the Spirit, according to the prophecy of the book of
Joel, and according to John 15:26.
Jesus sent the Helper, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, from the Father, as
prophesied in Joel. How appropriate that the Comforter is the Holy Spirit
prophesied by Joel, because that is what the people would need after the
destruction left behind by the locusts.
AMOS
Amos
is the prophet-farmer.
He was a shepherd turned prophet and
his name means “Burden-bearer”. He was simple man who worked the ground and
worked with his animals, but he came bearing a tough message. He came on the
scene in a very different time from most of the other prophets, not a time of
decline but a time of increase. Neither Israel to the north nor Judah to the south
had yet fallen into destruction. When Amos was raised up, business was booming
in Israel and the land was peaceful. The people are optimistic. They couldn’t
envision destruction or invasion or conquest. But Amos points out that beneath
the façade of peace and prosperity lay a neglect of the poor, a neglect of
social justice and reaching out to the needy. Amos addresses his message to
those who trampled the needy and did away with the poor. Greed festered beneath
the surface of prosperity. Amos points out the hypocrisy that filled the Jewish
religion at the time. Concern for the poor and the corruption of religion were
two themes of Amos’ prophecies. Outside, things were looking great but inside,
there was only corruption.
A key-verse out of the book of Amos is
the one that we opened with tonight. Amos
8:11-12 says “Behold, the days are
coming, says the Lord GOD, That I will send a famine on the land, not a famine
of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. They
shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and
fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but shall not find it.” The people had
all the security and food and wealth they could want, but they did not have the
LORD’s word. And that is more devastating than a lack of food or water.
How like America in our day! It’s
almost as if Amos spoke not to that ancient nation of Israel but to our own
nation today. Consider this country, with all of our wealth and fame and
possessions, and yet beneath the façade of prosperity, inwardly, there are
homeless people everywhere, poor people everywhere, and we hardly understand
anymore how to deal with them. How do we care for others in a world where viral
videos of people dumping ice-water on their heads become more important than
personal interaction with the needy, where facelessly giving money to corrupt
organizations becomes the easier way out than looking into the eyes of the
needy and feeling their pain with them.
Amos was named the burden-bearer,
because he had to bear a hard message to the people. He bears a hard message to
us, too. Jesus too was Our Burden-Bearer.
He carried the weight of our sins, our social injustices, our neglect, our
iniquity to the cross. Amos is concerned about reaching out to the poor; Jesus
was and is concerned about reaching out to the sinner.
OBADIAH
Obadiah
was the red-prophet.
His is the shortest book in the Old
Testament: one chapter, twenty-one verses. Obadiah is also unique because his
words aren’t directed primarily to Israel or Judah, but oddly enough to Edom,
the nation that descended from Jacob’s brother Esau. Remember the story in
Genesis? Esau was born red and hairy. Hmm gross… But hence the color red
representing the people that came through Esua, the Edomites aka the nation of
Edom.
So what does Obadiah have against Edom? God in
Obadiah accuses Edom’s arrogance and violence toward their brother nation,
Jacob’s descendants, Israel. Obadiah is about Edom’s condemnation and
destruction.
Key verse, Obadiah 1:4, “Though you
ascend as high as the eagle, and though you set your nest among the stars, from
I will bring you down,’ says the LORD.”
Christ is seen in the New Testament as
resisting the proud, the scribes and the self-righteous Pharisees, but giving
His grace and His healing to the humble. That’s mirrored in Obadiah. This book
shows Jesus as the Resistor of the Proud.
“Flee vain ambition, for by that sin
the angels fell”. Pride is the king of all sins, and it wants to be the king,
it wants you to be the king. But Obadiah reminds us that arrogance, pride,
thinking of ourselves instead of our neighbors will only get us into hot water.
Speaking of water…
JONAH
Jonah
is the reluctant prophet.
He is the minor prophet most familiar
to us in our time. We recognize his name from the Sunday school coloring books
“Jonah and the Whale”, and that’s usually what we think of first. Hey we even
referenced Jonah yesterday at Sunday camp-church. He may be the easiest minor
prophet to read and reference but Jonah is probably the worst of all the minor
prophets. Jonah argued with God. Jonah got angry. Jonah was probably racist. We
find in this book that the titular prophet got upset about his mission, and
then upset about God’s grace.
Whereas the other prophets of God had
a heart for the people they were called to minister to, like Jeremiah who wept
for the fate of his audience, or other prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel who
were so dedicated to their calling that Isaiah would walk around naked for
three years and Ezekiel would eat bread cooked over poop… Jonah cared nothing
for the people he was called to preach to: the Ninevites.
His reluctant heart and racism may not
have been entirely unfounded, since the Assyrians who made Nineveh their home
were some of the worst people ever: I found records of Assyrians blinding and
leading victims through lip-rings, dismembering and displaying the remains of
their butchered enemies, impaling, beheading, tearing out organs and genitalia,
riding through the entrails and bodies and blood of their enemies with their
chariots… I can imagine why Jonah would flee from a command to preach the
judgment of God to these people.
In fact, he feared so much and care so
little for the Ninevites that he fled from God across the sea, where he was
cast overboard in a storm and swallowed by a great fish, not whale, prepared by
the Lord. Eventually, he gets out of the fish three days later and continues on
begrudgingly into Nineveh where he preaches his hardcore message of impending
judgment and doom and then camps outside of the city to watch God destroy them.
Unfortunately for Jonah but fortunately for Nineveh, they repent and God
relents from His wrath upon them. Jonah throws a fit about it and God scolds
him and that’s the whole book.
We find our key-verse in Jonah 2:2, the prophet calling to God
from the belly of the fish: “I cried out
to the LORD because of my affliction, and He answered me. Out of the belly of
the grave I cried, and You heard my voice.” Ironically, Jonah is grateful
that God rescues him from his danger but then hates the fact that God rescues
the Ninevites from theirs. Yesterday, we talked about how God is concerned for
people. And for us, it is very easy to care about people, although the only
people we often care about most are ourselves and our immediate friends and
family. But God cares more than just that. We need to have a broader scope of
inclusion to welcome more and more into God’s grace and kingdom than Jonah did.
Jesus Himself quoted from the book of
Jonah and compared Jonah’s three-day stay in the fish to His own three-day stay
in the heart of the earth prior to His resurrection. Therefore, Jonah reminds
us that Jesus is the Risen One. He
arose from the grave after three days just as Jonah left the fish after three
days.
MICAH
Micah is the prophet of the
millennium.
Characterizing his prophesies are a
huge concern for the coming millennium, aka the millennial kingdom, a future
time of peace and security when Christ Himself will rule over the nations.
During Micah’s career, Israel falls into destruction. He sees the end of the
northern kingdom. Thus his concern is not for the human kingdoms that rise and
fall but for the coming kingdom of God. There’s more on the millennial kingdom
in Micah if you look for it in the latter chapters of the book of Revelation.
Micah prophesied over the sins of
God’s people, then their punishment and then their future restoration. A
key-verse out of the book of Micah is one of the most beautiful prophesies of
the coming kingdom: 4:3, “He shall judge between many peoples, and
rebuke strong nations afar off; they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
War came in Micah’s day. He saw the
destruction of Israel, but he looked beyond it to a time when people will no
longer learn war anymore. For all the unrest and tensions in our world today,
Micah’s message is one that gives me hope. There is a time coming when we won’t
have to worry over the threat of terrorism and wars rising between factions and
countries.
Christ is seen through the anticipation
of that coming millennial kingdom. In Micah, Jesus is seen as the Returning King.
NAHUM
Nahum
is the prophet of vengeance.
That’s ironic, because Nahum’s name
means “comfort”. How comforting is it that Nahum’s book is about vengeance?
Well, it’s comforting for all those who suffered under the Ninevites. Yes,
Nahum returns to the subject of the Ninevites and the Assyrians.
Interestingly, we can think of Nahum
as a sequel to the book of Jonah. Nahum directs his message against the same
city of Nineveh over 100 years after Jonah’s message and Nineveh’s repentance. In
Jonah, Nineveh repented and God relented from the wrath He was to pour out on
them. But now, Nineveh has returned to their violence and idolatry. So then
Nahum comes in with their final judgment: destruction. Nineveh would be swept
away, literally.
Nahum
1:8 is the key-verse: “But with an
overflowing flood He will make and utter end of its place, and darkness will
pursue His enemies.”
This was literally fulfilled. Nineveh
was defeated because of a flood. When there were unusually heavy rains during
the final siege of Nineveh by the Babylonians, the rainfall was so heavy that
Nineveh’s three rivers overflowed and the city walls were undermined and they
collapsed, allowing invading forces to enter the city and breach its defenses,
according to Greek historian Diodorus Siculus.
Christ is remembered in Nahum even in
the context of Nahum’s vengeance. We don’t often think of Christ in terms of
returning as an Avenger, but just read the conclusion of the battle of
Armageddon in Revelation where Jesus will wipe out the armies of the Antichrist
and return to this Christ-rejecting world. Thus, Christ is seen in Nahum as the Righteous Avenger.
HABAKKUK
The
prophet Habakkuk is the prophet of fairness.
That’s his concern. He looks around
himself and he sees incredible unfairness: a lack of justice, violence
everywhere, the wicked surrounding the righteous, and he cries out to God for
it. Habakkuk sees the dying nation of Judah, so close to their destruction, and
wonders how long this condition of decline can go on. Habakkuk wrestled with
the same questions that we ask today, the hard questions, like why God allows
certain things to happen, things that seem unfair.
A key-verse out of Habakkuk is one
which is also a key-verse for the whole New Testament, 2:4: “Behold the proud, his
soul is not upright in him; but the just shall live by his faith.” That
would later be taken up by the apostle Paul and justification by faith alone in
Christ alone would be revealed as the New Testament truth. How applicable in
the case of Habakkuk who looked around him but forgot to look up. Habakkuk was
living by sight, not by faith.
Habakkuk reminds us that we live by faith in Christ alone. It’s
interesting that there are so many things to worry over and get hung up about,
but “Christ alone” is a phrase we’d do well to remember.
ZEPHANIAH
Zephaniah
is the prophet of Judgment Day.
While it is true that each of the
minor prophets have some emphasis upon the judgments and the wrath of God,
Zephaniah really takes it to the next level. The theme of his writing is the
Day of the LORD, a coming time of tribulation and an outpouring of God’s wrath
not just upon Israel and Judah but upon the world, which the prophet describes
vividly in Zeph 1:14-18.
Remember the good king of Judah named
Josiah, the one who helped bring in revival to the people? Zephaniah was active
during that time of Josiah’s reign and it is perhaps the strength, the shock
and the blackness of Zephaniah’s warnings that aided in ushering in that time
of revival. Zephaniah emphasizes that the time of judgment is coming when sin
will finally be dealt with.
It makes me think about our modern era
when “doom and gloom” preaching is frowned upon, when nobody wants to hear or
tolerate “fire and brimstone” style messages. They seem to have gone out of
fashion with the Puritans. Zephaniah makes me think that the force of preaching
God’s coming judgment still has some part in revival, if we want to see revival
happen in our own time. People still need to be warned that the Day is coming.
People still need to be warned about the judgment upon sin that’s just over the
horizon. The message doesn’t need to change just because it has become
unpalatable.
“But Moses, can you scare someone into
turning to the Lord?”
Just ask Zephaniah. I don’t think that
this should characterize every message by every preacher and evangelist, but
let’s consider the warnings laid down by this prophet and see if the Spirit of
God would have us communicate them to those who need to hear it.
How is Jesus seen in Zephaniah? He is
seen even in the darkness of it all. Remember that the tribulation period, the
seven years coming, will end with the battle of Armageddon and the second
coming. Jesus is there Even in the
Darkness. Even in the darkest time in human history, Jesus will come to
execute judgment and righteousness and rule.
HAGGAI
Haggai
is the prophet of encouragement.
We completely read through the book of
Haggai a few weeks back so it should be pretty fresh in our minds still. Haggai
is the first of the three pre-exilic prophets: along with Zechariah and
Malachi. So Judah has already passed through their exile in Babylon and now
they have been allowed to return to the land with Ezra and Nehemiah. At first,
there is a lot of morale and excitement and the temple of God is slowly but
surely being rebuilt. But steadily, the cares of the world crept into people’s
hearts and the reconstruction of God’s temple eventually ceased. They stopped
working on God’s house because of their concern for their own houses, careers,
lives, and livelihoods.
A key-verse in Haggai is one which
really has stuck with me as one of the strongest statements out of these
ancient books: Haggai 1:4, “Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in
your paneled houses, and this temple to lie in ruins?” Haggai is raised up
by God to give a little rebuke and a little encouragement to the leaders and to
the people to get back to work. He says to the governor of Jerusalem:
“Zerubabbel, y u no finish temple?”
Haggai is about restoration, restoring
the temple yes, but really what that represents: restored faithfulness in the
people and restored relationship with God.
Jesus is seen in the book of Haggai as
the Desire of All Nations. Remember
that? Haggai 2:7, “‘And I will shake all nations, and they shall
come to the Desire of All Nations, and I will fill this temple with glory,’
says the LORD of hosts.” Haggai foresees a time when the temple is indeed
rebuilt and the glory of God returns to it. That’s a prophecy that goes all the
way to New Jerusalem in Revelation 21,
the great city that will have the glory of God, and the nations shall walk in
its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honor into it, and
it says that there is no temple there for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb
are its temple.
ZECHARIAH
Zechariah
is the prophet of the future temple.
A contemporary and perhaps teammate of
Haggai, Zechariah is raised up apparently from a family of prophets and
preaches with the same concern as Haggai about the state of the temple. But
while Haggai mainly focused on the present temple, Zechariah is more concerned
about the future temple. He emphasizes that the temple must be built now because of its part in the future when
Messiah’s glory will inhabit it. They weren’t just building a building, they
were building the future, paving the way for tomorrow’s blessings.
Zechariah is full of visions and
specific prophecies concerning the coming Messiah, the Savior Jesus Christ. In
fact, Zechariah may have more Messianic prophecies than any of the Twelve.
We’ll take Zech 9:9 as a key-verse:
“Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion!
Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having
salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey."
Just one example of a key-theme of the Messiah running through Zechariah.
Zechariah, for those of you that know
me, is one of my favorite of the minor prophets and I try to read it once a
year traditionally whenever I get to go down to the youth worker’s conference
in Murrieta. Zechariah has such a vast scope and is so mysterious that every
time I read it, it seems new and wonderful to me. Now if you read Zechariah,
you’ll realize that it is wacky. And I mean that respectfully, Zack…
Zechariah experienced many strange
visions: a woman in a basket identified as wickedness; horses and horsemen
reminiscent of the horsemen of the apocalypse; a flying scroll; olive trees
connected to a menorah with pipes and tubes… there’s a lot here. How do we make
sense of it all?
By going back to Jesus. More than
once, the Messiah is referred to by the prophetic title the Branch. So Jesus is
seen in Zechariah as the Branch.
What does that mean? I don’t have time to tell you so how about you go and read
it and study it for yourself. Zech 6:12 says
“Behold, the Man whose name is the
Branch! From His place He shall branch out, and He shall build the temple of
the LORD; yes, He shall build the temple of the LORD. He shall bear the glory,
and shall sit and rule on His throne; so He shall be a priest on His throne…”
A description of Jesus as both king and priest.
MALACHI
Last
one!
Malachi is the prophet of anticipation.
The last of the minor prophets is
Malachi, who comes on stage at the finale of the Old Testament, looking forward
to the future coming of the Messiah. A key-verse in Malachi does a great job of
summing up everything that’s come before Malachi in all the Old Testament: Mal 3:6-7 “For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O
sons of Jacob. Yet from the days of your fathers you have gone away from My
ordinances and have not kept them. Return
to Me, and I will return to you, says the LORD of hosts…”
Malachi closes out the Old Testament
with one word: “curse”, the very
thing that the law demanded upon those who did not or could not keep it: a
perfect word to sum up all the failure under the Old Covenant in the Old
Testament. The people had returned to the Promised Land from their exile, but
things had quickly turned sour again: priests acting shamefully, blemish
sacrifices being offered, men dealing treacherously, people no longer giving to
the Lord. But Malachi is not without hope.
Malachi
3:1-6 is a prophecy about John the Baptist who would announce and herald
the arrival of the Messiah. Malachi looks forward, four-hundred years in the
future and awaits that coming of that Messiah, closing out the Old Testament.
What comes between Malachi’s final
words and Matthew’s opening chapter is some 400 years of silence. Stuff
happened, oh yes, but there was no significant word from the Lord between
Malachi and Matthew. And I’m reminded in conclusion of Amos’ words that we
opened with tonight: A famine of hearing the Word of the Lord.
In one sense, we’re living in the
silent years today. The Word of God, though all around us and quickly available
to us, is hardly ever heard and though we have speedy access to it, we know so
little about it. Guys, I encourage you to get into studying the Word of God.
Don’t fall into the famine of the silent years.
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