©ChristianCourses.com/RBC Ministries Old Testament Basics - Lesson 10. Dr. Sid Buzzell. Lesson Ten. The focus of this lesson is Israel's prophets, or more accurately Israel's writing prophets. As you read the Old Testament, you discover that two of Israel's most famous prophets didn't write, they're not included in the writing prophets, Elijah and Elisha. And these two great prophets, who didn't write, represent many other Old Testament prophets: men and women who proclaimed God's message faithfully and were prophets. But we don't think of them as prophets often because they didn't write their sermons down. The prophetic office was ordained in Moses' day. Deuteronomy 18 records the beginning of the prophetic office as an office. Verse 18 of Deuteronomy 18, "God said to Moses, ‘I will raise up prophets from among their countrymen like you and I will put words, my words in his mouth and he shall speak to them all that I command him. It shall come about that whoever will not listen to my words, which the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.'" So the prophetic office was ordained by God, and God said, "I will raise up these people, I will put my words in their mouth, and they will speak for me. And because they're prophets, and because they speak for me, anyone who listens to them will be held accountable to me for what they said. Because a prophet doesn't speak in his own words, the prophet speaks in my words." In fact, as this passage continues, there is a strong condemnation against the false prophets who would come and call themselves a prophet but they didn't hear a word from God. And many of those prophets spoke very destructive messages. God condemned them, and God supported His own prophets. The Old Testament contains the written sermons from 16 different writing prophets. It's important to understand that not all these prophets spoke to the same people. To understand a prophet's message, it's crucial to understand who those prophets were speaking to. Today, preachers, and I'm one of them, go to the text, they study the text, they get the message from the text, and then one of the things a preacher wrestles with is how do I apply this text to my culture? The prophets began with the culture. The prophets saw something in their culture. They went to God and God gave them a message to speak into that culture. But if we don't understand the culture into which they spoke, their message really doesn't make much sense to us. In fact, let me urge you to get a good study Bible in a translation of the Bible that you like, that you find particularly helpful, and you'll see in the title of a study Bible the words "Study Bible." The Ryrie Study Bible for instance, the NIV Study Bible for instance, because these study Bibles will give you that background, that historical context into which the prophets spoke. But we divide the writing prophets up into six groups, some prophets; three of them actually spoke to Gentiles. Jonah spoke to the city of Nineveh, which was the capital of Assyria. Obadiah and Nahum spoke to a non-Israeli audience. Four of the writing prophets spoke to the people of Judah. Now go back and remember Israel and Judah, the divided nation, the southern nation of Judah. The prophets Joel, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk ministered and preached to the southern nation of Judah and those sermons were written down, and that's what we find contained in their prophecies, in their books. To the northern nation of Israel, the prophets Amos and Hosea spoke to them. The prophets Isaiah and Micah spoke to both the northern nation Israel and the southern nation of Judah. Two prophets, Ezekiel and Daniel, spoke to God's people during the period of the exile, which we looked at a couple of lessons ago. And then three prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, proclaimed their message and wrote those sermons down to the postexilic people, to the people during the reconstruction period, the people who lived under Ezra and Nehemiah. So understanding when these prophets proclaimed their messages is absolutely essential. For instance, if you don't understand that Haggai was proclaiming his message to people who were rebuilding God's temple after the destruction, Haggai makes no sense. So before you read a prophet, find out who was he speaking to and at what period of time. Now the prophets had a dual kind of ministry. Often when we hear the word prophet, we think of somebody gazing into their spiritual crystal ball and seeing the future. And while they did do that, their primary message was not looking into the future but addressing the circumstances of their time. Most often the reason the prophets were projecting out into the future is they were saying to their people, "If you do not listen to God's Word through this prophet, here is what will happen in the future." Sometimes that future was very specific. Now it's important to understand that from the prophets' day and the prophets' audiences' day, what the prophet was proclaiming was future to them. The majority of those messages are history to us. Some of what they proclaimed was way beyond their listener's day, even many of the prophets spoke of Jesus. And so it was future to them, it was long distant future even up to Jesus, but it's also history to us. There is very little in the Old Testament Prophets that is future yet to us. So when we're thinking about reading prophetically, now Daniel and Ezekiel and Isaiah are exceptions to that. But for the most part, while they did project into the future, they projected into the more near future; and while it was future to them, it's history to us, okay? So that's the . . . but understand that these men and women primarily as prophets were proclaiming God's Word, preaching sermons to the people of their own time. Let's look just briefly at some of these prophets and what their ministry was about. Amos, for instance, saw social injustice. He saw the poor going hungry while other people in Israel were living lavish lives. And so Amos' passion and Amos' message is very relevant to today as it was to the people of his day. He said, "God did not intend some people to live these lavish lives while other people, other countrymen, other people in Israel are starving to death." Hosea was primarily proclaiming God's Word against idolatry. It's a moving story of Hosea's own marriage being used as a case study, as an illustration of Israel's unfaithfulness to God. Habakkuk is right near the end of Judah's history. Habakkuk was complaining to God that he didn't do something about the injustice and the idolatry and the sin of his people Judah. And God said to Habakkuk, "You know I am going to do something about it." And Habakkuk said, "What are You going to do?" God said, "I'm going to raise up the Babylonians. They're going to wipe you out." Habakkuk said, "Well, now wait just a minute, how can you do that? They're worse than we are." So sometimes the prophets didn't really agree with God, sometimes the prophets found God's message troubling, but they proclaimed it anyway because they were God's messengers. Isaiah was a counselor to kings. When you read Isaiah's wonderful literature, it's just some of the most beautiful writing you'll find anywhere in all of literature. Even nonbiblical scholars talk about Isaiah's beautiful, beautiful writing, especially his poetry. But he was proclaiming both to the northern nation Israel and to the southern nation of Judah the warnings about being disobedient and unfaithful to God. Jeremiah lived right near the end of Judah's history. He was in trouble with the king because he was confronting them very forcefully about how their disobedience was leading this nation of Judah to destruction. Instead of listening to him they threw him in prison, they threw him into a slime pit, anything except listening to Jeremiah. Jeremiah is often called "the weeping prophet," weeping over the nation Judah, watching their self-destruction but also weeping over the agonies of his own life. Ezekiel and Jeremiah were contemporaries. It's important to understand that. We mentioned that earlier when we talked about the kingdom period, Jeremiah writing from Jerusalem, Ezekiel writing from the early days of the captivity. And Daniel also was a statesman who served the Babylonian and the Persian rulers, but he was God's prophet. He was God's spokesman, not only to his own people but also to these kings, to these Babylonian and Persian emperors. He had a marvelous ministry in high places much like Isaiah did. Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi were encouraging and ministering to the people who had come back from captivity, and under the Persian Empire were trying to rebuild their city and their way of life and their temple and to get life moving again under the struggles and the discouragement and the setbacks of that period of time. We read Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi encouraging and instructing the people to remain faithful to God. So the writing prophets are grouped by literature, by the type of writing into two major sections: the Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets. There are four Major Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. We call them Major Prophets only because their writings are longer. And then we have 12 Minor Prophets, and all the rest of the prophets fit into that period of the Minor Prophets. We divide them historically into three eras. We have the pre-exilic prophets; those are the prophets who ministered to Israel and Judah and sometimes to Gentiles before the destruction of Jerusalem, before the Babylonian exile. But their period of time is really quite brief. They began when Israel and Judah divided into the two nations. You remember that from the kingdom era. And shortly after that the prophetic ministry that we know of as "the writing prophets" began. And they went through to the exile. Then we have the exilic prophets, Ezekiel and Daniel; and then we have the three postexilic prophets. So if a prophet isn't Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, a postexilic prophet; if it's not Ezekiel and Daniel, an exile prophet; then it's one of the pre-exile prophets. So as you're reading a prophet, ask when did this prophet live? Pre-exile, exile, or after the exile? Because if you don't read them in their era, in their time period, they really don't make much sense, or they're very difficult to understand. They're grouped by audience into six periods, six groups. We already mentioned them: those who ministered to the Gentiles, those who ministered to Judah, those who ministered to Israel and Judah, those who ministered during the exile, and those who ministered to the pre-exile people. So these are various ways of thinking about the prophets. So ask yourself when you read a prophet what was his audience, what time period did he minister in? Then you can understand what was his message. The prophets, these writing prophets, were men who knew they were under God's commission to proclaim His truth. It wasn't easy to be a prophet. Sometimes your countrymen ridiculed you; sometimes you were thrown in jail; sometimes you were killed. Amos, the great prophet who railed against injustice in Israel, wrote these words, "Surely the Lord God does nothing unless He reveals His secret counsel to His servants the prophets. A lion has roared, who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesize?" Amos was a man under commission by God. Amos was a man who knew that God had spoken to him, and that put on him an enormous responsibility to speak to his people. Jeremiah said, "Each time I speak, I cry aloud. I proclaim violence and destruction because for me the word of the Lord has resulted in reproach and derision all day long." Jeremiah was saying, "Do you know what I suffer because I speak out God's Word? But if I say I will not remember Him, or speak anymore in His name, then in my heart God's Word becomes like a burning fire shut up in my bones and I am weary of holding it in, and I cannot endure it." But Jeremiah said, "I don't preach because it's fun. I'm certainly not in this for the money. Instead of money, I get a slime pit; instead of praise, I get thrown into prison. I've been beaten, my own family members have ridiculed me; they don't want anything to do with me. It's been a very costly thing. In fact, I've made the commitment at times: I'm going to stop, I'm not going to preach anymore, but it becomes like a fire in my soul, a fire in my bones. I can't hold it in." Now these were men who were possessed by God. They were possessed with a message. They were men and women of conviction. They knew what they were saying was right. They were men and women of compassion. They saw these people self-destructing, and they said, "I know the answer." It would be like a physician who has the cure for cancer walking through a cancer ward and saying nothing. These men and these women, these prophets said, "God has spoken to me, how can I not speak?" They spoke of God's love, they spoke of God's grace, but they also spoke of God's truth. Their message was: you are messing around with a roaring lion. You better listen. In these prophets, Jesus came together in His most elegant fashion. John tells us in John 1:14 that Jesus is the image of God. That in Jesus the fullness of God is revealed, and the fullness of God revealed in Jesus is that He's full of grace and truth. That's what the prophets were proclaiming. Truth says what you're doing is wrong. Truth says we cannot deny the fact that your behavior violates God's standard. God always proclaims truth, and the truth is that your behavior condemns you. But then over here is grace, and grace has a softer eye. Grace says while what you're doing is wrong, and while God cannot ignore your sin, God will stop at nothing to reclaim you from your sin. Truth and grace have a difficult time finding common ground. In fact, only one place at one time in all of history and in all the universe do grace and truth stand together, and that's at Jesus' cross. Only there do truth and grace meet and embrace. That was the prophets' message: "God will discipline you for your sin, but God wants to call you back to Himself and to forgive you." That is the eternal message of the prophets. That is the message of Jesus Christ to you and me today: "I will not tolerate your sin. I will not ignore it, but I will stop at nothing, including giving My own life to give you a way out of your sinful fallen condition." That's the prophets' message.