Intro to the Minor Prophets

Last Sunday we walked down the Emmaus Road with Jesus and two of the disciples as Jesus, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets…interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). In one of the most significant conversations in the New Testament, Jesus showed these followers that the story of redemption—the story God had been telling for thousands of years—culminated in Jesus of Nazareth.

So as we stand on the brink of 12 weeks in Amos, Micah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, and Joel, I want to spend our time this morning not simply talking about dates and other historical facts, but telling the story of Israel and seeing where we are in their history. I don’t know if you have this problem, but since the Old Testament starts with Genesis—which really is the beginning—I always assumed that everything rolled out chronologically like Zander and PJ rolling out the walkway for the wedding party. While it is true that Malachi is last book of the Old Testament both in order and chronology, the middle sections don’t work that easily. Needless to say, it surprised me when I was reading in Chronicles and lo and behold, Isaiah shows up! It’s like they leapfrogged over Job and Proverbs!

So where are we in the story when the Minor Prophets come on the scene? Before I answer that question, let me make a quick clarification about the name “Minor Prophets.” We use the word “minor” in a negative sense, like, “Oh, that ballplayer isn’t good enough to be in the major leagues so he’s in the minor leagues.” That isn’t what is going on here. It’s not as if Joel tried and tried to be a Major Prophet but just couldn’t make it. No, the descriptors “major” and “minor” relate to the length of the book, not the caliber of the prophet. So Isaiah, which is 66 chapters long, and Jeremiah, which is 52 chapters long, have major length while Amos, Obadiah, and Zechariah have minor length. That’s how we can get through 5 books in 12 weeks.

Now back to our question. Where do the Minor Prophets fit into the redemption story of the Old Testament? Well, the answer is “toward the end,” but that doesn’t help much if you’re not familiar with the story. So I want to give us five highlights of Israel’s story to put everything in context. I wish they created a really cool acronym, but all it spells is AMDER, so we’ll go with that, though I doubt it will spark any Christian merchandising campaigns. Don’t expect AMDER T-shirts or wristbands anytime soon.

So here are the big points, our AMDER points—Abraham, Moses, David, Exile, Return from Exile. That covers about 1,500 years of history and includes all of the Old Testament except the first 11 chapters of Genesis, which set everything up. And for all this history, for all that is written about it, the one thing I want to emphasize is the relationship God established with his people. This is not merely the story of the rise and fall of a nation. It is the story of God Almighty establishing a relationship with a nation. We can only understand the ministry of the Prophets in terms of God’s relationship with his people.

This relationship began when God came to Abraham and promised to make from him a great nation and give the Promised Land to this nation. God formed a covenant with Abraham, and whereas most covenants, like Greg and Erin’s wedding yesterday, have each party say, “I do,” in this covenant God said, “I do. Period.” And it’s a good thing, because Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob’s 12 sons could be rascals at times. But it was God who was faithful to his promise, his covenant with Abraham.

So we fast-forward 400 years to the Exodus, when Israel had been enslaved in Egypt and God brought them out with his mighty right arm. God had been faithful to his covenant with Abraham to multiply his offspring, and now he was fulfilling his promise to give them the land. Don’t miss this—it was God’s faithfulness to his covenant that drove the Exodus. Listen to these verses from Exodus 2: “During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.” The story of the Old Testament, the story of Jesus, the story of us, it all goes back to God’s faithfulness to his covenant with Abraham.

So God brings Israel out of Egypt, destroys Pharaoh’s army, then says to his people, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…This is how you are to live in covenant with me.” And he gives the 10 commandments and all the other laws. And as he gives the law, he tells them of all the ways he will bless them if they are faithful to God and all the ways he will curse them if they are not faithful to God and disobey his law. Again, this is crucial for understanding the Minor Prophets. Almost every curse that the Prophets either witnessed or foretold came straight from Deuteronomy 28, where God listed off the ways in which he would curse Israel if they forsook him and his ways.
We’ve looked at Abraham and Moses, and now we need to fly over the taking of the Promised Land and the period of the judges to King David. And I can’t help but throw in one word about seeing how the Old Testament story points to Christ. The book of Judges is a disaster, summed up by the last verse of the book—“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” In other words, the book of Judges, and King Saul for that matter, show what happens when there is not a good king over God’s people, and the prosperity under David shows what happens when there is a good king over God’s people. Yet David was by no means perfect, and God promised that he would put one of David’s offspring on the throne forever, and at that point you have a big, neon, flashing arrow pointing toward Jesus Christ.

For our purposes in seeing how the Minor Prophets fit into the big picture of the Old Testament story, we need to look at how we get from the D to the E in AMDER. How did we go from having a great king, David, to God’s people being conquered and carried away by their enemies?

When King David died, his son Solomon took the throne and built a magnificent temple where God’s people could worship. But Solomon strayed further and further from the Lord, in large measure because he disobeyed God and married women of other religions. In fact, the Bible explicitly says, “when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.” The consequences for this were devastating. Listen to what God says to Solomon in 1 Kings 11:

“And the LORD was angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned away from the LORD, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice and had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods. But he did not keep what the LORD commanded. Therefore the LORD said to Solomon, “Since this has been your practice and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you and will give it to your servant. Yet for the sake of David your father I will not do it in your days, but I will tear it out of the hand of your son. However, I will not tear away all the kingdom, but I will give one tribe to your son, for the sake of David my servant and for the sake of Jerusalem that I have chosen.””

And that is exactly what happened. After Solomon died his son Rehoboam took the throne, and it wasn’t long until Rehoboam alienated the 10 tribes in the northern part of Israel, and they set up their own king—Jeroboam. And this is what we call the divided kingdom. From this point on God’s people were divided into two countries—Israel in the north and Judah in the south.

It is during this time—from the splitting of the kingdom to the fall of each kingdom—that the prophets started writing down their words. There had been plenty of prophets in the past—Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, Elisha—but they had never published their work, so to speak, though you can read what they said in Samuel and Kings and Chronicles.

So we have this divided kingdom, and the northern kingdom, Israel, starts out on a bad foot and never recovers. Jeroboam set up idols for Israel to worship, and this trend of mixing idol worship with the worship of YHWH was carried on by every successive king of the northern kingdom. 1 and 2 Kings start sounding like a broken record—and this man became king, and he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and did not depart from the sins of Jeroboam, which made Israel to sin. This is where the prophets Amos and Hosea came in, to say, “if you don’t return to the Lord he will destroy you.” And they didn’t listen, so God sent the Assyrians to capture the northern kingdom, Israel, and in many ways the story ends there for the northern kingdom. If you want to read the tragic record of the northern kingdom, you can find it in 2 Kings 17.

Now that the northern kingdom dropped off the map, the rest of the story follows Judah, the southern kingdom. While Judah had plenty of bad apples for kings, they also had some great kings who sought to lead Judah in pure worship of the Lord. Sadly this was the exception rather than the rule, and about 130 years after Israel was conquered by Assyria, Judah was conquered and exiled by the Babylonians. This is the E in AMDER—Exile. And it was during this time that most of the prophets did their prophesying, warning Judah to turn back to the Lord, lest they be conquered like the northern kingdom. 4 of the 5 prophets we will be studying prophesied during this time. The other one, as I already mentioned, was Amos, who prophesied to Israel before they were conquered.

But even when Judah did not return to the Lord, God used the prophet Jeremiah to promise the people that they would only be in captivity for 70 years, then the Lord would bring them back to their land. And that is what happened. This is the R in AMDER—return from exile. During this time when the people of Judah were trying to rebuild their walls and houses and temple, God used prophets like Haggai and Zechariah to give them a kick in the pants to keep working.

AMDER—Abraham, Moses, David, Exile, and return from Exile. I hope this helps a bit, that the prophets we will be studying are between the D and the E—after king David and before the Babylonians took Judah into exile.

I hope somebody is asking the question, “Why study these prophets? How does this relate to my relationship with God today?” Here is the key. If you zoned out during the history part, please hear this one thing—this is all about a relationship. From Abraham to the return from exile the Old Testament is about God’s covenant relationship with his people. It runs across the AMDER gamut. Abraham was the one with whom God initiated the covenant relationship. Moses is the one through whom God gave the guidelines of how to live in covenant relationship with God. David received a new covenant promise that one of his offspring would rule on the throne forever. The Exile happened because God was punishing his people for breaking covenant and forsaking him. The return from Exile was driven by God’s faithfulness to his covenant despite his people’s sin. It is all about God’s covenant relationship with his people.

And as we saw last week, the ultimate fulfillment of God’s covenant promises is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham—in you all the families of the peoples will be blessed. Through Jesus Christ, the seed of Abraham, we Gentiles are grafted into the vine, so that we can read of God’s covenant relationship with Israel in the Old Testament and know that we too are part of that relationship.

The Minor Prophets that we will study all have the same message. They were given during different decades with different emphases, but the message was the same. You are in a covenant with God, and you have sinned and forsaken God. So God is going to punish you by allowing one of your enemies to conquer you and carry you out of the Promised Land. But God is faithful to his promise and will restore you. He loves you with an everlasting, steadfast, loyal, covenant love. He is a faithful husband even when you have been an unfaithful wife. He will restore you after he has punished you and you will be his people forever.

COMMUNION MEDITATION

One of the fascinating things about the Old Testament is that it not only told about greater things to come, but it gave types or pictures or foretastes of greater things to come. For instance, the Day of the Lord is one of the common themes in the prophets. And the prophets would point to disasters like the locust plague in Joel or the Babylonians burning down the temple, and use those as springboards to talk about God’s final judgment day. They said, “If you think this is bad, wait until you see God’s final judgment. Repent and turn back to the Lord before it is too late!” They used a little-d “day of the Lord” to point forward to the big-D day of the Lord, which is still in the future.

As we come to the communion table, we experience something bigger and better than they did in the Old Testament. Jesus was very intentional when he initiated the Lord’s Supper on the night of Passover. He tapped into the Jewish experience—the experience of a family raising a spotless lamb and sacrificing it so that lamb’s blood would cover the family and the Angel of Death would not kill their firstborn. Jesus used that experience to point to a greater work of sacrifice and covering: “this is my body…this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” This was not the blood of an animal; it was the blood of the spotless God-man, Jesus Christ.

Yet Jesus didn’t leave it there. Just as the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb pointed to something bigger and better—the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross—the Lord’s Supper points to something better—being with God forever in the New Heavens and the New Earth. At the first Lord’s supper Jesus said, “I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” Paul also notes the forward-looking aspect of the table: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

The bread and the cup do not point only to the sacrifice of Christ, they point to the fellowship with God that that sacrifice makes possible. Remember, it is all about the relationship. Christ died so that we could be reconciled with God and enjoy him forever!

So if you have never confessed your sins and put your trust in Jesus’ death and resurrection, do that now. As the bread and cup come by, take it and say, “Jesus, I believe that I am a sinner. I believe that you died to take the punishment for my sins and rose again to give me eternal life.” And if you are not at that point yet, please let the plate go by. The body and the blood are for those who believe. So if you are a believer, rejoice and be solemn that the Son of God died for you that you might enjoy him now and anticipate being with him forever. Our communion with God now is only a taste of our eternal fellowship with him in the New Heavens and the New Earth.