Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Harvester Podcast is brought to you by the Florida School of Preaching. Listen weekly to take a dive into biblical topics and thoughtful studies on things that matter to our eternal souls.
Welcome, welcome to the Harvester podcast.
We are happy that you have joined us today for our first episode in season five.
I am one of the hosts, Brian Kenyon, and with me are...
For Antemesaris
and Steven Ford.
And so all three of us are here this time for the first time in a long time and we are
happy that you are here.
We're gonna begin this season.
discussing the minor prophets.
we have chosen to name this season, majoring in the minors, that is the minor prophets.
And so we're gonna have an introductory lesson today.
And then we're just gonna go through the Bible order as we have them listed in our English
Bibles, Hosea through Malachi.
And we will discuss these.
kind of under the same format look at the historical background and we'll look at the
judgment the message in there along with the silver lining in the clouds mostly messianic
promises and then we will give some practical applications but before we get into that
we're just introduced the profits and when you think of them profits what do you think of
and then when you think of the minor profits what comes to mind
Well, think most people when they hear profit, they probably think of like future telling.
Even though it's a minor, minor part, no pun intended, of what a profit does.
Correct.
so, minor prophets, the prophets in general, and we'll talk about this more, but they were
not just future tellers or foretellers, but forth-tellers.
And I first heard that term, forth-telling, a long time ago.
I don't know who it originates with, but it does describe it.
A lot of the times, the prophets would interpret the past and also tell their audiences,
their hearers, what was going on in the present.
But we'll look at this in a moment.
in the he re-bible when when these were written and they were organized by the judeus
scribes and such they were called whether former prophets in the latter profits but what
they meant by profits were not always what we mean by profits the former profits for
example that section was composed of joshua judges first and second samuel first and
second kings of course in in the he re-bible there's just one book a samuel and one book a
king's
The latter prophets, that section was made up of two parts, the major and the minor
prophets.
The major prophets were Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.
The minor prophets were Hosea through Malachi.
And the thing about the minor prophets is, as far as we have record of, they are in the
same order as they are in our English Bibles, which is very interesting.
But that's the way we find them, unless my information has recently been
updated by recent discoveries, but as far as I know that is how they appear.
Alright, now the nature of Hebrew prophecy.
Now, prophecy may be defined, Gleason Archer defines it as an oral or written disclosure
in words through a human mouthpiece transmitting the revelation of God and setting forth
his will to man, end quote.
Now, in a broader sense,
even events such as the crossing of the Red Sea or the Brazen Serpent incident in numbers
can have prophetic significance in that the meaning of the event was not limited to that
time.
And I think when we had our season, believe it was number three, where George Beals
discussed prophecy at length and showed from Matthew 2 that there are all different kinds
of prophecies, one of which is typological, and that's what's being referenced here.
Alright.
many Old Testament events point forward to anti-typical fulfillment in the Messianic
kingdom, but in a broader sense.
fact, I thinking about in Matthew chapter 2 where Herod is having all the babies killed
and then Joseph is informed by God to go down to Egypt.
And then there's a reference there to Hosea 11.1.
Out of Egypt I called my son.
But if you did not have the New Testament revelation at all and you're just going by
Hosea, you would think he's talking about return from captivity.
But then Jesus tells us that's not the full meaning of the prophecy.
but at least part of that fulfillment is anti-typical of Jesus going into Egypt and coming
out.
in the Sermon on the Mount, he addresses that, at least in part, he says, I haven't come
to destroy the law of Moses, but to fulfill it.
And he uses the word fulfilled, and there's two different words he uses there.
One of them is to make full of meaning.
So he makes that passage, though he had an immediate context.
He adds to it and brings a fullness of that prophecy through his own life and ministry and
all those sorts of things.
Yeah, and that's one thing about prophecies.
Like for example, I'm thinking about the end of the world.
know, Jesus gave that prophecy in Matthew 24 about the destruction of Jerusalem and about
the end of the world.
And he says in there, you know, these things must come to pass before the end comes.
And so the destruction of Jerusalem is an event that's part of the ultimate fulfillment,
but it has to come first.
Now, Jesus,
didn't say how soon after it would come, know, immediately after or many years after,
whatever, you know, and we know the Lord hadn't come back yet and Jerusalem was destroyed
in 870, but of course we know time is nothing with God, 2 Peter 3 verse 8, but that event
had to happen before the end of the world could come.
And so I don't really think that that's dual prophecy, but just simply saying that that
event had to come before the end of the world.
And so we have to always look at the context in these prophecies.
And I think that's a good example because you one of the key themes in the minor prophets
as a whole is the day of the Lord.
The day of the Lord, the day of the Lord, the day of the Lord, and this idea of judgment
where obviously there are national judgments before the final judgment that in some ways
prefigure the final judgment.
do.
But there's, know, like when we get to Zephaniah, Zephaniah breaks out with God saying
I'll destroy everything off the face of the earth and you're like wow, you know, when did
that happen?
Well,
you read 2 Peter 3 and it seems like that's the final day of the Lord, you know, so I
think that that kind of fits Hand in Glove as well, where there's things that happen
before the ultimate thing that kind of look forward to and further prefigure that ultimate
thing, whether it's judgment or Christ or, you know, the church.
I think we read a lot about the church and the minor prophets and prophecy.
And that's one of the mistakes I think people make when they are
know, pre-millennialist, dispensationalist, et cetera, where they read passages about
Jesus's first coming and the establishment of the church and apply it to Jesus's second
coming and the, you know, thousand year reign or whatever it is where it's like, wait a
second, Jesus is reigning right now, you know?
But a lot of that in the minor prophets as well.
Yeah, and that's a very good point, and we'll repeat some of those things he just said
when we look at the prophets as they come out.
So that's very good point in an introductory place, be looking for that.
And even when you're reading the prophets on your own, you'll be looking for some of these
things that occur over and over again.
And they're more noticeable maybe in the minor prophets, because they're shorter.
And by the way, that term minor prophets has nothing to do with importance or inspiration
of them or the quality of them.
It just simply has to do with the length of them.
Although you sometimes wonder how Hosea and Zechariah, for example, could be classified as
shorter, but compared to Isaiah, Jeremiah, they're very short.
But Daniel, a little bit longer.
anyway, and so minor prophets had nothing to with that.
think maybe Augustine maybe named them minor prophets.
Some historian way back did that with that.
But anyway, so also by way of prophecies in the broader sense, you know, much of the Old
Testament is prophetic, but in the narrower sense, the term is confined to
discourse of those specifically chosen who occupied the function of a prophet.
Now in the Old Testament there are classified prophets by the nature of their message,
basically two classes of prophets, oral prophets and then written writing prophets.
Now the oral prophets, those who are explicitly called a prophet or a seer, sometimes the
word will be used, Abraham in Genesis 20 verse 7,
and in Psalm 105, 15 is referred to as a prophet.
Miriam, Exodus 15, 20 referred to as a prophetess.
Deborah, Judges 4, 4.
Samuel, 1 Samuel 1, 25.
And then in Acts chapter 3, 24, the prophets from Samuel on up spoke about these things.
Nathan, thou art the man, that prophet, 2 Samuel 7, verse 2.
Micaiah, 1 Kings 22, 7-8, Elijah, 1 Kings 18, 36, and Elisha, 2 Kings 6, 12.
These were all referred to as prophets or prophetesses, but we often don't think of them
when we think of prophets because we think of the writing prophets.
Yeah, like if you didn't have a book with your name on it, think sometimes we miss that.
And then of course there are the writing prophets, the major, and we've divided those into
major and minor prophets.
Major being Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and then of course Lamentations, know, I
guess we, yeah, they're with the prophets in our listing, you know, one could say that's
historical, but anyway, it's good stuff, Jeremiah writing that.
But anyway, so that's kind of the nature of prophecy, Hebrew prophecy.
Now the
function of a prophet, the responsibility of the Old Testament prophets was not primarily
to predict a future that is foretell, but rather to communicate the will of God which he
had given them by revelation.
And we mention the term foretelling.
know, foretelling is given information now, and that information now may be, you know,
what past scripture said that applies to now.
or maybe even what's going on now and i often think of a good example of that is you know
jeremiah ezekiel and daniel all those three prophets kind of overlap one another but god
had a spokesman in the courts of abalone daniel he had a spokesman in and out of jerusalem
jeremiah and then he had a spokesman among the captives by the river kebar
And all of those books, all three of those books involve Messianic prophecies, but they
also involve interpretations of history that are happening right now.
And they also involve, you know, here's what's going on now.
And, you know, Jeremiah might say what's going on with Daniel and vice versa.
And so God had a spokesman in every major section of where his people would be or that
would affect his people during those years right before the captivity.
and a little bit after the captivity.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And I think too, I think sometimes we forget when I read the prophets, minor prophets, I'm
reminded that in some ways it's similar to a preacher, right?
Like a preacher should have a source material in the word of God and you're proclaiming
the word of God, calling people back to the word of God and the prophets act in the same
way.
I mean, they're talking to people who were in a covenant with God and we're supposed to
know the law and we're supposed to know the books of Moses.
And oftentimes we're breaking that covenant and it's kind like, we're calling you back to
some of this isn't new information.
This is, hey, like seek the old paths.
Like Jeremiah says, right?
Like there's a way that God told us how to do it.
We need to get back there.
And they're like, they're really preaching the word of God, obviously directly, but also
alluding back to the law of Moses and the books that in the covenant that the people
weren't keeping.
One of the things that always kind of intrigues me about studying the Minor Prophets is
the, kind of like the overall flow that you'll see.
Like sometimes you'll have like the introduction of the person.
Who's this guy, where does he come from, why is he preaching, what have you.
And then you'll have like this message that comes, so you get like some historical
narrative in there.
So this king, that king, this person, that person.
And you also get like this message.
So it's not just like, ah
It's not just like a character study.
It's not only a narrative, but you also get this very stern, most of the time, message.
And so you kind of get all of it, kind all in one as this kind of study is there,
revealing this word.
And one of the other things that seems like that, some of them even struggle.
We probably talk about this a little bit more uh later on.
Some of them even kind of struggle with the message they have to preach, which I think, I
love the guy put that in there, lets us see the people grapple with this message
sometimes.
I think that can even be the case, as you just talked about, for preachers.
We know we have to preach God's word.
It's not a question about that.
We know we have to preach the whole council of God, because everybody needs it.
But then, it's not always easy to preach those, because you know faces associated with
this message.
know, hey, I know...
you know, John Dover is struggling, I gotta preach his message, and so you're preaching,
and you know, there's people, Judah or Israel or whoever, it's like, these are
individuals, these are like real souls that are going to face consequence and that.
That's just always, I know that wasn't like directly related to what you were just talking
about, but the kind of that three-fold part of it, and that the individuals receiving this
message are like, all right, what are we gonna do with it?
Yeah, that's a point.
Yeah, and I think that's very relevant because, and when you'd mentioned, know, with the
major prophets, we do have more of the character of the prophet.
Like, for example, Jeremiah, you could preach several lessons just on his character and
what he had to go through.
And then you could preach several lessons on his message and the background that's going
on.
And when you put those two together, you get really good stuff and a lot of preaching.
And some of these minor prophets, I'm thinking like Joel, for example, Obadiah, we don't
know a whole lot about them.
So you can't really go by that part, but the message you have to focus on, but guaranteed
when they were written, I mean, they knew the original readers, first readers, they knew
about that, and they knew what was going on and everything, and we don't have as big a
picture, but we still have great messages that we can learn from that.
And in the providence of God and the omniscience of God, you know, he would know that,
that later on, like for example, Joel, for example, the prophet Joel,
If he were not quoted in Acts chapter two, I don't know that we would really study him
much, or we would be aware of him much.
Kind of like Obadiah now.
Obadiah, we don't study Obadiah much at all because we don't hear him directly in the New
Testament.
But with Joel, we do, and with others, we do.
And there's still a great message in Obadiah that we'll get to, Lord willing, in this
season.
But it's just the nature of the prophecy.
All right, now the main, well,
The prophet was basically a mouthpiece for God.
A prophet is one who speaks on behalf of another.
And I think this is best illustrated, at least as uh introductory material, with Aaron's
relationship to Moses.
Aaron's relationship to Moses in Exodus chapter 4 and verse 10.
we read about one of moses's excuses as to why he could not go before pharaoh at least in
his mind he didn't think he could go and the bible reads then moses said to the lord all
my lord i'm not eloquent neither before nor since you have spoken to your servant but i'm
slow speech and slow of tongue so the lord said to him who has made her who made man's
mouth or who makes the mute the death the seeing or the blind have not i the lord
now therefore go and i will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say through
verse eleven and verse twelve so the lord said to him who has made man well just read that
verse fourteen so the anger of the lord was kindled against moses and he said is not Aaron
the levite your brother i know that he can speak well and look he is also coming out to
meet you when he sees you he will be glad in his heart now you shall speak to him and put
the words in his mouth
and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth and I will teach you what you shall do."
And so he gives Moses the answer to his excuse and saying that Aaron is going to be your
mouthpiece and God said, will be with Aaron, I will be with you, Moses.
But then when we read in Exodus chapter 7 and verse 1, now the Lord said to Moses, see I
have made you as God to Pharaoh.
And Aaron your brother shall be your prophet, and you shall speak that all I command you,
etc." And so here in Exodus 7-1, he calls Aaron Moses' prophet, but back in chapter 4, he
said he'd be your mouth, your mouthpiece.
And so a prophet is just simply one who speaks on behalf of another.
Yeah, think Exodus 4 16 he calls him a spokesman to you know, spokesman mouthpiece mouth
prophet all that kind of signifying the same thing
Also showing that the prophet wasn't presumptuous.
wasn't just like he's saying what he thinks, what he feels.
It's, hey, this is coming directly from God.
I'm literally just like a speaker.
Yeah.
uh
And it's not a fortune teller or something like that.
think sometimes people, a lot of people view prophecy that way, but it's literally just
what does God say?
Sometimes God's revealing the future, right?
But not always, yeah.
Right, and it also shows, as we mentioned, that the prophet has no authority to speak his
own words.
In fact, we'll come across, yeah, it'll be in the minor prophets, too, but especially in
the major prophets, talk about, God will say, I did not send these prophets.
They're speaking out of their own heart and their own will and so forth, and so um God's
prophecies are there.
And they're commissioned.
It's not like a guy says, you know what?
I want to go speak on behalf of God.
God, me some time to go talk for you.
It's always the word of the Lord came unto this person and God's saying, hey, I'm going to
send you to that group of people.
So it was God initiating the contact with the prophet and initiating the message and those
whole things.
It's not like the person is just saying, hey, here's what I want to go do.
God let me
Yeah, sometimes it's called a burden too, you know, where it's like, don't even like I
think about Amos, you know, we'll get to him but I think it's either chapter six or
chapter seven, you know, where he's told to stop preaching by the false priest and he's
like, I'm not a prophet.
I'm not the son of a prophet.
God sent me here, you know, and it's like, it's like you said, it's not like a vocation
that I chose.
Like God chose this for me and obviously free will is involved.
See Jonah, you know what I mean?
But
you it's as a task given by God.
And Jeremiah, Brian mentioned Jeremiah a little while ago, that's one of my favorite
studies of prophets, because you see the whole range of emotions with him.
It's like, I don't wanna go, I don't wanna do this, this is not my choice to go and preach
doom to these people.
And then, God's like, no, you need to go and do this, here's a message I have.
and he needs to kind of be encouraged along the way of his ministry.
needs to go and do it.
Because, and that's even an act of mercy too.
The guy said, listen, these people need to hear it.
They need to hear what's coming, what's the potential, what's the way out of it.
oh They need to hear it.
you get to see the fact that it is a burden to some, it is difficult to some.
Some make excuses, but it's like you still gotta go and do it.
And people might not want to hear it, but they need to hear it.
Yeah.
And we see that throughout the prophets.
And so the prophet was not, and here's a quote from Archer again, was not to be regarded,
quote, not to be regarded as a self-appointed professional whose purpose was to convince
others of his own opinions, but rather he was called by God to proclaim as a herald from
the court of heaven the message to be transmitted from God to man.
And when I think of passages like 2 Timothy 4 verse two, preach the word, be in sin, in
season, out of season,
And other passes, that's the same as a preacher, which we just mentioned that with
preachers and prophets, very similar in their duty and in their jobs.
All right, the function of the Hebrew prophets, what the prophet had the responsibility,
number one, to encourage God's people to trust in the Lord's power rather than in their
own strength and or the strength of earthly allies.
And we'll see this in the background of some of these prophets, and that's real, just as
real today as it was back then.
is the temptation to trust in worldly alliances and worldly powers.
And that's one thing that worries me about our president, you know, is he talks about,
almost comes across braggadocious about how great our military is and all that.
And yes, it's great and all that, but it's nothing without God.
And so I know that pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
And so we have to be cautious on
Don't put your trust in horses and chariots
all right also certainly the prophet had the responsibility to remind the people that
their success and or failure was conditioned upon their adherence to god's law and this
comes out a lot of nasa one thirteen through eighteen where he list all these things that
they were doing but yet god says i'm sick of them don't want anything to do with it
because your hands are full of blood etc thirdly the prophet had the responsibility to
encourage israel about her condition
their conditional future, blessings or curses, depending upon their response to God's
Word.
And then fourthly, Hebrew prophecy was to seal the authoritativeness of God's message by
the objective verification of fulfilled prophecy.
And sometimes that prophecy would come in a relatively short time, like in 2 Kings 7.
Sometimes the fulfillment would be so far in the future, so as to be beyond the experience
of those to whom it was spoken.
but those prophecies were maybe more for our benefit than theirs.
But in such cases, verification would benefit only future generations.
However, circumstances may call for this kind of verification, like Isaiah 42 verse 9,
Isaiah 44, 7 through 8, and various times in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, especially Ezekiel, he
would be told several times throughout his prophecy, then you shall know that I am the
Lord.
And so the prophecies
may not come in their lifetime.
In fact, I don't know, maybe lot of them would not, but in our lifetime, and we see it all
together again, the providence of God, the omniscience of God.
He knows when those prophets were written, and God knows future generations, even future
from us, that those prophecies in the Old Testament would still be relevant simply because
of the Word of God and what's going on in society.
I Peter talks about, know, first Peter, the prophets, with the angels longing to look into
these things and the prophets not even always knowing what exactly they're talking about.
Looking forward to Christ and his, his ministry and his suffering and establishment of the
church and all that where.
But it still would be hopeful.
You know, I think about a lot of these minor prophets, especially end with this messianic
expectation of, God's not done with us yet.
there's still something even better God is working toward.
And I think you see how a lot of those expectations build so that when Jesus, in the
fullness of time, when Jesus is born and does grow and start his ministry, everybody's
primed and ready for what he's going to do, you know.
That's an interesting point that the prophets didn't even always understand it and it's a
demonstration that God's revealed will to and through the prophets wasn't always to say
I'm gonna give you kind of the behind the curtain look.
It's not that.
You just go and preach what I'm telling you to preach.
And I also think it's kind of interesting that God would, he would commission the preacher
or the prophet, excuse me,
And the prophet was to go and talk to the people, but it was never a thing of like, hey,
I'm gonna give you the message and I'm gonna tell every individual the message also.
I'm gonna give this prophet the message.
He can, in some cases, maybe demonstrate some miraculous thing, but very rarely.
It was just go forth and tell.
And it was the people's responsibility who knew God to believe that message from God.
And it just reminded me of uh Luke 15.
where, excuse me, 16, where the rich man is like, well, hey, go back and warn my brothers.
No, in essence, they've got the prophets.
They have Moses and the prophets.
Let them hear them.
so God has already revealed his message.
He wants us to know what to do, why to do it, when to do it, how to do it, those sorts of
things.
And it's man's responsibility to hear that message.
But I think it's just kind of neat that it was always the commissioning and conditioning
almost of the prophet.
Go out and tell this message.
Get your heart ready.
And I keep thinking about Jeremiah and Ezekiel too.
God said, listen, the people are gonna be mean and they're not gonna listen, they're gonna
be hard-headed, they're gonna have stern faces, but go preach to them anyway, because they
need to hear the message.
And it wasn't about conditioning the hearts of the people.
That's up to them.
It's just like, here's the message, so you need to go out and preach it.
Yeah, yeah like that conditioning or commissioning and conditioning.
I'm think of a third point that rhymes with that.
Yeah, I gotta get another point.
Get a servant in there.
All right, well as we think about and we're gonna make the transition to getting into our
episodes on each of the prophets, but uh before we do that, the message of each of the
writing prophets, each one was written against the backdrop of a real historical time.
uh
setting that has a lot to do with understanding the message.
And so we'll have each of these prophets, we'll kind of begin with a little bit of
historical background as we start them, but also that historical setting was also relevant
to the moral and religious situation of each of the prophets' own time.
And we see that in our culture today as well, that depends on the cultural things going
on, depends on the sins that are going on.
And we see that a lot.
ah
you know, like the 1950s compared to now, a lot different.
Sins are, well, of course, sins are basically lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and
pride of life, how those are carried.
Yeah, are different.
Yeah, and I think to sometimes we stood like I think America is a great example because
you said if you would ask What is the culture of America?
Well when you know 1940 1950 1800 2026 it's different and sometimes when we're studying
Israel we forget like in the minor prophets There's a 400 500 year span.
Yes, where you know the situation when obadiah Joel whoever is prophesying isn't
necessarily the same situation when
Haggai Zechariah is prophesying where there are cultural things, are certain sins, there
are certain, you know, contexts that the prophet's speaking to directly.
That's something we always have to keep in mind when we study it.
It's sometimes can be difficult to keep that backdrop of culture in mind.
There was an actual context in which those people were living and what they were
experiencing.
And so the prophet's message was specific.
And sometimes we kind of lose that.
We just want to read the words and what do the words say.
Well, they were written at a particular time for a reason.
There's all that extra layer.
I'm glad we'll get to kind of talk about that with the introduction of each prophet.
Yeah, and so the prophetic messages are just as relevant today as they were back then in
other words humanity We still trust in material strength and wealth more than God
sometimes We still lie steal commit adultery both physical and spiritual adultery
Oppression and injustices are still rampant as they were in the days of the prophets We
still prefer the preacher sometimes who presents the pleasant message
and assures us that all is well.
We like to hear peace, peace, when in fact there is no peace.
And then also, mankind today still thinks that external acts, quote unquote, will justify
ungodliness.
But remember what the Lord told Samuel?
To obey is better than sacrifice and to hearken than the fat of rams.
And so the messages of the prophets are still relevant today.
because we live in a culture much like theirs at times and sometimes different but all
goes back to the same thing we need God we need to recognize that and if we don't trouble
is coming
People are still people, God is still God.
And I love that you get to hear right from virtually the mouth of God, here is what I'm
displeased with.
And it's not like conjecture, I think God doesn't like this, I think God doesn't like
that.
There's a lot that can come in our current culture.
We take our hot button issues and make those the main things that we think God is happy
with or displeased with.
we say, what does God say?
We get to hear it right from those prophets, what he likes, what he doesn't like.
Yeah.
All right, with this introduction of the prophets, we're ready to begin our fifth season,
majoring in the minors, that is, minor prophets.
We are glad that you joined us today, and we'd love to hear back from you, get some
feedback.
And so you can email us or you can contact us to the Florida School of Preaching.
But we thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Harvester Podcast.