01 Introduction to the Prophets

Krisan Marotta: Good morning. This is Krisan Marotta, welcoming you to Wednesday in the Word. This is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today we'll be listening to a talk given by Dr. Erica Moore titled Introduction to the Prophets. Dr. Moore is a professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Trinity School for Ministry. I first heard this talk at the October 2009 Women in the Word workshop, which is a Ministry of World Reformed Fellowship. I'll put a link to their website in the lecture notes. I'm very grateful to republish Dr. Moore's talk here on Wednesday in the Word. She is one of my favorite teachers, especially when she's teaching on the Old Testament. Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy. Speaker 1: The title of our first talk today is an introduction to the prophets, basically asking and answering who were the prophets. Now, this Women in the Word workshop emphasizes redemptive history. The outworking of God's plan of redemption, calling a people to himself. And so what we want to do today is figure out where the prophets fit into that plan of salvation. And in particular, we want to look at Ezekiel. Not so much at this session, but this evening and then, especially this evening, and then some tomorrow. And some people ask, you know, why'd you pick Ezekiel? Well, when I go and teach a Sunday school class on Ezekiel, a Bible study, or speak at something such as this, and I say I'm going to speak on Ezekiel, I've yet to see a bunch of people roll their eyes and say, Ezekiel, Ezekiel, that's all I ever hear about is Ezekiel. I'm Ezekiel out. So hopefully we'll learn some new things today looking at a book that many people do tend to ignore. I had the privilege of working on Ezekiel for my dissertation, so I got to spend six years looking intimately into the book of Ezekiel. So the we want to ask and answer the question who were the prophets? And I have some quotes up there. The first one by Phil Yancey Three reasons why people don't read the prophets. They're weird, they're confusing, and they all sound alike. Okay? Well, hopefully by the end of this weekend, they won't appear to be too weird. And Ezekiel is usually considered the weirdest of the weird. Okay, he's just uh he does all these peculiar synacts of people read Ezekiel and scratch their heads. Confusing. Well, hopefully, they'll be a little less confusing after our time together. And uh we'll also see some of the distinctives in in different uh portions of the prophetic corpus of literature. So hopefully we'll be able to have a different view than Philip Yancey there. And then Martin Luther. The prophets have a queer way of speaking. It always takes Martin Luther to say it as it is. So I'm German, so I it takes one to know one. Who were the prophets? When we think about Ezekiel, Isaiah, Obadiah, Haggai, did Ezekiel just wake up one day and say, I think I'll be a prophet when I grow up? How is it? Where do the prophets fit in to redemptive history? Okay, and the first piece of the puzzle that we want to think about is that the prophets were successors to Moses. Okay, now what do we mean by that? Okay, well, we need to turn to Deuteronomy 18. One of the expressions that my former professor at Westminster, Ray Dillard, would say repeatedly is context is king. And uh, I don't know how many times I'll say that over the weekend, but I will be saying it a few times. We need to understand the context of a passage when we're trying to understand what it's about. And when we get to the book of Deuteronomy, it is Moses's swan song. The Israelites are perched on the plains of Moab. They're about to enter the Promised Land. You remember that the first generation died off, except for Caleb and Joshua. Moses himself will not get to at this time enter into the land of Canaan because of his sin back in the book of Numbers. So he is in Deuteronomy, he is recounting to the people before he dies the things that he wants to impress upon them. So Deuteronomy is Moses' swan song. And in Deuteronomy 18, Moses is preparing the people for the time when he will no longer be leading them. And when we read in Deuteronomy 18, we'll start at verse 9. When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there. Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft or casts spells, or who is a medium or a spiritist, or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord, and because of these detestable practices, the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you. You must be blameless before the Lord your God. And it's interesting that the next topic in the chapter is answering the crisis and leadership that will ensue when Moses is no longer there. When Moses is dead, he is the one who has been the mediator between the Israelites and God. If you remember back in Exodus at Mount Sinai, the people begged Moses to intervene because they were so frightened by the awesomeness of God's presence on Mount Sinai. Well, what's going to happen when Moses is gone? Who was going to mediate on behalf of God to the people? So Moses sets out to the people that when he's gone, they're not to practice all these detestable practices of the Canaanites. That's why they're being vomited out of the land, if you will. And then he tells them what God's answer is to the crisis and leadership that will happen when he dies. He says in verse 14 of Deuteronomy 18, the nations you will dispossess, listen to those who practice sorcery or divination. But as for you, the Lord your God has not permitted you to do so. The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers. You must listen to him. For this is what you asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God, nor see this great fire any more, or we will die. The Lord said to me, What they say is good. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. I'll put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him. If any one does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name, I myself will call him into account. Now there's some ambiguity that comes into the text in the next verse. But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name, anything I have not commanded him to say, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods must be put to death. You may say to yourselves, how can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord? If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is the message, the a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him. So when we say that the prophets were successors to Moses, the first thing that we need to appreciate is that when Moses was gone, God promised to raise up other intermediaries that he would give his word to so that they could then present it to the people. And this would be the prophets. This would be the Obadiahs, the Ezekiels, the Samuels, the Elijah's, the Elishas. But there's, as I said as I was reading, there appears to be some built-in ambiguity in the text. Up until verse 19, it's clear that the Lord is speaking about a prophet. I will raise up for them a singular prophet. But then in verse 20 and following, it's obvious that there will be more than one prophet. But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name, anything I have not commanded him, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods must be put to death. And this is how you test whether or not a prophet is from me or not. And we're going to come back to that ambiguity at the end of this afternoon's lecture. And I do believe it's intentional there. So on the one hand, the prophets are Moses' successors. They mediate the Lord's will to the people. They function as the Lord's spokespersons. Okay? The second piece of the puzzle as to figuring out when I'm reading Isaiah or Obadiah or Zechariah, who are these guys, what are they doing, is that in addition to being successors to Moses, they were guardians of the theocracy. They were sent by God to remind the kings of their covenant obligations. When you think of King Ahaz, you think of Isaiah. When you think of Elijah the prophet, you think of him going before Ahab and Jezebel. So the second thing that we want to understand as we fit the prophets into redemptive history is that they were sent by the Lord to remind the kings of their covenant obligations. And remember, Deuteronomy is Moses' swan song. It's his last words to the people before they enter Canaan and he dies. And he prepares them for the time when they'll have a king. My NIV at verse 14 of Deuteronomy 17 says the king. And here he gives regulations for the king. Okay, in verse 16, first of all, he cannot be a foreigner, verse 15. He cannot acquire great numbers of horses, he can't return to Egypt, he should not take many wives, verse 17. And then in verse 18, when he takes the throne, he's to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law taken from that of the priests who are Levites. It's to be with him, and he's to read it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees, and not consider himself better than his brothers, and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel. So prophets were sent to remind the kings of their covenant obligations. So they're successors to Moses, their guardians of the theocracy. And thirdly, the prophets, Hosea, Joel, Amos, were covenant prosecutors. You won't understand the prophets or their message without understanding the covenant between Yahweh and his people. Okay? And that's why we do biblical theology at sessions like this, so that we can put these things together. So Ezekiel. Ezekiel wasn't written so that we in 2009 can figure out if Russia is really the enemy of God or not. Okay? And there are a lot of our dear brothers and sisters in Christ who do precisely that. And I'll share a little more about that this evening. But that wasn't Ezekiel's primary purpose. Ezekiel's purpose was the Lord raised him up at a particular time in redemptive history, and one of his jobs was to act as a prosecutor and to prepare. Ezekiel happened to be ministering in Babylon, and he was there among the exiles, preparing them for what in their minds had become unthinkable, and that is that Jerusalem and the temple would be destroyed. And so the Lord raised up Ezekiel and kept, and Ezekiel kept telling the people, God is going to do this because you haven't kept your part of the covenant. Okay? So the covenant was established. The Lord takes the people out of Egypt. They become an established nation at Mount Sinai in Exodus 19 and 20. And there are covenant obligations that they have in this new relationship with Yahweh. And there's been quite a few scholars, Meredith Klein, a guy named Menden Hall, who've actually shown the parallels that exist between the book of Deuteronomy, for example, and covenants that were written between a sovereign and his underling in the second millennium B.C. So the prophets come along and they bring the covenant to bear on the people. If you don't obey, this is what's going to happen. So Deuteronomy 30 and Isaiah chapter 1. And we'll start with the Isaiah passage. Now Isaiah was an 8th-century prophet, and he was raised up by the Lord to speak and to the southern kingdom. And among other things, okay, he's he one of his jobs is to explain the exile that was going to happen at some further point and explain why it was going to happen. And he starts in verse 2. Verse 1 is just a little biography of Isaiah telling us that he's connected to royalty. And in verse 2 of chapter 1, he starts out, Hear, O heavens, listen, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. I reared up children and brought them up, but they've rebelled against me. The ox knows his master, the donkey his owner's manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand. Now, why is Isaiah at the beginning of his book invoking the heavens and the earth? Well, if we go back to our Deuteronomy passage, and I meant 32, Deuteronomy 32, I'm sorry. In 32, verse 1, listen, O heavens, and I will speak. Hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. When the Lord had entered into covenant with Israel, one of the practices, a common practice when a covenant was entered into at that particular time, was you had witnesses. Well, who's going to be a witness between God's covenant with Israel except the heavens and the earth? So when Isaiah, back in chapter 1, verse 2, invokes heaven and earth, he's reminding the people of the covenant and the fact that it's because they've broken the covenant that judgment is coming on them. Another example, turn to the book of Hosea. And Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, the first of what I don't like saying minor prophets, just smaller prophets. There's no such thing as a minor prophet. And in Hosea chapter 4, he's actually more explicit. He says, Hear the word of the Lord, you Israelites, because the Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land. Okay? Here, again, the prophets are covenant prosecutors. And Hosea is saying, This is the charge that God is bringing against you. We had a covenantal agreement, and you have not kept your part of the covenant. There's no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgement of God in the land. There's only cursing, lying, murder, stealing, adultery. They break all bounds and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Okay? So the prophets were folks raised up by the Lord to remind not just the kings of their part in keeping the covenant, but the people themselves. And to show the people that the judgments that they experienced were not evidence that God was impotent, but the judgments that they experienced were evidence that God means what he says and says what he means, and that the reason they were being judged is because they had broken the covenant. Now, we won't take the time to read this today, but two passages of Scripture that if we had another hour we could read, but it would be good for you to write down are Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. When I teach Old Testament at Trinity, I we refer to these often, and I tell my students, you won't understand Ezekiel, Hosea, Jeremiah without understanding Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. And I'm more familiar with the Deuteronomy 28 passage. I just tend to go there more often. But what these passages do is they give the curses that will come for covenant disobedience, and they give the blessings that will come when the covenant is obeyed. And why that's important is because so often, Isaiah, Malachi, the prophets are referring back to those principles in their indictments against the people. Fourthly, in addition to being successors to Moses, guardians of the theocracy, covenant prosecutors, the fourth thing that piece for us to help understand the prophets is that they were witnesses to God's sovereign rule over history. They were witnesses to God's sovereign rule over history. When they spoke, they were ministering the words of God, not merely their own personal observations. Okay, it wasn't his own creation. They were giving the words of God. Over 5,000 times, according to Walter Kaiser, over 5,000 times in the Old Testament, the prophets say, Thus says the Lord. Okay? 5,000 times. And what they're doing is they give a word, usually, not always, of warning, and they announce that when this comes to pass, then the people will know that God indeed is sovereign over history. For example, Ezekiel, over 65 times in his book, Ezekiel says, such and such will happen. And after such and such happens, he gives some sentence or variation of this. Then you will know that the Lord is God and a prophet has been among you. Okay? Over 65 times he says that. Okay? Because, and why does he do it so much? Because Ezekiel's message in particular was a very hard one for the Jews to swallow, because Ezekiel's message was that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed. And it had become at that time an established belief among the people that Jerusalem could never, ever, ever, ever be destroyed. And so when they were hearing Ezekiel preach this, they were in their minds hearing somebody who was speaking gibberish. And they thought they even had scripture to back up their ill conceived notion. So Ezekiel over and over again says, when this happens, then you will know that the Lord is God. He is sovereign over history, and you will know that a prophet has been among you. Isaiah does something similar. Let's turn to Isaiah chapter 41. And again, Isaiah is an 8th century prophet sent to the southern kingdom. And in Isaiah 41, listen to how Isaiah is mocking the idols that were, that folks were tempted to worship. And I'm on verse 21 in Isaiah 41. Present your case, says the Lord. Set forth your arguments, says Jacob's king. Bring in your idol to tell us what's going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or to declare to us the things to come. Tell us what the future holds, so that we may know that you are God. Do something, whether good or bad, so that we will be dismayed and filled with fear. But you're less than nothing, and your works are utterly worthless. He who chooses you is detestable. So you see, Isaiah is mocking the idols that other people were worshiping and the Jews were tempted to worship because they were dumb. They couldn't talk about the future. And yet God had raised up prophets to tell the people what would happen, and that when it happened, then they would know that God indeed was sovereign over history. Another piece in this puzzle is that the prophets were intercessors. And I think this is important because in a couple minutes we're going to talk about how, according to Scripture, you and I have a prophetic function in the world today. And so these things are important for us because we do some of the same sorts of things that the prophets did. And too often when we think about the prophets, we think of them as receiving a word from God and then passing it on to the people. And that's certainly, as I've hopefully been demonstrating, one of the things, one of the functions of the prophets. But another function of the prophets was to pray for their people. And let's turn to Genesis 20, which is the first time in Scripture that the word prophet is used. Genesis chapter 20. We'll start at verse 1. Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of Negev and lived between Kadesh and Shur. For a while he stayed in Gerar, and there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, She is my sister. Then Abimelech, king of Gerar, sent for Sarah and took her. But God came to Abimelech in a dream one night and said to him, You're as good as dead because of the woman you have taken, she is a married woman. Now Abimelech had not gone near her, so he said, Lord, will you destroy an innocent nation? Did he not say to me, She's my sister? And didn't she also say, He's my brother? I've done this with a clear conscience and clean hands. Then God said to him in the dream, Yes, I know you did this with a clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That is why I did not let you touch her. Now listen to verse 7 carefully. Now return the man's wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you, and you will live. So the first time we hear about a prophet in Scripture, in this case Abraham, prayer is connected, as prayer is one of the things that prophets do. Another important passage is in 1 Samuel chapter 12. 1 Samuel chapter 12. And my NIV at 1 Samuel 12 says that this is Samuel's farewell speech. And we know that Samuel was a prophet. You remember he anointed both Saul and David. And at the end of his life, listen carefully to his words in his farewell speech to the people. And we'll start at verse 20. Do not be afraid, Samuel replied, You have done all this evil, yet do not turn away from the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart. Do not turn away after useless idols. They can do you no good, nor can they rescue you because they are useless. For the sake of his great name, the Lord will not reject his people, because the Lord was pleased to make you his own. Now listen carefully to verse 23 here in Samuel's farewell speech. As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you. So the prophet Samuel would have considered his ministry to be full of sin against the Lord if he had failed to pray for the people. And then he goes on, and I will teach you the way that is good and right. And then one more example. Let's turn over to Jeremiah chapter 14. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. Jeremiah chapter 14. And Jeremiah is Ezekiel's contemporary. Jeremiah is pretty much giving the same message that Jerusalem will be destroyed to the people in Jerusalem, while Ezekiel is hundreds of miles away east in Babylon in exile. So they're contemporaries saying the same message. And in Jeremiah 14, verse 11, the Lord said to me, Do not pray for the well-being of this people. That's pretty amazing. The Lord commanding Jeremiah, do not pray for the well-being of this people. Although they fast, I will not listen to their cry. Though they offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Instead, I will destroy them with the sword, famine, and plague. But I said, Our sovereign Lord, what's he doing? He's praying. It was such a habit of Jeremiah's that when the Lord tells him, Do not pray, he goes right back to the Lord, our sovereign Lord. The prophets keep telling them, You'll not see the sword. Indeed, I will give you lasting peace in this place. And he goes on again, verse 19, have you rejected Judah completely? Again he prays. It was such a habit of Jeremiah to pray for his people. Prophets don't only receive a word from the Lord and pass it on to the people, they're intercessors. They go before the Lord on behalf of the people praying for them. Another component to us understanding a redemptive historical, uh redemptive historically, who the prophets are, is that they were primarily forth tellers and not foretellers. This is make a nice little bumper sticker, I've always thought. Fourth tellers and not foretellers. And what do we mean by that? unknown: Okay. Speaker 1: Too many times the prophets are gleaned for what we think they can say to us today. I said Ezekiel in particular is often, people hardly ever read Ezekiel, and when they do, they go to see what Ezekiel has to say about China or Russia. I don't know which is worse, not reading it or reading it for those reasons. But the Lord did not primarily raise up Ezekiel for us to figure out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys today. Okay, the prophets did not speak in a cultural vacuum. When the Lord raised up Isaiah and Jeremiah, he raised them up to speak to their contemporaries. So when I say that the prophet, I mean I didn't come up with this, this is just a common little bumper sticker. Their messages instructed the people regarding God's character as well as giving a spiritual diagnosis of the people. They gave a warning and an appeal to those living in sin. Okay, so their job was to bring God's word to bear on their contemporaries. Now I'm not saying that Ezekiel and Jeremiah and the prophets don't have anything to say to us today. I'm not saying that at all. But I'm saying that primarily they were raised up as preachers to bring God's word to bear on their contemporaries. Okay. And it seems, again, I'm not saying there's no predictive element to their message. There certainly is. But it seems to me that whenever things heat up in the Middle East, that there's a renewed interest in trying to figure out if the prophetic books have something to say directly to us today. And we'll talk a little more tomorrow about something called dispensationalism. And dispensationalism is an approach to scripture and by our brothers and sisters in Christ, but it's a very different approach than what we're doing here today, what you're doing this weekend when you're doing redemptive historical appreciation of God's Word. And under the influence of dispensationalism, a lot of times the prophets are not even thought of as having something to say primarily to their contemporaries. They're looked at to see how what they say can fit into this system that helps to try to figure out end time events. Again, it's brothers and sisters in Christ, but I think a misguided understanding of how primarily they are to be understood. So to read the prophets, to read Ezekiel in order to primarily find details regarding the end of the world is dangerous, it's misguided, and it can prove to be quite an embarrassment when one's predictions regarding when the world will end prove incorrect. So don't think of the prophets as history ahead of time. Okay? These men were raised up by God to preach to their contemporaries about coming judgment, coming restoration, whatever the message was at the time. So the prophets, their successors to Moses, they were raised up by God to fill in that gap, that mediating gap that was left when Moses would die. They were guardians of the theocracy. They were to remind the king listen, Deuteronomy 17, you have a job to do. You're to lead the people in covenant obedience. They didn't just speak to the king, they spoke to the people at large. They were witnesses to God's sovereign rule over history. When such and such happens, then you will know that God is sovereign. Then you will know that a prophet has been among you. They were covenant prosecutors. They constantly preached out of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. These things are going to happen not because God can't control the forces of your enemies, not because God is capricious. These things will happen because God said that this would be the consequences of either obedience or disobedience, way back in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. And if you continue in this path of disobedience, this is what will happen. So they bring the terms of the covenant to bear on God's people. They pray, they're intercessors. Prophets pray for their people. They're primarily forth tellers and not foretellers. Now on the outline, I have how to distinguish true and false prophets. We're going to save that to the end today. And we're going to go on to the next section: three main periods of prophetic activity. And this is just something some Old Testament person came up with to help classify the prophets and to see some distinctions between them. These aren't biblical terms or anything, but they're helpful classifications. When we talk about pre-classical prophets, we're talking about the prophets who ministered in the early years of the monarchy. And what's interesting, we're talking now about people like Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, Elisha. And what's interesting about these prophets is that we only know what's recorded about them in the historical books. With Ezekiel, we have his sermons. With Isaiah, we have his words. But with these pre-classical prophets, all we know about Elijah are the stories about him that are recorded in the books of Kings and Chronicles and Samuel for the different prophets. They didn't write down their messages in separate books. So they're primarily remembered for what they did rather than what they said. So the preclassical prophets, those who ministered during the early years of the monarchy, and we know them from what's recorded about them, not for what they actually wrote. The classical prophets are prophets who ministered in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. And it's interesting, their oracles tend to cluster around two great dates. Okay, what they wrote about tended to cluster around these two dates. And who are we talking about here? Well, we're talking about Hosea and Amos, Isaiah and Micah. Okay, and Hosea and Amos and Isaiah and Micah tend to focus on 722 BC, which was the fall of the northern kingdom. You remember by this time the nation of Israel had been divided into two kingdoms, the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom. And the northern kingdom was the kingdom to be destroyed first. In 722 BC, the Assyrians finally came in, destroyed Samaria, destroyed the northern kingdom, took away most of the people and set them in other nations, and then brought in other conquered peoples and moved them into the northern kingdom. So when we read Amos and Hosea and Isaiah and Micah, a lot of what they say is focusing on the impending doom of the northern kingdom. And then Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, their oracles tend to focus on the fall of the Southern Kingdom in 586 BC. So the classical prophets, their oracles tend to focus on these two great crises in the nation's history. And then finally we have the exilic and post-exilic prophets. And here we're thinking of Ezekiel and Daniel. Now, in our English Bibles, we put Daniel in that section where we have all the prophets. In the Hebrew Bible, Daniel isn't in that section. So I put him in here since I'm assuming most of us are reading English Bibles. But you might want to know that in the Hebrew Bible, Daniel is not considered a prophet. He's in that third section of the canon called the prophets. But the exilic and post-exilic prophets spoke God's word to the people during the dark years of the Babylonian exile. That would be Ezekiel and Daniel. And then during the period of Judah's restoration in Palestine, and that would be Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. So again, that's just a nice handy way so that if you're picking up Haggai, you can say, oh, okay, he's post-exilic, he's speaking during the restoration. Now, this is all fine and good. So we've learned about pre-classical prophets, classical, and all this stuff. But, and so maybe next time you play the Bible version of trivial pursuit, you'll have one up on your opponent. But what's the point? Okay, why is it important to know all this stuff? Okay? Why is it important to study the prophetic books? Well, let me give you three reasons. Okay, I put two on the outline, but I came up with a third. And the first is I'd like you to take your finger and start at Isaiah 1.1 and then go to Malachi. What you have there from Isaiah 1.1 to Malachi 4 is the prophetic books of Scripture. And what's interesting is that the prophetic books of Scripture comprise a portion of God's Word that is larger than the entire New Testament. Okay? That's pretty interesting. Okay, when you look at that and then compare it with Matthew to Revelation. Okay? So from Isaiah 1.1 to Malachi chapter 4, that corpus of literature is larger than the entire New Testament. Okay? And I find that to be a sobering statistic in light of the fact that so many Bible-believing Christians ignore so much of that part of God's word. When was the last time you studied Obadiah or Zephaniah? I know I'm really picking the big ones here, or Ezekiel. Okay, and yet we say that we're Bible-believing Christians. This is where we go to learn about the Lord, and yet there's a portion of Scripture larger than the entire New Testament that I think we avoid at our own spiritual peril. Okay, so we need to study the prophets because it's a large part of God's word. Okay. The second reason why we need to study the prophets, and this will flesh out much more tomorrow morning, but I'll just state this fact now. How we interpret Ezekiel, Amos, or other portions of the prophets, is more determinative of how you view the second coming of Jesus and what events attend the second coming of Jesus than any other portion of Scripture. And we'll do a little exercise tomorrow morning. But when when you know you when you think our blessed hope is that Jesus is coming again, and when you formulate in your mind what events attend the second coming of Jesus, what you come up with has more to do with the prophetic portion of Scripture than it does Revelation or Thessalonians or any other book. And we'll look at that a little more tomorrow, okay? And we'll talk a little more tomorrow about how Christians differ in how we perceive what will happen when Jesus comes again. But the fact is that what it boils down to, okay, when when we talk to our and and perhaps some in the room here are dispensationalists. If you're a dispensationalist and you believe A, B, C, and D, even though Revelation 20 talks about the thousands of thousand-year reign, what you think happens at the second coming prior to it depends more on Ezekiel than it does Revelation. So that's another important reason to study the prophets. And then a third reason as to, or answer as to why it's important to study the prophetic books is the prof the prophethood of every believer. And I said that earlier, but in a very general sense, we serve as prophets in the world today. And we'll do a little biblical theology now. We'll run a theme through redemptive history to demonstrate that. Turn to Numbers chapter 11. Numbers chapter 11. And we said context is king. Numbers is an unfortunate title for the fourth book in our English Bibles. The Hebrew title for this book is Bemidja. Which means in the wilderness. And that really is a much better title for numbers. Our English title comes from the Septuagint, and it's there because two censuses are taken in the book of Numbers. But the Hebrew title, the Midbar in the Wilderness, is a much better title because that's what Numbers is about. It's all those years wandering in the wilderness before the Israelites enter the promised land, when the first generation dies off and the second one gets ready to enter the promised land. And in Numbers chapter 11, Moses is tired. He's tired of the sniveling, all the complaining and grumbling of the Israelites. And in verse 10, he hears the people of every family wailing, and the Lord becomes angry, and Moses is troubled. He had wailing people and angry God, and Moses is just troubled. And he asks the Lord, Why have you brought this trouble on your servant? What have I done to displease you that you put the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? And so Moses is tired. And you know, the Lord's answer is, you know, Moses, you're not the only one. There are other people that can help you here. And the Lord tells Moses to gather 70 elders of the people together, and he says, I'll put my spirit on them. You're not the only one around here that can do this. Okay? And so Moses calls these seventy elders together. Okay. Verse 24, he went out and he tells the people what the Lord had said. He brought together seventy of their elders and had them stand around the tent. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke with them, and he took of the spirit that was on him and put the spirit on the seventy elders. When the spirit rested on them, they prophesied, but they did not do so again. However, two men, whose names were Eldad and Medad, had remained in the camp. They were listed among the elders, but they did not go out to the tent. Yet the spirit also rested on them, and they prophesied in the camp. A young man ran and told Moses, Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp. Joshua, son of Nun, who'd been Moses' aide since youth, spoke up and said, Moses, my lord, stop them. But Moses replied, Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them. Then Moses and the elders of Israel returned to the camp. Yeah, it's just interesting here. A couple verses later in chapter 12, verse 3, Moses is called the most humble man on the face of the earth. He's not threatened by people in a ministry that aren't part of his core ministry ministering. He's like, are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all God's people could be like this. Well, turn over to Joel chapter 2. Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah. Joel chapter 2. When I teach Old Testament, I give my students a prophet's chart. So again, just helping them get used to when the prophets ministered, who their putative audience was, et cetera, et cetera. But I have a question mark by Joel. Joel is one of three minor prophets that we don't know the date of. And I think that's purposeful. I think the book was meant to be used at times of national mourning and lament. So we just don't know. In fact, when I first started teaching at Cuts many years ago, I had Joel in the 9th century, and now I have him in the 5th century. So we just don't know. We don't know. We know there's times when he couldn't have prophesied, but we just don't know when Joel prophesied. We do know that there had been a devastating locust plague that he speaks about in his prophecy. And in Joel chapter 2, verse 28, we read. And that then you will know that I am in Israel, I am the Lord your God, there's no other, never again will my people be ashamed. And then he says in verse 28, and afterward I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days. I'll show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke, the sun will be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. For on Mount Sion and in Jerusalem, there will be deliverance, as the Lord has said, among the survivors whom the Lord calls. Now it's interesting here. Who do you think in Israel had more power? Men or women? Men. Okay. Who had more power, young or old? Old. Slave or free. Free. And yet in this passage, through the prophet of Joel, the Lord is prophesying that there'll be some future time when his spirit will be poured out on not just men, but men and women. Not just old, old and young. Not just free, but free and slave. There's going to be a democratization of God's spirit being poured out on all people. Now Moses had wished that back in Numbers 11, Joel prophesies that this is going to happen in the future. And then we turn to Acts chapter 2, where we read Peter's sermon at Pentecost. Okay? And you remember that when the Holy Spirit comes down, the tongues of fire on all these people, some people made fun of these folks and said, well, you know, they're drunk. And then in verse 14 of Acts 2, then Peter stood up with the eleven, raised his voice, and addressed the crowd. These men are not drunk as you suppose. It's only nine in the morning. No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel. And then what does he do? He quotes from the passage we just read. In the last days, God says, I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams, even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. So what's the point? Well, Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the church, is the answer to Moses' prayer and Joel's prediction. Okay? So in a very real sense, you and I are God's prophets today. Okay? We are, and what that means, now, again, in redemptive history, we live during the age of the closed canon. So we're not going to get new revelation, but remember the fourth tellers rather than foretellers. As the prophethood of every believer, it's our job to go and bring God's word to bear on our contemporaries around us. Okay? And so this is kind of the kiss of death to any who say, Oh, I don't have the gift of witnessing. Okay? Now, yes, there are special people who have are specially endowed with gifts of evangelism, uh, but on the other hand, we all have God's Spirit and we all can speak to what God has done in our lives. Okay, so that's why it's important to study the prophetic books. And then finally, we want to spend the last bit of time today talking about suggestions for reading the prophets. Okay. Monday morning, when you're all home, you all decide, I just got to study Ezekiel for the next two months. I'd like to give you a couple of helpful um hints in that endeavor. Uh it was the greatest email, I got the greatest email about two weeks ago. Two years ago, I taught an intensive course on Ezekiel at Trinity. And I got an email, I said a couple weeks ago, from one of the students, and he said, Dr. Moore, I have referred so much to Ezekiel in my ministry that the folks have asked me to lead a Bible study on Ezekiel. So that just made my day. So maybe one day I will get to a uh a workshop and people will roll their eyes and say, I am Ezekiel now. That's all I've been studying. So, suggestions for studying the prophets. Okay, so what do you do? Say you want to study Zechariah, okay, or Ezekiel. Well, the first thing you want to do, remember, context is king. So you want to learn about the history of the period during which the prophet lived. Okay, and what will help you there? Well, the books of kings, the books of chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, these are books that are going to help you in that study. Okay, so learn what you can about the history of the period during which the prophets lived. And doing that helps combat that sense that people have, oh, they all say the same thing. Well, no, they don't. And when you start putting Isaiah in the 8th century and Ezekiel in the 6th century, you start seeing, no, that's not quite accurate. Okay, so learn about the history of the period during which the prophets lived. Secondly, expect the prophets to use symbolic language. Flannery O'Connor wrote, To the heart of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures. Okay? To the heart of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind, you draw large and startling figures. If we had time, it would be great to read Deuteronomy 28, which again is that passage that lays out the covenant curses for disobedience and the covenant blessings for obedience, with a passage in Ezekiel. Okay? You know, Deuteronomy 28, it's real clear. You do A, B happens, you do C, D happens. You know, Ezekiel, the Lord, raises him up and he has to lie on his side, he has to cut his beard, he has to do all these peculiar things, and he uses all this uh this imagery, or you have Daniel who sees these hybrid creatures coming out of the sea. Why? Well, because the people at this point are hard of hearing, okay, and they're shouting in their symbolism. Okay? And again, I the the prophets don't just want to give their audiences information. They want to move them to action. Okay? And you know, if if if I just saw a note in the back here and nobody else is looking backward that said a tornado is five minutes away, I wouldn't calmly say, let's talk about tornadoes for a few minutes. I would jump up and down and say, we've got to get cover. That's what the prophets are doing. Okay, time for just the nice talking is over with, and they're just shaking and saying, folks, wake up, because what God promised in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 is about to happen. Okay, and one of the ways that they accomplished that is through the use of symbolic languages. Turn back to Numbers chapter 12, or in the wilderness book, Numbers chapter 12. And we have a little story of sibling rivalry here. Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he'd married a Cushite. Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? They asked. Hasn't he also spoken through us? And the Lord heard this. Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. At once the Lord said to Moses, Aaron and Miriam, Come out to the tent of meeting, all three of you. So the three of them came out. Then the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud. He stood at the entrance to the tent and summoned Aaron and Miriam. When both of them stepped forward, he said, Listen to my words. When a prophet of the Lord is among you, I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face. Clearly, not in riddles. He sees the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses? unknown: Okay. Speaker 1: The Lord is giving us a lesson in interpretation here. When he speaks to Moses, it's clearly face to face. When he speaks to the prophets, it's in visions and dreams and riddles. You're going to expect symbolism. And yet it's one of the odd things when I go to the Christian bookstore and look at books on end-time prophecy that they take the prophetic books of Scripture and translate them very literally. And yet the Lord here is literally telling us that He's going to speak to the prophets in very symbolic language. So when we're reading Hosea, Joel, Amos, we want to, we ought to expect that there'll be a lot of symbolic language there. Look for recurrent themes in when reading the prophets, the day of the Lord, the concept of the remnant, the idea of judgment and restoration, all covenant terminology. Look for those themes when you're reading the prophets. And then now and later, okay, some of the words of the prophets have multiple fulfillments. And so we need to figure out what of that which a prophet says is about his own day. Babylon will come and invade the southern kingdom. What relates to a future time? Micah 5, the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. And what relates to a much, much later time. Isaiah 65, there'll be no more death and no more miscarriage. Okay? So there's going to be a now, a later, and sometimes a very, very much later. Now there's a problem, and that's that the prophets don't tell us, oh, this is for now, this is for later, this is for the second coming. They don't do that. Okay, they do what's called telescoping. It's kind of like if you're driving, and my husband gave me this analogy because I've never been to the Rocky Mountains, but he said, you know, when he used to go as a kid, you know, from a distance, it looks like one mountain peak. But then as you drive closer, you notice that it's different peaks. And it's the same from Ezekiel's point of view, you know, he gives this prophecy and he kind of bumbles it all together. And now as redemptive history unfolds, you see, oh, there's this time, this time, and this time. Okay? So, and for and that's you know, how do we figure that out? Well, we'll talk a little more about that uh this evening. Well, how do I know what's now, what's later, what's very, very much later, okay? But expect that kind of now and later in the prophets. Another principle for interpreting the prophets is that the New Testament, and not the latest book in the La Haye series, is our divinely inspired commentary on the Old Testament. Okay? And that's important. You want to learn how to interpret Ezekiel. One of my professors at Westminster, when I graduated with my master's degree, he challenged the class, read the book of Hebrews. Read it devotionally for a long period of time, particularly with an eye to the fact, how does the book of Hebrews, how does the author handle the Old Testament? And I took my professor up on that. I spent a year and a half in the mid-80s reading the book of Hebrews using Philip Edchcombe Hughes' commentary on Hebrews. And that was such a help to me in understanding what to do with the books of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc. So read the book of Hebrews. Learn to, I tell this to my students all the time, learn to develop a sensitivity when you're reading the New Testament for when they're quoting the Old Testament, alluding to the Old Testament, and what they're doing with the Old Testament. And that's a lifelong process. That's something that has to be done throughout one's life, as then that's the way we develop a greater sensitivity to what's going on. But the New Testament is our divinely inspired commentary on the Old Testament. And then ultimately the prophets point us to Christ. The person and the work of Christ perfectly fulfill both Old Testament prophecy and the prophetic office. And I was looking at Connie's pre-seminar lecture, and it looks like she did a little of that in Luke 24, so I'm not going to go there. But let's go back to where we started in Deuteronomy 18. Remember Moses' swan song, there's a crisis in leadership. The Lord says, I'm going to raise up prophets. But remember that singular a prophet, I'm going to raise up a prophet for you. I'll put my words in his mouth. That built-in ambiguity. Well, I think it's because it's pointing to the fact that the prophets are the successors to Moses, and they themselves are pointing forward to one prophet. Let's look how the Pentateuch ends in Deuteronomy 24 34. The end of the Pentateuch. We have Moses' death. And then in verse 10 of Deuteronomy 34, since then no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, who did all those miraculous signs and wonders the Lord sent him to do in Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his officials and to his whole land. For no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel. Do you get the sense that whoever wrote chapter 34 of Deuteronomy, and probably not Moses since it's about his death, that some time has passed. And, you know, we're still waiting for this prophet like Moses, who does all these miracles, et cetera, et cetera. If we fast forward to the Gospel of John in chapter 6, Jesus miraculously feeds the 5,000. And after this, and remember what we just read in Deuteronomy, since then no one has risen like Moses, who did all these miraculous deeds and knew the Lord face to face. John 6, verse 10. After Jesus feeds the 5,000, the people see the miraculous sign that Jesus did, and they begin to say, Surely this is who? The prophet who is to come into the world. Okay, so they see him feeding the people. Ah, this is the prophet like Moses. And then over in chapter 7, at the final day of the feast, Jesus stands up in verse 37 and says in a loud voice, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him. By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified. So Jesus here talks about water, streams of living water, and once again the people hear this in verse 40, and they say, Surely this man is the prophet. Which prophet? The prophet of Deuteronomy 18, the prophet of Deuteronomy 34. Jesus fulfills both the prophetic office and he also fulfills all the prophecies in the Old Testament. And I will close with a quote from one of my former professors, Dr. Clowney. The prophetic office of Christ is evident in all of the Gospels. For example, at the Transfiguration, we read, This is my beloved son, hear him. The force of this command is profound in the context. Moses, the founder, and Elijah, the restorer of the prophetic office, appear on the mount with the glorified Christ. Christ's authority transcends that of Moses as the authority of the Son transcends that of the servant. God spoke directly from the cloud on Mount Sinai and then gave the law in further detail to Moses. From the Theophanic cloud on the Mount of Transfiguration, God does not give Ten Commandments but one. This is my beloved Son. Hear him. The message of the Son is not the one he receives on the mount as Moses did. His message is that which was committed to him in the eternity of his divine pre-existence with the Father. John 17, verse 8. Finally, ask God to help us cultivate a prophet's heart for the people he's placed around us. And remember, prophets pray for their people. So do we pray for the people the Lord's called us to minister to? And for me personally, a difficult part of the Lord cultivating in me a prophet's heart has been the need to develop courage and not to preach or teach false comforts like many of the false prophets in the Old Testament. Thank you. Krisan Marotta: Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but also shows you how to figure that out. I hope this podcast has blessed you. If it's inspired you to learn more, I invite you to visit my website and explore the free, ad-free, spam-free Bible study resources. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates. You can find his fabulous music on heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.