Touring with the prophets

riding with unpopular people

Just for fun, I recently took a little tour of the minor prophets in my personal Bible readings. The Bible is large enough, and I read small enough sections daily, that occasionally I flip to part of the Bible and think “Oh, I haven’t read this for a while!” And then that’s where I read next. At least the way I’m reading right now. Some years, I have an actual reading plan. In the meantime, I think it’s most important to read it and to read it in books so you have context. Not a few verses here and a few verses there because how will you ever know what’s happening?¹

I had recently read Jeremiah, but not the minor prophets so I started at Joel and went straight through Malachi.² I’m grateful that 2+ decades have changed how I have read the Bible. While I know more about the prophets and why they wrote and how they wrote, now I let my curiosity run through the reading. What was the rest of Joel’s life like? How did Micah’s community receive what he had to say? Did God speak other things to Nahum and they just aren’t in our Bible? What was Malachi’s word from the Lord like? Were all of these prophets literate? Did they have scribes like Jeremiah had Baruch? Did other nations hear Obadiah’s vision about them? Did they go back to herding sheep after announcing impending doom?

For some of this we can find answers, but a lot of it we can’t. Scripture isn’t concerned with those questions and yet it still invites them. I find that the more I wonder at the lives of the people in the Bible, the more I wonder at my own. These prophets were, after all, only people. They got sick. They were afraid. They experienced joy. They did hard things when God requested it of them or life required it.³ We can learn something about being human from being curious about these other followers of God.⁴

I love the prophets: their boldness, their poetry, their tenacity. Today, I’d like to look at two separate topics: the United States and the prophets, and themes of the prophets.

The United States and the prophets

I just finished reading Unsettling Truths, a book unveiling the deadly outcome of the doctrine of discovery and how theology was the foundation of that false belief. The authors repeatedly pointed out that early Europeans arrivers to the current United States claimed the promises that God gave to Israel. They thought they were being given the promised land. They thought God was on their side. They used those beliefs to inflict horrible trauma and violence on the people who already lived on this land.

But the United States isn’t ancient Israel. We are not the promised land or the sacred people of God. The United States is not the church, and even the church is not given the same land promises and the physical blessings that the nation of Israel was given in their covenants with Yahweh.

So when we read the prophets the United States is not a direct correlation to Israel. We would line up more with God’s proclamations to foreign nations. However, I believe that while the Scriptures were not written to us, they were written for us. We can see this in 1 Corinthians 10:11. After citing different situations of the Israelites, Paul writes, “These things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our instruction.” We find instruction in these stories of God’s people even if we cannot put ourselves directly in their place. We will find God’s heart and what God cares about it as we read God’s word to Israel through the prophets. Got it? We aren’t Israel. But we can still learn a lot from what God said to Israel.

Themes of the prophets

The prophets show up the most when they are least wanted. Normally, they are coming around, tugging on the sleeve of somebody powerful, and insisting they better straighten up or their own sin is going to kick their butt. That’s not a job most of us would sign up for because it sounds like a good way to get killed (see, for example, Jeremiah 26:20-24). The prophets pointed out where the people’s behavior no longer matched the law. Remember, the law was not something the Israelites kept so that God would like them. God had already declared them God’s own people. He rescued them from slavery and invited them into His redeeming work of the world. Their part was to represent God in the world so that meant when they didn’t act in a way that reflected well on God, they were actually dragging His name through the mud.

Here are some overarching themes:⁵

• God wants heart change and not just outer change (Joel 2:13).

• God has an eternal character: “gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in faithful love, relents from sending disaster (Joel 2:13). Sometimes it was a variation on a theme: “The Lord is slow to anger but great in power; the Lord will never leave the guilty unpunished” (Nahum 1:3). God was the same God that Israel had always known. He had introduced himself this way all the way back in Exodus.⁶

• God hates oppression and violence (Amos 1:7, 3:9-10, 4:1, 5:12, 8:4.⁷ See also Obadiah 1:10, Micah 3:9-11, Nahum 3:19, Habakkuk 2:17, Malachi 3:5-6)⁸

What does God want from His people?

“The word of the Lord came to Zechariah: ‘The Lord of Armies says this: Make fair decisions. Show faithful love and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the resident alien or the poor, and do not plot evil in your hearts against one another.” Zechariah 7:8-10

“Speak truth to one another; make true and sound decisions within your city gates. Do not plot evil in your hearts against your neighbor, and do not love perjury, for I hate all this.” Zechariah 8:16-17

“Mankind, he has told each of you what is good and what it is the Lord requires of you: to act justly, to love faithfulness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Micah 6:8

“Pursue good and not evil so that you may live, and the Lord, the God of Armies, will be with you as you have claimed. Hate evil and love good; establish justice in the city gate.” Amos 5:13-15

“But let justice flow like water, and righteousness, like an unfailing stream.” Amos 5:24

I’ll sum up with the words of Jeremiah. Not a minor prophet, but still a prophet.

This is what the Lord says: Administer justice and righteousness. Rescue the victim of robbery from his oppressor. Don’t exploit or brutalize the resident alien, the fatherless, or the widow. Don’t shed innocent blood in this place.” Jeremiah 22:3

This behavior toward others was directly tied to their following God. Just a few verses later, it says, “Many nations will pass by this city and ask one another, “Why did the Lord do such a thing to this great city?’ They will answer, ‘Because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord their God and bowed in worship to other gods and served them.’” Jeremiah 22:8-9

The way we treat other people—all other people—is directly tied to our worship of God. The prophets tell us so.

How long has it been since you read the prophets? What stands out from their writings?

Resources

• The Bible Project overviews of each individual prophetic book along with their guides. Also this video on how to read the prophets and this mini-series on what prophecy is for.

• How to Teach and Preach the Old Testament for All Its Worth: I’ve long said this is great for “reading and understanding the Old Testament.” You don’t have to be interested in teaching at all to use this book.

1. My favorite actual plan for the OT is chronological. It helps make sense of what is happening and why the prophets are saying what they are. You think the prophets are harsh, go read what was happening in the land when they were writing. Context matters.

2. Apologies to Hosea. I’m not sure why he got left out.

3. I want to go on a tangent here and talk about Eugene Peterson and imagining yourself in the story of Scripture and how that is helpful, but I will refrain for the sake of time.

4. I had a similar conversation with the boys when we read about Pilate. Was Pilate curious about who Jesus was or was he worried about his own political power?

5. This is, in no way, comprehensive. One could write an entire book on this subject.

6. See Exodus 34:5-7.

7. Actually just go read why God was mad at Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, the Ammonites in Amos 1 if you don’t believe me. He really hates it when people dehumanize and oppress others, especially if those others are weaker than us.

8. Haggai barely counts because those people actually did what the prophet said. Unbelievable.