How to approach the Prophets

The Prophets (Isaiah – Malachi) are some of the most fascinating and least understood books of the Old Testament. In this series, we’ll give some insight into how to approach them, and provide some context for listening to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Minor Prophets. We’ll draw some conclusions about how they apply to us, and how they are fulfilled in Christ.

This introductory post covers how to approach the prophets. What is a prophet? How do we know what context they were addressing?

What is a prophet?

A prophet is a person who speaks for God. The prophet:

• heard what God was saying, and delivered the word of the Lord, or
• saw a vision of what God was doing, and called God’s people to follow.

Prophets were not soothsayers predicting the future. Sometimes they spoke of things to come as they described what God was doing, but that wasn’t their aim. What defined them was that they spoke by revelation: the message God spoke, the vision of where God was leading.

God sent prophets when his people got off track. Israel was God’s covenant people, called to live under divine kingship, guided by God’s laws and leadership. When they got off track, God would send a prophet to warn, “Turn back! That’s heading for disaster. Turn back to the Lord, and walk in his ways. He will lead us and rescue us.”

Sometimes the word of the Lord was one of encouragement and comfort rather than warning. God sent the prophets to say, “Keep going! You’re on the right path, even though it’s tough. Don’t give up.” Sometimes the message was, “Even though it’s all fallen apart, I will rescue you. Even though you were unfaithful to the covenant, I am faithful to you. I will save you.”

Why does context matter?

Those are the general themes, but the message God gave the prophets was quite specific. He sent prophets to confront a specific diversion from God, or to allay fears of a particular enemy. That’s why understanding the circumstances into which the Prophets spoke is so crucial to understanding them.

You need to know the background information in order to be able to catch the point of much of what a prophet conveys. God’s Word came through the prophets to people in particular situations. Its value to us depends partly on our ability to appreciate those situations so that we can in turn apply it to our own.
— Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, (Zondervan, 1993), 189-190.

Understanding something of what situation a prophet was addressing will transform how you hear the Prophets.

How do the prophets fit into the narrative of the Bible?

There’s a story that runs through the whole Bible. It’s a narrative of reconciliation, heaven and earth being reunited. But before we get to the end where “they all lived happily ever after,” this story has more twists and turns than a spy novel.

The Prophets don’t appear in chronological order. To see where they fit in, you’ll need to appreciate how the Bible narrative develops. Here’s an overview:

1. Earth belongs under heaven’s reign, but violence took over. God chose Abraham as the family to restore the blessing of his reign (Genesis).
2. God saved Jacob’s family, forming them into a kingdom under God through the Sinai covenant (Exodus – Deuteronomy).
3. Joshua fought for the land for God’s kingdom, and the judges fought to keep it (Joshua – Judges).
4. Israel asked for a king to fight their enemies. God gave them his anointed, promising David the kingship forever (1–2 Samuel).
5. The kingdom split. Israel (the north) and Judah (the south) had separate kings. They lost it all: Israel fell to Assyria; Judah was exiled to Babylon (1–2 Kings).
6. After the exile, some returned and rebuilt when Persia defeated Babylon, but they remained under foreign rule (Ezra – Esther).
7. Hundreds of years later, Jesus rode into Jerusalem hailed as king, but he was rejected — crucified as God’s Christ, the king of the Jews. God vindicated him as his Son by raising him up, giving him all authority (Matthew – John).
8. The gospel — the good news that God’s Christ is our Lord — is being announced to all the nations of the earth. As his people, we embody his reign. One day, everyone will acknowledge him as Lord (Acts – Revelation).

That’s the plotline for how earth is restored as a kingdom of heaven, so what God decreed in the beginning is fulfilled in the end.

But in the middle of that story, everything fell apart (#5 and #6 above). The kingdom split, and both parts fell to the nations. It was into those tragic times that God sent the prophets — messengers of hope, calling God’s people back to him.

The kingdom disintegrated in four stages:

• Divided kingdom: when Israel split from Judah (920s BC), there were two kingdoms with separate kings in the two capitals (Samaria and Jerusalem). This is the setting of Hosea, Jonah, Amos, and Nahum.
• Judah alone: after Israel fell to Assyria (722 BC), only Judah was left.
  This is the setting of Isaiah, Micah, Zephaniah, and Habakkuk.
• In exile: after Judah fell to Babylon (586 BC), there was no kingdom left.
  This is the setting of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Obadiah.
• Post-exile: after Persia conquered Babylon (539 BC), some returned to rebuild. This is the setting of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.

So, here’s how the prophets fit into that story:

Date	Event	Reign	Prophets
1200s BC	Moses leads the exodus. Joshua takes the Land	The Lord is king
1040 BC	United kingdom (Saul, David, Solomon)	The Lord’s anointed
920 BC	Kingdom spits: Israel (north), Judah (south)	Separate kings over Israel and Judah	Hosea, Jonah, Amos, Nahum
722 BC	Israel falls to Assyria (Judah alone remains)	Kings of Judah	Isaiah 1-39 Micah, Joel? Zephaniah, Habakkuk
586 BC	Judah exiled to Babylon (land, temple, and kingship lost)	Babylon	Isaiah 40-66, Jeremiah, Ezekiel Obadiah
515 BC	Second temple dedicated: returning from exile	Persia, Greece, Rome	Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi
AD 30	Jesus the Christ is raised up with all authority	The Lord’s anointed
The goal	Earth fully restored to heaven’s reign	The Lord is king	1 Cor 15:24

“The exile” was when Babylon captured Judah (the only part of Israel left). Babylon destroyed the temple, terminated the kingship, and took people to live in Babylon.

In summary, the prophets of each era were:

• Divided kingdom: Hosea, Jonah, Amos, Nahum.
• Judah alone: Isaiah, Micah, Zephaniah, Habakkuk.
• Exile: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Obadiah
• Post-exile: Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.

(Note: We’re not covering Lamentations or Daniel in this series: in the Hebrew text they’re considered Writings, not Prophets.)

Conclusion

That brief overview is designed to help you place the prophets within the narrative of salvation history, the story of what God has been doing. That’s the only way to make sense of what they were saying.

In our next post, we’ll talk about how the message of the Prophets applies to us.

What others are saying

L. L. Grabbe, Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages: A Socio-Historical Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995, 107:

The common denominator … is that the prophet is a mediator who claims to receive messages direct from a divinity, by various means, and communicates these messages to recipients.

Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible Book by Book. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002, 171-172:

As God’s appointed spokesmen, they call Yahweh’s people back to their covenant roots, announcing both the curses and blessings for covenant disloyalty or loyalty (see especially Deuteronomy 27–30). The exilic prophets also helped the people through their twofold loss—of the divine presence and of the promised land—thus playing the role of Moses and Joshua in reverse.

Thus the prophets constantly call God’s people back to divine realities: They belong to God, God does not belong to them; God has called them into being for his purposes of redeeming what was lost in the Fall and of blessing the nations. At the heart of the prophets’ message, therefore, is deep concern that Israel reflect God’s character by walking in his ways and keeping covenant with him. At the same time, they are constantly reminded that Yahweh is not a local Israelite deity, but is the sovereign God of the universe—Creator and Sustainer of all things and therefore also sovereign over all the other nations.

Bible Project video: The Prophets (5:18).