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Sunnyside Baptist Church Michael Dirrim, Pastor
Let's go to the Lord together in prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for gathering us together tonight. Thank you for the opportunity to fellowship and to enjoy the love and the shared hope that we have together in Christ.
I pray that you would bless our time tonight as we think about your word, how you have preserved it and put it together and delivered it to us. We give you praise for this wondrous gift. We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.
In our introduction to our taking some time to prophet, we come across the word many times in the Old Testament, and we have been thinking about a prophet's, the nature of the job of a prophet and how the prophets had various concerns that they returned to time and again, that the prophet's main message was that of Christ in more than simply predictive prophecy, but in every fashion, in some way, they ultimately spoke about Christ.
And about the prophets is to think about how they fit within what we call the biblical canon. 66 books were written over the 1500 year time period, but over 40 different authors in three different languages from three different continents, a cohesive whole, a one book of many books, the Bible, speaking as the word of God, as the father everywhere in the scriptures by the spirit speaks of the son.
And when we look at the Old Testament, we have a variety of genres, right? So when we read the Proverbs, it just seems different, doesn't it? Then when we read Ezekiel, right? Or when we read 2 Samuel, they are of different quality.
They have different types of literature. Sometimes they are stories about God's providence and his divine power. Sometimes they are, it's poetry about wisdom or about the glory of God. Sometimes they are discourses given by prophets as they preach about who God is and bring to bear his holiness and his character on the lives of the people.
We open up the Old Testament and I invite you to turn to your table of contents if you have that in your physical copy of the Bible. I was reminded of the usefulness of the table of contents this morning when my son was looking for Philippians and wisely went to the table of contents to find what page number it is on.
In your table of contents, you're gonna see, of course, the Bible separated into two sections, the Old Testament and the New Testament. When you were being brought up, perhaps, in vacation Bible school or Sunday school or some sort of discipleship opportunity, you might have been taught about the way in which the Old Testament is organized.
How do you organize these 39 books? Perhaps this was in connection with memorizing all 39 books and you would start off section by section and try to memorize the order of the books of the Bible and think about their categories.
In our Bibles, we find a listing in order from Genesis to Malachi that is not original to the days of Jesus and the apostles and to the time in which the Old Testament was translated into the common language Greek and so on, but it is an important organizing of the Old Testament for us today.
You'll see that there are two categories, the major prophets and the minor prophets, and that is somewhat significant in our study, trying to understand how do the prophets fit, how does the prophet Isaiah fit within the whole Bible and how one book sits with other books.
Remember that the scriptures are to be interpreted by the scriptures, and so it matters when we find them, it matters how we find them, and as we've talked about before, the interpretation, the rules of interpretation are the same rules for real estate, location, location, location.
Where do we find this scripture passage and where do we find it again in a larger sense and where do we find it again in an even larger sense? And so that helps us to think about how the Old Testament is structured often to understand the sections of the Bible as law, history, poetry, the major prophets, the minor prophets.
And an older scholar by the name of J. Sidlow Baxter was very fond of pointing out the numbers involved in some things to help you remember where you are when you're reading through the Old Testament.
And so, of course, we have the books of the law, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy that Moses wrote, and then we have a section in our Bibles.
That we call history, the next thing, the two,.
In that there is certainly history when you read the first five books of the Bible. Genesis is a book of history, and there's a lot of history in the books of Exodus and Numbers, but this is called law in the sense that law comes from the Hebrew word Torah.
Now, it doesn't simply mean law like a law book where you would have case law, where you would have just a bunch of rules and ways in which those rules are applied. And you'll know that when you read Genesis and Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, there's a whole lot more there than simply a bunch of rules.
Teaching, there's doctrine, and there are a bunch of rules. But when you find the word law in the Old Testament, Torah, you shouldn't think primarily rules, you should think primarily instruction, okay?
Because rules are a part of instruction, but they're not the whole of instruction. And the Hebrew word for law, or Torah, involves instruction and teaching, includes the doctrines that God would teach his people about who he is and so on.
So when you read the first five books of the Bible, we do call them the books of the law, and of course, we find a whole lot of stories, and we find sermons, and we find poetry, we find songs, and it's widely varied.
Everything that happens in the next 12 books, in the next 12 books, from Joshua to Nehemiah, all that history is constantly reflecting on what God said, and the truth that we find in the first five books.
I mean, you can't read through Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, you can't read through any of those books without coming across the, with folks from Noah to Abraham to Israel and David, I mean, everything is just of the law.
So this is the foundation, and then the history is the, you see the outworking of what God promised, how he's staying faithful and performing those things. And then we, right in the middle, we have books of poetry, and we have five books there, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, we call those poetry, because even though Job is filled with lots of discourse, speeches, and then speeches back, and then speeches in, is filled with concern about wisdom, and very often the discourse is structured in a way that is poetic.
Line upon line, you have a comparative parallelism, contrasting parallelism, and it's very rich in imagery, all the way through the book of Job, so there is a lot of poetic elements to Job. And of course, we know that the Psalms are songs, sung to the Lord, the praises of his people, the songbook for the old.
Indeed, because of Christ, it can be our songbook as well. And we see poetry there in the Psalms. Proverbs, a different type of poetry, very pithy, sayings that get to the heart of the matter very quickly, things that hang on, you remember throughout your days, they're actually called the sentences, something that Solomon gave to his son, things to remember, and other wise men, to give to people to remember, and operate by wisdom.
Ecclesiastes pushing the limit about what is it like, what is the meaning of life, if you do not take into account who God is, and the most cynical parts of Ecclesiastes is exploring,.
What is it, of course, there's nothing left to do,.
But to fear God, and do what he says, and to rejoice in the gifts that he has given you. And then we have the Song of Songs, or the Song of Solomon, in which Solomon rejoices in the drama, and the beauty of a love relationship between a husband and a wife.
Ultimately, of course, Paul says it's a great mystery, but it points to a greater mystery, that of Christ and the church. And so, what we see in the poetry, truly is an intensification into poetic form, bringing together of all of these realities.
When you read the history, many times you find bad times, sorrowful times, difficult times for the people of God. And when you read the poetry, you often find that expressed, correct? I remember reading through the Psalms, something that we used to do, we're reading through Matthew right now, but we used to do the Psalms as a family at lunchtime,.
And about 73 of the Psalms, of the 150 Psalms,.
Have elements of lament and sorrow in them, right? So, when we're saying poetry, it's not just roses are red, violets are blue type of poetry, it's an intense experience in the historical background that we've seen already in these first 17 books.
So, 17 books on this side, an intense center to the way our Old Testament is organized, 17 books on the other side, right? That's a very Hebrew way to arrange things in a chiasm, and we have five and 12 over here, and we have five over here.
So, this is the way we organize. The major prophets are called major because of their size, because of their size and their foundational significance to the rest of the prophets, okay?
So, Isaiah, follow are also called the scroll of the 12,.
Because those 12 were always set together in that way. So, you see that rounding up the conclusion of the Old Testament, everything from Hosea to Malachi. Now, interesting tidbit to remember where you're at.
If you're reading through the books of history, as we have them in order in the Old Testament, the last three deal with the exile. What it's like to live in the exile and sometime just after the exile, right?
Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. Okay, what is it like to live in the era of the exile and then coming home from Jerusalem? And three of the minor prophets deal with exile, or what it's like to live in God's land after the exile.
Zechariah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Those are all exile prophets. They're preaching and talking about things after they come back to Jerusalem, right? That's what happens in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.
So, you have Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi as well. So, nine and three, nine pre-exile, three exile. That's the way that the minor prophets are arranged. So, that can be helpful to remember as well.
The history, the poetry, the prophets,.
Honestly, at the first,. Will complain about that,.
But they complain about a lot. Now, this is, I think, helpful for us. I think it's a fine way to organize the Old Testament, and it can help you remember where you're at, okay? Isaiah, of course, is the first of the major prophets, and I think that that's exactly where Isaiah needs to be.
Isaiah, to live in the light of God's covenant promises, coming right after the poetic books makes a lot of sense. Isaiah is more vibrant in its imagery than the other prophets do. You're going to find that the other prophets and build upon themes of Isaiah.
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel all preached after Isaiah,.
So it makes sense to have Isaiah, and it goes on.
But how many divisions are there in the Old Testament during the New Testament time, okay? So, this is going to be something to think about when you read, in the New Testament, how Jesus and the apostles talked about the Old Testament.
And they're not going to mention, like, history, poetry, the major prophets, the law, so there is a connection there. Not only that, but the books were organized and ordered a bit differently in the Jewish Old Testament.
Let's turn in our Bibles to Matthew chapter five, Matthew chapter five, and then look at verse 17. The law, saying, law is a way of summarizing the entirety of the Old Testament. That was a common expression in the days of Christ.
Talk about the Old Testament. We say Old Testament, they didn't know that there was a New Testament yet, right? So, they're living in a time when these are the scriptures. Well, it's a good way to summarize the scriptures, other than saying the law and the prophets.
Sometimes we find it summarizes just the law. It's interesting, sometimes you'll find one of the apostles, they'll say that the law states, and then they'll quote, like, Isaiah or something. Well, did you get confused?
You know, Isaiah's down in the major prophets, it's not up here. No, there was just an offhanded way of summarizing the entirety of the Old Testament. And they were just saying, it's in the scriptures that we've already been given.
It's in the instruction, right? They're using it in a very broad sense. In Luke 24, 44, Jesus actually gives three divisions, the law, the prophets, and the Psalms, right? And this is reflective of the way in which, remember, we are so blessed to have these leather-bound, oil-skinned pages, gilded on the edges.
I've got three bookmarks in mine. This is high tech, okay? Given the history of the world, right? Hey, I forgot my smartphone.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is high tech, lasting technology, okay? This Bible will still be in existence when my cell phone's all done and broken, just so you know, okay? And the way in which the Old Testament was kept was not like this.
People didn't have the copy of their own Bible, right? The Levites were the caretakers of God's word, and they would copy, hand-copy down God's word, scroll section by scroll section, okay? And they're papyri, and they would either use, of course, at the very beginning, they were using much harder substances, but using scrolls, scrolls of some kind of substance.
And they would put them together, and they knew on each section of the scroll, how many words were to be on that page, okay? And they even had markings that had nothing to do with punctuation, nothing to do with grammar, nothing to do with spelling.
Marks on the page that would say, this is the middle letter of this line, to let them know that they're counting correctly. They would always count how many letters were on, and they knew how many letters were to be on each line, how many words were in each book.
They knew all of that, because they were carefully copying God's word, okay? And that's why they would memorize it, because, I mean, you write it so many times, you're gonna be memorizing the word of God.
And so, what they would do is, they would have the scrolls kind of put in, if you had like a wall, pretending like you go back to kindergarten, and there's the wall full of open cubbies where all the shoes go, okay?
Imagine that, but full of scrolls, okay? And they would put all the scrolls into that shelf, and they would have it organized.
And they would organize the Torah,.
The prophets, or the Nevi 'im, and the writings, or the Kethuvim. And they took the letters, made an acronym out of it, the T of the Torah, the N of the Nevi 'im, and the K of the Kethuvim, and they said, Tanakh.
They say, Tanakh. And so, that would sort of look like, if we were to emphasize the three consonants with pending sounds. So, they would also have the books of the Bible. And again, remember that when you find that word in the Old Testament, it's not simply rules, okay?
It is a very broad sense. Remember, in Psalms, he meditates on his law day and night. He thinks about rules day and night? No, he's thinking about what? He's thinking about God's faithfulness to Abram, and how God interposed as the angel of the Lord, and kept Abraham from killing his son, Isaac, right?
He's thinking about the plagues of Egypt, right? And he also is thinking about those times when the Lord says, I am the Lord, your God, therefore, you should live this way, right? But he's meditating on the instruction and the teaching, the way that God declares himself.
That means instruction. Also, this middle section, the Nevi 'im, is called the prophets, is the plural, plural for prophets. And there's eight scrolls. Eight scrolls, or eight books for the prophets. Four former prophets, and then four latter prophets.
That's how they organized them. The former prophets are Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings. Those are the former prophets. We call those history, right? But those were written by the prophets, who God is, and who Israel is, and how this all works out.
So they, the four latter prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.
Okay, no wait, I got one wrong.
The latter prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the 12, I got that wrong. The 12, not Daniel. Daniel shows up down here in the writings. That's different. So, it's only four scrolls, because they had 12 minor prophets on one scroll.
That's how it would be organized. The book of Hosea, or the book of Obadiah, it was all on the same scroll, and you would just roll it out until you found it, okay? So there was four scrolls for the four latter prophets.
It was Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the 12. 12, and those are all the prophets. So when you hear, when you hear, when you read in your New Testament, and you read Jesus or the apostles talking about the prophets, right?
They're thinking about, they're saying the prophets, a quote from the prophets, they're thinking about these eight scrolls. And then, the last section is called the Ketuvim, or the writings, and this is kind of a place where everything else went, okay?
But they're organized in a set of three, five, and three. The first three is the name of one of my sons, Emeth, or Truth, and this is Job, Psalms, and Proverbs. Job, Psalms, and Proverbs, that's the first three.
They call that section Emeth, or Truth. The last three is Daniel, and then Ezra, Nehemiah, were on one scroll, it's one scroll. So Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. So those are the last three books of the Hebrew Old Testament.
The last book in the Hebrew Old Testament is Chronicles, not Malachi. These five, the Megillo are called the Festal Scrolls, often called the Festal Garments. And you had books in there like Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther.
These were all a bit on the shorter side, and they were, each one of them, attached to a special feast day in the life of Israel. And when that feast day rolled around, the day before, they would read that scroll.
And so they were all kept together for various feast purposes.
So when we think of a similar thing here,.
Though, in these prophets, Isaiah is the first of the latter prophets, and that makes some sense as Isaiah was talking about the end before the exile. Now, when we think about the way the Old Testament ends, how does the Old Testament end as we have it?
All right, Malachi? All right, so we go to Malachi chapter four. How does the Old Testament end? Last three verses. I think we'll find something rather significant, as we would hope we would. Now, this is the last of the Old Testament that we, as we have it, the way that we as Christians have organized it, because of our faith in Christ, okay?
But even if we were thinking about the way in which the Jewish Old Testament is organized, this is the last word of the scroll, the 12, the last word of the section called the prophets. So it also is still significant there.
So let's read what it says. All right, verse four. Remember the law of Moses, my servant. All right, that's the first section from Moses, his first five books of the Bible. Commanded him in Horeb for all Israel with the statutes and judgments.
So he says, God says, remember, remember.
Okay, now verse five.
Behold, I will send you a light in the hearts.
Of the fathers to the children, in the hearts of the children to the fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.
I'm just thinking Proverbs right now, okay?
So there's just some slight echoes there of the law, the prophets, and the writings in the last three verses of Malachi. Now, for Christians, we look at that and we say, verse five, now Jesus said that was John the Baptist.
Jesus said that John the Baptist was Elijah, right? You gotta trust Jesus on this, folks, really do. In the last 150 years, you know the number of false prophets who have come out and said that they're Elijah?
I mean, they're all just ignoring Jesus.
Like, oh, I'm Elijah.
I get to predict when Jesus comes, okay? But Jesus said John the Baptist was Elijah, and then questioned whether or not we're willing to believe it, okay? But this is a promise that Elijah the prophet will come, and he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, in the hearts of the children to the fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.
Last word of the Old Testament as we have it is a warning about a curse, a warning about a curse. Well, who comes and bears our curse? Yeah, who comes and bears our curse? Who comes as, after the forerunner comes, then the Messiah comes, and all our hope is in him.
So that's the way our Christian Bible ends there in Malachi. Now, let's compare that to the way that the Hebrew Old Testament ends in Chronicles. Let's go to the very end of 2 Chronicles. And for us, that's a ways back.
But let's go to the end of 2 Chronicles, and in verse 22 of 2 Chronicles 36, "'King of Persia, that the word of the Lord "'by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, "'the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, King of Persia, "'so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, "'and also put it in writing, saying, "'Thus says Cyrus, King of Persia, "'All the kingdoms of the earth, "'the Lord God of heaven has given to me, "'and he has commanded me to build him a house "'at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
"'Who is among you of all his people? "'May the Lord his God be with him, and let him go up.'". Now, what were the Jews doing when Jesus came on the scene? What was their number one primary project? They were still building the temple.
They were still building the temple, weren't they? They had built the temple under Ezra and Nehemiah, but then they were still working on it. And how were they doing it so? They were doing so with a state partnership.
Herod the Great was called the Great because he was a builder. That's why he got his title, the Great, because he was a builder. And he helped to initiate and helped to bring financial support to the refurbishing and expansion of the temple there in Jerusalem.
And in fact, the temple had become such a beautiful and wonderful place that Roman citizens throughout the empire were successfully lobbied to bring donations to the cause, even though they didn't believe in the God of the Bible, because they felt like it beautified and improved the empire.
So here we find state-sponsored building of, construction of the temple and a call for everybody to get involved and build the temple. And they were still doing this. The last verse in the Hebrew Old Testament is this, and that's what they were still doing when Jesus arrived.
Makes sense, doesn't it? Well, what else are they supposed to do? That's the last word. Now, there's something else about this, though. It's not very conclusive ending. To put it in other words, this is a bit of a cliffhanger.
The people were expecting a further word from God. God had left things in such a way that they were to expect a further conclusive word from the Lord, and they were waiting on it. In fact, the word showed up in the flesh.
And when he showed up, what did he have to say about their state-sponsored refurbishing project? They were a little peeved that he wasn't on board. What did he say? Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
There you go.
Cyrus, king of Persia, thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, all the kingdoms of the earth the Lord God of heaven has given to me, he has commanded me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Now notice the question he asks.
Here is the open-ended question of the ending. The singular. The last question from Cyrus, who had been converted to the one true God, he asks a question. Who is he who will go up and build the temple?
Jesus comes and answers that question, doesn't he?
Right?
So they, the Jews, had not read that last significant verse in the Old Testament correctly. So whether we're ending with 2 Chronicles 36 -23, or ending with Malachi chapter four, and that ending, either way.
Come back next time, we're going to talk about the prophets who were contemporaries with Isaiah. The other prophets who were preaching and serving at the very same time that Isaiah was. And we're going to see how they echoed one another's messages, and that reinforces the content of what, and the importance of what was going on during the time of Isaiah.
So that'll be our focus next time. All right, well let's close by singing the doxology together.
