Survey of the Major Prophets

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Survey of the Major Prophets This is our fourth lecture in the series "Survey of the Old Testament" Sovereign Grace Academy www.SGFCjax.org/Academy

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Good evening, my name is Keith Foskey and I'm the pastor of Sovereign Grace Family Church.
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And tonight we are doing a live stream of our Sovereign Grace Academy class.
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There's no one here with me.
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We have had a situation which called for the cancelling of in-person class tonight.
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But I am here, I am teaching.
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And if you're a student and you are coming in via the live stream on Facebook, then this would be just like an in-class situation.
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The only thing is, obviously there won't be an opportunity to ask questions as we would normally have in class.
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And for that, I apologize.
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I hate that we won't be able to interact like we normally would.
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But keeping that in mind, if you do have questions throughout the class, feel free to message or email me those questions.
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And I will try to respond to them as best and as quickly as I can.
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Now the only positive for this is that we normally do not broadcast this class via live stream, because you are supposed to join Sovereign Grace Academy.
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You have to come and you have to become a member of the academy.
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You have to fill out an application.
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And so we keep these classes, we provide the videos, but we don't provide live feeds.
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Because we want the in-class environment to be something that people don't avoid or miss because of it being live streamed.
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So if you are watching tonight, you have an opportunity to see something that you might not normally see.
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And that is a live class.
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And again though, there are no students here, it is only me.
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To give you a little bit of a background on what we're doing tonight, we are continuing with our survey of the Old Testament.
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And we are now in lecture number five.
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Every one of our courses is an eight week course in the classroom and then there is a four week post class opportunity where you have to do some type of a project to finish the class and receive your certificate.
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So it's eight weeks in the class and then four weeks of independent study.
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So right now we are at our fifth week so far.
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We have looked at a survey of the Pentateuch, that is Genesis through Deuteronomy.
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We have looked at a survey of the history books, that is Joshua through Esther.
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And we have looked at a survey of the poetical books, which is Job through the Song of Songs.
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In tonight's session, we're going to be looking over the major prophets.
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The major prophets covers from Isaiah through Daniel.
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And prior to this lesson, if you're a student with Sovereign Grace Academy, you should have read in our commentary, which is what we're using for this class.
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The Believer's Bible Commentary, which every one of you should have a copy of.
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Prior to tonight's class, you should have read Introduction to the Prophets, which is in this commentary.
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And you would have been properly prepared for tonight's lecture if you did that.
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So if you have not done that, and you are hoping to earn a certificate in this class, maybe you got behind for whatever reason, then your responsibility will be to add that to the reading list for this week.
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Every week, we have readings that are required, and they prepare you for the lesson that you're going to participate in.
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So let us begin with our study of the major prophets.
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And before we do even that, we're going to very quickly just make a distinction.
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Why are we saying major prophets? And as many of you know, but some of you may not, we break the prophets down.
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There are 17 books, which we call the prophetic books.
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And of those 17 books, five of them are referred to as the major prophets.
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And then 12 of them are referred to as the minor prophets.
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Now next week, whether we meet in person or not, we'll see.
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But whether or not we do, next week the lesson will be on the minor prophets, which is Hosea through Malachi.
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The major prophets are Isaiah through Daniel.
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And the important thing to remember about these terms is that the term major and minor deals with the amount of their prophecy, not with the importance of their prophecy.
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That is a key thing to remember, because oftentimes in our mind, we hear the word major, and we think important, and minor, we think less important.
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But that is not how the books are grouped, rather they are grouped in relation to their breadth of material.
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The major prophets, of course, being larger, and the minor prophets in general being shorter books, some of them only being one chapter.
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Likewise, there are prophets in scripture who do not have a book.
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If you look up Elijah, you'll see him mentioned in the Bible.
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And Elijah, they're both prophets, but neither one of them has a book, yet their prophetic voice was no less important.
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So let us for a moment consider what it means to be a prophet of God.
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How do we define a prophet? The word prophet relates to this.
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The idea is one who speaks for God.
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A prophet is one who speaks for God.
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And that is in counter distinction to a priest.
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A priest is one who speaks to God.
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A prophet is one who speaks for God.
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Both of these offices in the Old Testament were anointed offices.
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And Jesus is referred to as the anointed one.
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That's what the word Messiah means, that's what the word Christ means, Christos.
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And the anointed one, he is called that because he is, in fact, prophet.
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He spoke for God.
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He was priest.
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He spoke to God.
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And he exercised the role of priest in making a sacrifice in and of himself.
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And he's also king.
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King is another anointed position.
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Therefore, we call Jesus the anointed one because he is prophet, priest, and king.
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Prophetic voices go back to the earliest passages of scripture.
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Enoch prophesied according to Jude 14.
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Noah was called a preacher of righteousness in 2 Peter 2 and verse 5.
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And certainly, the patriarchs all had a prophetic voice.
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Moses, of course, had a prophetic voice.
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He spoke for God.
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Thus, he could be called a prophet.
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However, when we refer to the prophetic period, we are typically recognizing that period as having begun during the time of Samuel, around 1100 BC.
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The priesthood had fallen into corruption.
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The prophets, therefore, ministered through the age of the divided kingdom until the coming of the Messiah.
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And the final Old Testament prophet was actually John the Baptist.
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He would have been the last of the Old Testament prophets.
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Prior to him, it would have been Malachi.
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And there was a 400-year division between the two.
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There's 400 years from the last prophecy of Malachi to the first utterances of John the Baptist.
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And it's interesting to note that 400-year period because if we go back in our study of Bible history, we learn that there was another time when there was a 400-year period where there was seemingly no prophetic voice in Israel, the time between Joseph and Moses.
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The people of Israel were enslaved for around 400 years.
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And that time, we could say there was no prophetic voice in Israel.
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And when the voice did come, it came in the person of Moses, a very powerful and strong prophetic voice.
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Fast forward to Malachi.
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And after Malachi, there's 400 years of silence, prophetically speaking.
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And then a powerful prophetic voice, John the Baptist, the last of the Old Testament prophets, comes and he prophesies what? Make his paths straight.
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The kingdom of God is at hand.
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He preaches Jesus.
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He preaches the way of the Messiah who was coming.
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So a prophet is one who speaks for God.
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The writing prophets fall into a more limited scope of history, even more limited than what we would call the prophetic period.
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We would say the writing prophets fall into an even tighter window.
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They came on the scene during the divided kingdom, which would have been around 930 BC.
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They prophesied in the two kingdoms through the exile and during the restoration.
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If you'll remember back a few classes ago, you'll remember that we had the kingdom first with Saul, and then it was given over to David, and then David to his son Solomon.
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And then after Solomon, there was a divided kingdom with Jeroboam and Rehoboam.
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You had the king to the north and the king to the south.
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And you had Israel and Judah.
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And that divided kingdom would eventually fall.
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722, the northern kingdom would fall to Assyria, and 586, the southern kingdom would fall to Babylonia, and they would go into exile.
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And then after the exile, there would be restoration.
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Well, if you look at the handout, if you're a student and you look at the handout that I gave you in our first class, the time period, you'll see that it's during that divided kingdom where the writing prophets begin to have their moment in history, if you will.
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And from a biblical historical point of view, they prophesied from about the time of first kings to about the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.
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So that gives us the time period approximately of the writing prophets.
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Now, I want to speak for a moment on the methodology of the prophets, the methodology of the prophets.
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When most people think of a prophet, they confuse prophecy with fortune telling.
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There is a sense in which the prophets did announce the future.
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In fact, that was the test of a true prophet.
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According to Deuteronomy 18.22, if a prophet said something would happen and then it didn't happen, that was the test of how you knew he was a false prophet.
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Listen to Deuteronomy 18.22.
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When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken, the prophet had spoken it presumptuously, you need not be afraid of him.
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So the very test of a prophet in Deuteronomy 18.22 is that if he says something's going to happen and it does not, then he is not a true prophet.
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How many prophets today would that disqualify? I'm reminded only recently of prophecies that were made regarding COVID-19 and the coronavirus.
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There was one prophet in particular who said that it was all going to be eradicated sometime in March.
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Well, here we are in June still dealing with it.
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And after his prophecy failed and failed miserably, he came out and said, well, the Holy Spirit misled me.
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That is amazing because essentially he was calling God a liar.
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And if there is a liar in that situation, it is certainly not God.
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Deuteronomy 18.22 says when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if what he says does not come true, that word is not from the Lord and he has spoken presumptuously, we should not fear him.
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And I think that test for prophecy still stands today.
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But again, the methodology of the prophet is that they did speak about things that would come and we call that foretelling.
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Prophecy is a type of foretelling.
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It's announcement about the future.
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And if they said something would happen and it didn't happen, they were a false prophet.
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But that is not the only way that the prophet spoke.
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In fact, I would say that is the minority way that the prophet spoke.
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More common among the prophets, rather than foretelling, they did something which is often referred to as foretelling or rather speaking forth the word of the Lord to the people of God about the present situation that they were in.
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Rather than prophesying about the future, oftentimes they gave insight about the present.
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So it is important when we're reading through the prophets to understand that not everything is a prophecy about the future.
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Some of it is simply a statement about what is happening at the time.
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What you are doing now is idolatry.
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What you are doing now is sinful.
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And the prophets were strong preachers.
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And that's what we have to remember about them, is the method that they would use was the proclamation of God's word.
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They were speaking God's word.
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They were speaking on behalf of God.
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They both foretold the future and they foretold or spoke forth regarding the present condition of the people.
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That was their methodology.
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And now for a moment, I'd like to look at the classification of the prophets.
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We've already said there is a classification of major and minor.
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But regarding their historical setting and context, this really doesn't help.
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Because it's better for us to consider them in a different way rather than thinking of them in major and minor.
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It's better for us to consider them as either pre-exilic, exilic or post-exilic.
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And we talked about this in our first class.
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Because when we were going through the timeline, I said, see, here's the exile.
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And there are those who prophesied before the exile.
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We call them the pre-exilic prophets.
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There are those who prophesied during the exile.
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We call those the exilic prophets.
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And then there was those who prophesied after the exile.
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And really, it's easy to break that down because the pre-exilic prophets make up the majority report.
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There are only two that prophesied during the exile, two exilic prophets, if you will, and they were Ezekiel and Daniel.
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And then the post-exilic prophets would have been Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.
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So you have the rest of the 17 major and minor prophets, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, all of those prophesied up to and into the beginning of the exile.
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We would refer to them as pre-exilic prophets.
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Another thing to help in understanding who they were was to understand to whom they prophesied.
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And you have those who prophesied primarily to the Northern Kingdom.
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You have those who prophesied primarily to the Southern Kingdom.
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And then you have those who prophesied what we would say to the surrounding nations.
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The Northern Kingdom was Hosea, Amos, and Jonah, even though you could say Jonah fits into the category of the nations as well, because he prophesied in Nineveh.
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But we would say definitely Hosea and Amos prophesied within the Northern Kingdom.
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The Southern Kingdom would have been Isaiah, Jeremiah, Joel, Micah, Habakkuk, Malachi, Zephaniah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai, and Zechariah.
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The majority, again, were in the Southern Kingdom.
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And then the ones who prophesied to the nations, again, Jonah could qualify for that, Nahum, and Obadiah.
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So those are different ways.
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You can say, okay, how are we gonna divide the prophets? We can say they're pre-exilic, exilic, and post-exilic, or you can say there are those who prophesied to the Northern Kingdom, Hosea, and Amos, and Jonah, and then those who prophesied to the nations, Nahum, and Obadiah, and also Jonah, and then those who prophesied primarily to the Southern Kingdom, which it would have been the rest.
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And so those are all ways to identify.
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And why does that matter? Well, it matters when you're going to start interpreting the books.
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Knowing to whom they spoke and knowing when they spoke is a major component of a right understanding of what they spoke.
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You wanna know what they said and what they meant, you have to understand who they were speaking to and when.
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And so this is all part of the literature that you have.
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You have your book that can help you.
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You have your timeline that I gave you in the very first class.
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If you're a member of the academy, then you have all of these things.
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And I encourage you to have them with you when you are studying the prophets.
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But again, for the sake of the lesson tonight, we are going to keep with what we call the English Bible division.
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The English Bible breaks up the Old Testament into the divisions of the Pentateuch, the books of Moses, the historical books, the poetical books, the major prophets and the minor prophets.
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There's five major divisions in the English Bible of the Old Testament.
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And so tonight we're gonna look at the major prophets.
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But before we do, and again, I know I keep saying we're gonna talk about the major prophets, but I have a lot of introductory material about prophecy.
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I do wanna say one last thing of introduction before we move on onto the major prophets.
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And that is the themes that are found within the books of the major prophets.
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What themes do we find in the books of the major prophets? Number one, the theme of monotheism.
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There is only one God who created all things.
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All other gods are false.
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We see this major theme coming up throughout the prophets.
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There is one true God and all the other gods are false.
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Number two, God is holy.
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He's not part of his creation.
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He is sovereign over his, or rather he is above his creation.
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He's separated from it.
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He is other than his creation.
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He is holy.
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And that is something that comes up throughout the prophets.
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He is sovereign.
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That's number three.
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He is sovereign, not only over nature, but also over nations.
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Recently, we had our sovereignty of God conference here at Sovereign Grace Family Church and brother Mike Collier preached a message on God using an evil nation to bring judgment on the people of Israel.
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And it was a proof that God is sovereign even over the work of evil nations.
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And he was speaking from the book of Isaiah.
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So again, the prophecies, one of the themes of prophecy is the sovereignty of God.
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Another theme is God's mercy and grace.
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The very reason God sent the prophets in the first place was because he was merciful to the people.
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He was giving them the prophets for correction and guidance, comfort, and hope.
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Another theme is the justice of God.
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God is concerned with justice.
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He calls his people to repent and be obedient to him, to love him and to love one another.
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God is concerned with justice.
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Another theme is God's covenant and his law.
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God's law was the foundation for holy living and his covenant was the foundation for hopeful living.
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His law gave them the way to live and the covenant gave them for what to live.
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We live for the promise of God.
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And so his law and his covenant is a major theme in the prophets.
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Another major theme, of course, is the exile and the restoration.
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We see warnings prior to the exile.
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We see comfort during the exile and we see assurance after the exile.
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And so those themes come up throughout the prophets.
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And finally, a theme that comes up within the prophets is the theme of the Messiah.
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The central component of hope within Israel was the coming of a savior, the coming of the Christ, the coming of Messiah.
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And we see him and the promise of his coming throughout the prophets.
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And so there is our introduction to the prophetic books.
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Now let us begin to focus our attention on the five major prophets.
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The five major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and then of course, well, let me back up.
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There are four major prophets, five books, because there is the book of Lamentations, but as we will see in a moment, we believe that it was written by Jeremiah.
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So there would only be four major prophets, five books of the major prophets.
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And so we say the books are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel.
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And so we're going to begin with the book of Isaiah.
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Isaiah is recognized as one of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets.
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He is identified as the son of Amoz in chapter one, verse one.
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His name means salvation is from the Lord.
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And what's interesting about that is the word salvation comes up in the book of Isaiah 26 times.
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And you say, well, that doesn't seem like a lot.
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It is when you compare it to the other books, the other prophetic books, because in the other prophetic books, the word salvation only comes up seven times in total.
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So the other books mentioned salvation seven times put together.
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The book of Isaiah mentioned salvation 26 times.
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And this becomes the theme that unifies the book.
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Now, tradition states that Isaiah was the author of the entire book.
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However, some higher critical scholars argue that there were two Isaiahs.
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There was the Isaiah who wrote chapters one through 39.
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And then there was what some called the Deutero-Isaiah or the pseudo-Isaiah, the false Isaiah who wrote chapters 40 to 66.
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However, this, even though there is certainly a distinction that is recognizable between chapters one to 39 and between chapters four to 66, it does not necessarily demand that there is a different author.
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The New Testament quotes freely from the whole book of Isaiah, at times quoting passages from the first 40 or the first 39 and the last 27 chapters and bringing them together saying this is from Isaiah.
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That's important because what that tells us is that the New Testament writers considered Isaiah to be one unified work, not broken up over several authors.
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Also, the Dead Sea Scrolls show no evidence.
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And those are our oldest extant manuscripts that testify to the veracity of the Old Testament.
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There's no evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls of any distinction between Isaiah 1 to 39 and Isaiah 40 to 66.
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The writings of Isaiah span 66 chapters and therefore it has been referred to as the Bible in miniature.
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Because if you think about the Bible, the Bible is 66 books and Isaiah is 66 chapters.
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And what's even more interesting past that is that if you consider that distinction I mentioned that the first 39 chapters seem to read a little differently than the last 27 chapters.
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That also corresponds to the Bible where we know there are 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament.
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Now, some make a big deal about that.
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I tend to not make such a big deal about that for a couple of reasons.
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The primary reason being the Hebrew Bible is not numbered the same way ours is or the Hebrew Bible does not have 39 Old Testament books and they don't have a New Testament to make up 66 books.
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So that would only really be a distinction for the English Bible.
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The chapter divisions were not added until many centuries later.
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So the idea that this is some kind of a miracle, I just think it's a very happy coincidence.
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And of course God is sovereign so there's really no such thing as a true coincidence.
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God has a purpose in everything that he does.
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And so there is a way with our English Bible to see Isaiah sort of mirroring the Bible.
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The Bible that we have, the English Bible, 39 books in the Old Testament, 27 in the New, the 66 total, Isaiah 66 chapters, the first 39 have a certain tone, the last 27 have a different tone.
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And it is interesting that there would be that connection.
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But again, I wouldn't make too much of it.
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Isaiah preached a message of judgment and salvation.
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He was outraged by idolatry, injustice, unrighteousness and rebellion.
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The arrogance and scandalous behavior of God's people was his focus.
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And he communicates God's anger and warns of God's impending judgment.
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Judah was trusting in their military might and in their political treaties for protection.
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But unless they repented and relied upon God, they would fall into destruction.
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Several passages in Isaiah should be noteworthy for us and are worthy of independent study along with studying the entire book.
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The first one is one that I think all of us should be very familiar with and that is Isaiah 6.
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That is Isaiah's vision.
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And that also pinpoints when Isaiah's prophecies began and pinpoints where he sits in prophetic history or Israel's history.
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Because he says, and it says in chapter six, in the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated in the throne high and lifted up in the temple high and lifted up.
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And so we have Isaiah's vision, his calling, and we have the timeline.
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It happened in the year King Uzziah died.
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That's Isaiah chapter six.
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And it reminds us of the holiness of God.
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That's where he saw the seraphim that would say, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.
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The next thing that would be important to point out are the references to Christ.
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We see the virgin birth announcement in Isaiah 7.14.
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Time does not permit me to demonstrate that this actually is a statement about virgin birth.
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There is some higher critical scholars that say the word virgin is an improper use of the term.
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However, we know that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which was translated somewhere around 200 BC before Christ, the Septuagint uses the Greek word parthenos there to reference that it was in fact a virgin.
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And so it does say the virgin will conceive and bear a son.
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We also have the promised announcement of a child being born, government be on his shoulders, and he will be called a wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, and prince of peace.
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That's Isaiah 9.6.
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That's again a reference to Jesus.
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And then of course we have the suffering servant passage of Isaiah 53.
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One of the clearest passages, not only of Jesus, but of the work of Jesus in the penal substitutionary atoning work of the cross, where it says by his stripes, we are healed.
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That does not mean that we will always be physically healed from every sickness or ailment.
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It's referring to the healing which comes on the cross, which is the taking away of our sins, healing us from spiritual deadness, bringing us to new life in him.
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That's what it's referring to.
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And that's found in Isaiah 53.
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Another passage of note would be Isaiah 61, one and two, where Jesus actually would later, when he is in the synagogue, he opens up the scroll and he reads from Isaiah 61, one and two.
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And he says, this passage is about me.
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So I would encourage you to look at that passage as well.
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So is our look.
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And again, for those who haven't been here, we are not able because of time to do in-depth studies of any of these things.
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These are all introductions.
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And so this is the introduction to the book of Isaiah.
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Now I'm going to change my attention to the book of Jeremiah.
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Again, if you read your commentary, which you should have read prior to class, then you would know that these are, you would have read the introduction to these books and you would have a lot of this information.
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And what I'm doing through the lecture is simply reinforcing what you have read, encouraging you and your knowledge of it.
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Oftentimes we don't learn something the first time we hear it.
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It takes hearing it a couple of times.
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So tonight is just reinforcing a lot of what you have already read in your book.
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So we're going to go now to the book of Jeremiah.
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Jeremiah is referred to by many as the weeping prophet.
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He began his ministry after the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
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And he warns of the oncoming destruction of the Southern Kingdom of Judah if the Southern Kingdom will not repent.
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Jeremiah calls out for the nation to turn back to God.
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And at the same time, he recognizes the inevitable, or excuse me, the inevitability of Judah's destruction due to its unrepentant idolatry and immorality.
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Now, I want to read to you a quick summary of Jeremiah, and I will read this quote.
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It's a paragraph, so it's a rather lengthy quote, but it gives an overview of the book.
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The book of Jeremiah is primarily a message of judgment on Judah for rampant idolatry.
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After the death of King Josiah, the last righteous king, the nation of Judah had almost completely abandoned God and his commandments.
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Jeremiah compares Judah to a prostitute.
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Chapter 2, verse 20, chapter 3, verses 1 to 3.
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God had promised that he would judge idolatry most severely.
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And Jeremiah was warning Judah that God's judgment was at hand.
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God had delivered Judah from destruction on countless occasions, but his mercy was at its end.
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Jeremiah records King Nebuchadnezzar conquering Judah and making it subject to him.
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After further rebellion, God brought Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian armies back to destroy and desolate Judah and Jerusalem.
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Even in the most severe judgment, God promises the restoration of Judah back into the land God has given to them.
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And that is Jeremiah 29 and verse 10.
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And so ends the summary quote.
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Jeremiah had the courage to speak a message of doom, but he also had the compassion to weep over God's people in prayer.
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This is a demonstration of what the man of God should look like.
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The man of God should have the courage to speak the truth and the compassion to weep when necessary.
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This is Jeremiah proclaiming hard truth through bitter tears.
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Jeremiah also, however, brings a message of hope in the midst of destruction.
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God would save a remnant of his people.
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He would establish a new covenant with his people.
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And if you're reading along, if you're with me, I'd like for you to turn to Jeremiah 31, because this is the promise of the new covenant.
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And it is the new covenant that I believe we live in now as Christians.
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Jesus, when he was in the upper room with his disciples, he said, this cup is the blood of the new covenant.
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This represents the new covenant.
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We see that in Jeremiah 31, verse 31.
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It says, behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
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Not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord.
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For this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord.
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I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts and I will be their God and they shall be my people.
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And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother saying, no, the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.
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What a beautiful promise, what a wonderful promise about the new covenant.
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Consider the promises of the new covenant that are ours in Christ, forgiveness of sin.
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God remembers our sin no more, why? Because it has been paid for in the death of Christ.
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It says, they will all know me.
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How is that possible? Well, it's possible because it's speaking of members of the new covenant.
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And how does one become a member of the new covenant? One becomes a member of the new covenant through the gift of regeneration, the gift of regeneration where you're born again.
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And when you are born again into the family of God, you are a member of the new covenant.
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And no more does someone have to tell you to know the Lord because you know the Lord.
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He has made his home within your heart.
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He will be their God.
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They shall be my people, Jeremiah promised.
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And he will put his law within them.
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We have the law written on our heart.
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As new covenant believers, we have the law of Christ, the law of love, the law of liberty in our heart.
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Some people argue that we are not truly the recipients of the new covenant because it says, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
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And they'll say, well, you're not a Jew.
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So you can't be a part of the new covenant.
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And I respond by saying this, when Jesus came, the Bible says, he broke down the wall between Jew and Gentile.
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The first disciples were Jews and the gospel did go to the Jews first, but it did not stay within the nation of Israel.
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It went out into all nations.
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And that was the promise given to Abraham.
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Through you, all the nations of the world will be blessed.
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The apostle Paul tells us in Galatians that God was preaching the gospel to Abraham when he said through you, all the nations will be blessed.
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And we are told that when we become members of the new covenant by faith in Jesus Christ, that we are grafted in to the family of Israel, that we are made sons and daughters of Abraham.
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Now there are some of a particular theological system that would say, no, the church and Israel must always be distinct.
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There must be a wall of separation between Israel and the church.
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And that's why they would say we are not yet in the new covenant, but I would steadfastly disagree.
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I would say we have been made partakers of the new covenant because of the work of Christ.
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And there is no longer a dividing wall between Jew and Gentile.
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There is no longer a separation.
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We are, in fact, the Israel of God.
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That's what Paul calls us in Galatians chapter six.
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He calls the church the Israel of God because we are engrafted into that family.
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So that's the promise Jeremiah gives, the promise of a new covenant that is to come.
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That's a wonderful promise.
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If you think about the fact that they're about to go into exile, they're about to lose their prosperity, they're about to lose their property, they're about to lose their homes, they're about to lose their freedom.
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And yet Jeremiah gives them hope, even in the midst of pain, the hope of a new covenant.
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Following Jeremiah, we come to the book of Lamentations.
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The word Lamentations itself means a lament or to cry or to weep.
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The book doesn't tell us who wrote it, but tradition says it is Jeremiah.
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In fact, the tradition is that Lamentations is simply a part of Jeremiah.
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But in the English Bible, we distinguish between the book of Jeremiah and the book of Lamentations.
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It's a relatively short book.
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It's a cry of grief over the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.
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When the Babylonians attacked Jerusalem, they destroyed the city and the temple, and many people died as a result of that attack.
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And though they had been warned this was coming, they still could not believe such destruction had befallen them.
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And Lamentations is the crying of sorrow and repentance of the national sin that brought about this national destruction.
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Lamentations is a prayer, in a sense, a prayer for forgiveness, a prayer for restoration.
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And it has been noted that this lament, in one sense, may prefigure the pain of Christ on the cross.
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The Bible calls Jesus a man of sorrows acquainted with grief.
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Well, we see grief in Lamentations, and we certainly see the grief of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, as he prepares himself to go and suffer on the cross.
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As Jeremiah weeped the tears of a prophet and a preacher, so Jesus wept tears as the Lord wept tears of the sacrifice for sin.
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Well, now we move on to the fourth of the major prophets, the fourth book, third prophet, fourth book, and that is the book of Ezekiel.
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The book of Ezekiel was written by Ezekiel the prophet.
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He is named in the book in chapter one, verse three.
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As far as we understand history, he would have been a contemporary of Jeremiah, who we just spoke about, and Daniel, who we will be speaking about.
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He wrote during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews.
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Now, many people are familiar with Ezekiel in part, but not much beyond the parts.
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If you mention the book of Ezekiel, they may mention the wheels, the vision of the wheels.
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They may mention the vision of the valley of dry bones.
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That's a popular one.
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There's songs, those bones, those bones, those dry bones.
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So that's something that people will remember, but much of the book outside of those prophetic visions, outside of that, much of the book and its symbolism remains a mystery.
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So I want to again, quote from a summary of Ezekiel to try to give us a picture of who the prophet is and what his ministry is about.
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Ezekiel, destined to begin his life of ministry as a priest at the age of 30, was uprooted from his homeland and marched off to Babylon at the age of 25.
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For five years, he languished in despair.
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And at age 30, a majestic vision of Yahweh's glory captivated his being in Babylon.
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The priest prophet discovered that God was not confined to the narrow structures of Ezekiel's native land.
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Instead, he is a universal God who commands and controls persons and nations.
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In Babylon, God imparted to Ezekiel his word for the people.
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His call experience transformed Ezekiel.
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He became avidly devoted to God's word.
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He realized he had nothing personally to assist the captives in their bitter situation, but he was convinced God's word spoke to their condition and could give them victory in it.
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Ezekiel used various methods to convey God's word to his people.
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He used art and drawing, a depiction of Jerusalem, symbolic actions and unusual conduct to secure attention.
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He cut his hair and beard to demonstrate what God would do to Jerusalem and its inhabitants.
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Again, Ezekiel is a book of many interesting narratives that we read through and we see both in the visions of Ezekiel and in the visions of, or in the works of the prophet himself.
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What's interesting about Ezekiel is that I mentioned earlier about the valley of dry bones.
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The promise there was the bones that were dead and dried up and they were given life, muscle and skin and life returned to the bones and they came live.
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And this was a picture, of course, of the promise of the restoration.
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Israel was as it were dead in captivity, but there was coming a restoration.
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What's interesting about that particular prophecy is that we can also use that in a sense to think about how God breathes life into the dry bones of the dead sinner.
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Again, we don't wanna be too loose with how we interpret, but there are analogies that we can make in scripture.
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And one of the analogies, of course, is the sinner sits dead in his trespasses and sins, according to the book of Ephesians chapter two.
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He is dead in his trespasses and sins, but God makes him alive.
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How many among us have thought about the story of Lazarus in the tomb? God made him alive.
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That's the same picture of God taking the dead sinner and giving them life.
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It's the picture of that valley of dry bones.
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God gives it life.
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God is the life giver.
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Another unusual thing about Ezekiel is his emphasis on comforting God's people.
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He prophesied to the exiles a word of encouragement in the midst of their captivity.
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And like Jeremiah, Ezekiel promises gifts that will accompany a new covenant.
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Now the language of the new covenant is given in Jeremiah, but the content of the new covenant is given to us in Ezekiel.
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And I want to read, if you have your Bibles, turn with me to Ezekiel chapter 11.
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We're gonna look at 17 to 20.
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This again is a promise of what God will do in the new covenant.
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Therefore say, thus says the Lord God, this is chapter 11, verse 17.
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I will gather you from the peoples and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered and I will give you the land of Israel.
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And when they come there, they will remove from it all its detestable things and all its abominations.
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And I will give them one heart and a new spirit I will put within them.
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I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them.
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And they shall be my people and I will be their God.
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This passage certainly refers in time to the returning of the people to the land, but it also refers to the coming of Christ because it is in the coming of Christ that the spirit would no longer make his home in the tabernacle or in the temple, but now the spirit of God would make his home in the heart of every believer.
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When Jesus died on the cross, the temple curtain was torn in two.
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Matthew tells us from top to bottom.
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That tells us that curtain which separated the holy place from the holy of holies, the most holy place, the sanctum sanctorum, you couldn't access that unless you were the high priest and then only once per year, that place where the spirit of God was believed to have resided, curtain is open.
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Because now the spirit of God no longer is in this place, but he is in the heart of every believer.
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This is why in the New Testament, the apostle Paul would say, do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit lives within the believer.
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I will put my spirit, a new spirit I will put within them.
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I'll take out the heart of stone, give him a heart of flesh.
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The heart of stone which was sinful, replace it with a heart of flesh which beats.
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It's alive and alive for God.
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So that's the promise that Ezekiel gives and looks forward to the gifts that will accompany the new covenant.
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Well, we have come now to the fifth and final of the major prophetic books.
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Ordinarily this class would take an hour and a half, but that would include engagement from the class and the students asking questions and stopping and clarifying things.
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Since I didn't have that tonight, we probably will go just a little over one hour.
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So if you're wondering about why tonight was shorter, it was simply because of the way that this is more of a monologue tonight where our classes normally operate functioning as an interactive dialogue where students are able to ask questions as I give the lesson.
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So now we come to the book of Daniel.
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The book of Daniel is one of my favorite books.
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Whenever I was a youth leader, I got saved when I was 19.
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I began to work in the church helping out.
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Almost immediately after I got saved, I began to help out around the church.
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But after I began to be serious about ministry and God called me into ministry, the first thing I did in the church was I worked with young people.
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And I was a young man myself.
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And one of the things I remember doing as a young man, working with young people, was taking them through the book of Daniel because particularly the first few chapters of Daniel are very useful as examples to young people who are living in a land that is opposed to the things of God.
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In fact, we could identify Daniel as really a counterculture person.
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He was in a culture where he was pulled in and he was given a new name.
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He tried to give him a new religion, a new identity, and Daniel stood his ground.
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And of course, also he had his compatriots who we know as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
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But one of the things to remember about those is those names are their Babylonian names, their Chaldean names.
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That is not their actual names.
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Their actual names are given to us in the book of Daniel.
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And I want to see here, this may take a moment.
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Didn't have this written down.
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Yes, here it is.
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In chapter one, it's speaking.
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It says the king, verse five, it says the king assigned them a daily portion of the food they ate and of the wine he drank.
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They were to be educated for three years.
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And at the end of that time, they were to stand before the king.
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Among them were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.
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If you ask somebody if they know the story of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah from the tribe of Judah, most people would say I never heard those names before in my life.
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You never heard of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah? No, I've never heard those names before.
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But if you ask them if they've heard the tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they would say yes, those are the three boys, the three young men who were thrown into the fiery furnace.
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This is what it says in verse seven.
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It says the chief of the eunuchs gave them names.
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Daniel, he called Belteshazzar.
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Hananiah, he called Shadrach.
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Mishael, he called Meshach.
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And Azariah, he called Abednego.
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All of those names are referencing Babylonian gods.
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This is a picture, one of authority, one of the ways that authority is expressed in the Bible is the giving of a name.
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If you remember in the very second chapter of the Bible, God is speaking to Adam and he calls the animals to Adam and he calls Adam to name them.
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You ever wonder why he did that? The reason why he did that was because that was an exercise of dominion.
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To name something, to give it a name was an exercise of authority.
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It was an exercise of position.
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It was an exercise of power.
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Adam was God's vice-regent and therefore he had the responsibility to name the animals.
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We see here one of the first things that was done when these boys were deported from their homeland, brought to Babylonia to be re-educated in the ways of the Babylonians.
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The first thing, well, among one of the first things they did was change their name.
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And so whenever I was teaching this to young people, I would say that you have to consider how important these lessons are because what's happening is they're being taken from the place of their youth, what they were taught, they're being thrown into a culture that's ungodly and they're being taught an entirely different way to live, an entirely different way to eat, an entirely different way to behave and even an entirely different name.
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Is that not what happens to our young people oftentimes? Especially in school, if a child goes to school, they are caught up in the culture of the day and they are taught to deny the very things that they were raised to hold sacred and to hold dear.
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So again, the Book of Daniel has a lot of value for young people just to see how the world operates.
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When the world wants to take you in and change you, oftentimes it's not taking you in and changing you for the better.
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It's changing you to be like it.
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The Bible says, love not the world, neither the things therein.
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The Book of Daniel consists of two main parts.
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Chapter one through six is primarily narrative.
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It speaks of Daniel and many others being taken into captivity, I've already mentioned that, and it includes familiar narratives.
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Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, we're familiar with that.
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Daniel being placed in the lion's den, we're familiar with that.
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The handwriting on the wall, we're familiar with that.
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There's also the prophetic statements and dreams of Nebuchadnezzar about the rise and the fall of nations.
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Chapters seven through 12 are primarily prophetic.
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So chapters one through six are primarily narrative.
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Chapters seven through 12 are primarily prophetic.
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They include visions and dreams about future world events.
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This is by far the most difficult portion to interpret.
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Many have used this section to come up with various understandings of history, especially in conjunction with the coming of Jesus and the end times.
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You'll hear a lot of times when people are talking about the end times, they'll refer to Daniel's 70 weeks, and they'll be referring to a passage in the latter half of Daniel.
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The common thread throughout the book of Daniel is this, God rules all.
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Whether it's the first half of the book or the latter half of the book, what is shown throughout the book is God's ruling hand.
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One of the most amazing things about Daniel's prophecies is the incredible accuracy which it contains regarding the changing over of world powers.
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Daniel interprets the dream of Nebuchadnezzar where he sees a statue which represents kingdoms.
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The statue has a head of gold, a chest and arms of silver, a belly and thigh of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay.
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We find out that that is actually a reference to world history and the rise and fall of nations.
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The golden head is Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar.
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The chest and arms are the Medo-Persian army that would come and take over.
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The belly and thighs of bronze are the Grecian army.
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The legs of iron are Rome.
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The feet of iron and clay, there's debate about it, but a lot of people believe refer to the divided kingdom.
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But the one thing that's in that prophecy that's often seen as very important, and I believe it's very important, is the stone.
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The stone that is cut without hands and comes and destroys the statue.
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That stone, I believe, is the kingdom of the Messiah, the kingdom of Christ.
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He is the stone.
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It's his kingdom that will rule all.
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And the Bible says all nations will be made his footstool.
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His enemies will be placed under his feet.
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History tells us this is the pattern of power that actually did arise.
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And in fact, from Babylon to Medo-Persia to Greece to Rome, that is so accurate that some people believe Daniel's predictions couldn't have possibly be written in his time period because they're too accurate.
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I remember years ago, I purchased a commentary.
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It was a Bible handbook which explicitly said Daniel could not be the author of the book because it spoke of events which came after his death.
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But again, these events are prophetic, and that disregards the supernatural elements of the book.
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If Daniel is a prophet of God, there's no reason why he could not speak of the future with perfect accuracy.
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In fact, one of the ways that we feel confident in the veracity of the Bible, in its reliability, is that it speaks with perfect precision about future events.
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One of the most profound passages of Daniel comes in the last chapter.
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There we have a vision of the end of the world.
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If you have your Bibles, turn to Daniel chapter 12, and we're gonna begin to draw to a close by looking at Daniel chapter 12, verses one and two.
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At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince, who has charge of your people, and there shall be a time of trouble such as never has been since there was a nation till that time.
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But at that time, your people shall be delivered.
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Everyone whose name shall be found written in the book, and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
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What's interesting about this passage is that there are some people who make the argument that the Old Testament does not have a hope in the afterlife, especially they'll say that the Old Testament death was just dying, you went into the ground.
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There is no promise in the Old Testament of eternal life.
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There's no promise in the Old Testament of eternal torment.
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I've even heard a Jewish man say Jews don't believe in hell because there's no reference to hell in our Bible, and their Bible, of course, would be referenced to the Old Testament.
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Now, right away, Christians can acknowledge that there is much more to say about eternal life.
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There's much more to say about the afterlife, and there is much more to say about hell in the New Testament, but this passage in Daniel, Daniel 12, verse one and two, is proof positive that yes, the Old Testament does provide insight into the afterlife.
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It tells us clearly some will be raised to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
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That is the same, almost exact same language that the New Testament gives us when it tells us that some will be raised to heaven with Christ and others will be poured into the lake of fire or they will suffer eternal conscious torment forever.
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So, that ends Daniel 12, and there's one last thing I wanna mention about Daniel, or that ends the book of Daniel in chapter 12.
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I wanna mention one other thing, and it's this figure called Michael.
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Michael is mentioned here, and he's mentioned also in another passage in Daniel throughout the book, and there's some questions about the identity of Michael.
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We see Michael come up again in the New Testament.
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The Bible says it makes a reference in Jude.
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In fact, if you wanna turn in your Bible to the New Testament and go to the General Epistle of Jude, we see in the Epistle of Jude a reference to Michael in verse nine.
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It says, but when the archangel Michael contending with the devil was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, the Lord rebuke you.
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Okay, so Michael comes up again here, and so this figure is a mysterious figure.
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We know he's an archangel.
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That's what Jude tells us.
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He's called a prince in the book of Daniel.
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Some people believe that Michael is Jesus, that they are the same person, just given two different titles, two different names, and particularly if you are ever visited by the Jehovah Witnesses, one of the things that is a very important part of their theology is the belief that Michael the archangel is Jesus.
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So that's an important thing to remember.
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There are some Christians who have tried to make that argument, even some very sincere and devout theologians, and they see in Michael a reference to a character that could be Christ.
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And certainly there are parallels, especially when we go back to Daniel 12, and it talks about him rising, having charge over the people, and this being at the time of the end, and certainly we know Jesus will be there at the time of the end.
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I think it's, I don't think it's proper to conclude certainly that Michael is Jesus.
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I think it might be better to say that Michael is a very important angel, very powerful archangel, certainly one of the only few whose name is mentioned in the Bible.
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Gabriel is mentioned, Michael is mentioned, but not many more are mentioned by name, and so that refers to him as an important person.
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But to assert that this is Jesus, I don't believe that we can prove that, and I don't think that it's necessary to.
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The New Testament never makes that connection for us, and I think that it would if it were a necessary thing to believe.
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And here's the other thing, too, to remember, Jesus is not an angel.
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Jesus is the second person of the Trinity.
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He is fully divine, and angels, while they are angelic, they are celestial, they are not divine beings in the sense that they do not have eternality.
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Jesus is eternal.
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He's co-equal and co-eternal with the Father.
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Angels are not eternal, and therefore, I would say, most likely, Michael is not a reference to Jesus, but rather, we're looking at a very important angel.
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So there lies our ending of our study of the major prophets.
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So much to learn in each of these books, and we have not, even for a moment, truly scratched the surface of all that is contained within.
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Next week, we will focus our attention on the 12 minor prophets.
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We will have to go much more quickly because each of those books, we have to go through all 12 in one night, and here's what you have to do for your homework, and this is the most extensive reading you're going to be doing for this course, so please do the reading, even if we don't meet in class.
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If you want to earn the certificate for this class, you have to watch the video, you have to take notes, you have to do the reading, and what you're going to be doing, the reading you're going to be doing next week is you're going to be reading the introductory notes for all 12 minor prophets.
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It's only a few pages per, but because there's 12, you're looking at several pages of reading, so make sure you start early in the week, make sure you have plenty of time and give yourself plenty of time so that you have read all 12 introductions to the 12 minor prophets before class next week, and that way, you'll be able to engage with the lecture.
01:11:32
Now, I want to just finalize that thought.
01:11:37
Again, the readings are required for the certificate.
01:11:43
We do it on the honor system.
01:11:44
Sometimes I might ask you a question or two to see if you've read, but ultimately, it's up to you as the student to have the integrity to do the readings that are required for the course.
01:11:57
So far, you've only had to read one or two introductions per week.
01:12:01
Next week, you're going to have to read 12, and again, if you don't read them, you're probably going to be lost in the lecture because the lecture is going to go very quickly through the books of the 12 minor prophets.
01:12:14
Lot of information in a very short amount of time.
01:12:19
I hope tonight has been useful for you.
01:12:21
I hope that you have been encouraged by it.
01:12:25
Again, I'm sorry we could not meet together as a class, and sorry we didn't have our normal interactions of asking questions and answering and getting to engage with these subjects.
01:12:37
I love that, and I hate that we missed it.
01:12:40
So again, thank you for watching this video.
01:12:43
Please make sure to do your homework, and if you want to get the certificate, that homework is required.
01:12:50
So thank you again.
01:12:51
May God bless you.