Bible Study

  As we come down to the last couple of weeks of our Bible study there’s a kind of subtle shift in the messages we’re going to hear. Up to now, the prophecies we’ve looked at have tended to be either from just before the Jewish exile to Babylon, or from the period of the exile, reflecting the experience of terror in the former and despair in the latter. We started a bit of a shift out of that feeling a couple of weeks ago when we looked at apocalyptic prophecy, and today we’re moving to the end of the exile and what message the prophets are giving about what God will be able to do for the people. I asked you to read two prophecies for this week: a famous passage from the Book of Ezekiel that we’ll get to in a few minutes, and a very obscure prophecy known as the prophecy of Obadiah, and I want to begin my comments tonight with Obadiah. Obadiah is probably most noteworthy for being the shortest book by far in the Old Testament. It’s so short that it couldn’t be divided into chapters...

       “The Suffering Servant.” We’re looking this week at a very important piece of Isaiah’s prophecy - a part of the prophecy that puts Christians and Jews completely at odds with each other over the question of how to interpret it. The basic question is simple: who is “the suffering servant” of Isaiah 52-53? The answer, though, is a lot more complex, and obviously - as always with any of the prophets, we need some context to begin understanding what this passage is speaking about. There’s a few things we need to be aware of.      First, if you remember a couple of weeks ago we spoke about the 3 different parts of Isaiah. This passage comes from Second Isaiah, so that tells us that it’s been written during the last days of the Jewish exile in Babylon. In First Isaiah destruction is imminent and restoration is a dim future hope; in Second Isaiah destruction is in the past and the restoration is imminent. So, the exile is coming to ...

  The word “apocalypse” is one that pretty much everyone is familiar with these days. It refers to some catastrophic event that seems to threaten the very survival of humanity. It’s a pretty common theme in the entertainment industry dating back to the late 19th century, when the first great example of secular apocalyptic literature appeared - that was “War Of The Worlds,” written by H.G. Wells and published in 1897, which was about a Martian invasion of earth. The idea of alien apocalypse has been around ever since then. After World War II, the Cold War gave rise to stories about what you might call the nuclear apocalypse - so, the fear of nuclear war. In the 1960’s, really starting with the movie “Night of the Living Dead,” the idea of a zombie apocalypse became a popular genre and it remains popular today. There have been lots of movies and TV shows featuring zombies, and if you’ve ever seen an episode of “The Walking Dead” you’ll be familiar with it. There have been, of course,...

  If we’re going to be looking at the prophets for 8 weeks, it was inevitable that we’d eventually bump into Isaiah. Thinking of the others who are considered “great prophets,” Isaiah certainly wasn’t Moses, and neither was he Elijah. But if he wasn’t “the greatest” of prophets (or even close to “the greatest,” he nevertheless is an important prophet. The sheer size of the book named for him makes that inevitable. Isaiah’s prophecy has 66 chapters, making it the second longest book in the Bible, after the Psalms. And from a Christian perspective, even if Isaiah wasn’t the greatest of the prophets he may be the most important and the most familiar of the prophets, and so in 3 of our last 5 sessions we’re going to be looking at passages from Isaiah. Christians love Isaiah’s prophecy because it contains so many passages that appear to speak about Jesus. Whether they do speak of Jesus or not is an open question, of course. I think the most we can say is that they seem to speak of Jesus...

So far we’ve had the chance to talk about what prophets do and why they usually don’t actually want to do it. This week, I want to focus more on the “how” question. How do prophets do it? How are prophets actually empowered to be prophets? How are they “inspired” to share what they believe God is telling them? How are they made bold enough to speak what they believe is God’s word to a society that generally doesn’t want to listen and that might not take kindly to what they hear? Those are all valid questions. I want to take up this subject by looking at two more prophets: Elijah and Ezekiel. We’ll start with Elijah. Elijah was a very early prophet. His story gets told in bits and pieces, mostly found in the 1st and 2nd Books of Kings. There are, by my count, 71 references to Elijah in the Old Testament and 65 of those are in either 1st or 2nd Kings. There’s also an additional 30 references to Elijah in the New Testament, usually revolving around the idea that John the Baptist was “Elij...