Bible Study

  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...

  I’ve entitled my presentation tonight “I Don’t Want To Do It.”  That refers to my general understanding of the reaction of prophets to their call to be a prophet. Most seem to have a response that could be paraphrased as “I’d rather work at McDonalds than be a prophet!” That also helps to explain what I mentioned last week - that part of our responsibility as Christians is to discern those who are called to various roles within the church, and one test of discerning a real prophet from a false prophet, to me, would be to see if they proclaim themself as a prophet or if they seem to enjoy being a prophet. To me, that would cause me to suspect that the call to prophecy is at least questionable. Prophets generally have a very hard life, as we’re going to see tonight. Most wouldn’t choose that life. I asked you to read for tonight an excerpt from the Book of Exodus detailing the call of Moses, and the Book of Jonah. Some of you might wonder about me including Moses in our study....