Bible Study

  Tonight we’re coming to the end of our Bible study on the prophets and, predictably enough, we’re going to be looking at a couple of prophecies about “the end.” There’s a sense out there that when the Bible talks about “the end” it’s ominous - a warning or a threat. We think of the end times as a time when all sorts of bad things are going to happen. But we miss the point of the entire biblical story - the entire course of God’s relationship with humanity - when we think that way about what we call “the end.” The course of history isn’t a straight line going from Point A to Point C, where Point A is paradise, Point B is the flow of history, and Point C is a horrific end to everything. Instead, the course of history is more like a circle that has Point A - paradise, followed by Point B (the flow of history), followed by Point C (some devastating cataclysm) - which is then followed by Point D, which is where the circle closes, because Point D is back at Point A. So the purpose of G...

  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 ...