Malachi is not a gentle touch. He might sound like a yeller when he quotes God. “People, you bring me blind animals. That’s your sacrifice, your gift to me. Blind animals. And crippled critters. Diseased, as well….Try giving animals like that to your governor. Would he be happy with you? Would he say, ‘Thank you …
Fifty years before Zechariah opened his mouth to report his visions of: a flying scroll (5:1-4) celestial chariots (6:1-8) and a little woman sitting in a bushel basket (5:4-11) Jews considered themselves the privileged, handpicked people of God, prospering in the Promised Land. But that was before he kicked them out, turned his back on …
Jews rebuilt their own destroyed houses before they rebuilt God’s house—the Jerusalem Temple. God didn’t like that one bit. He had the prophet Haggai tell ‘em so. “You say it’s not yet time to rebuild the LORD’s house from the ruins. But I’ve noticed it is time for you to live in nicely appointed houses …
How are we supposed to make sense of a prophecy that starts with God killing all life on earth and ends with God singing for joy in Jerusalem? Who knew God sang? So far, this is sounding like a joke, with God singing for joy because people are finally making him happy. Aren’t they all …
Habakkuk’s three-chapter prophecy reads like a play in five acts. Habakkuk’s complaint The prophet complains that the southern Jewish nation of Judah has gone bad. It’s overrun with so much violence, destruction, arguing, fighting, and injustice that “There’s too much of it for the law to handle” (1:4). God’s shocking answer God says he’s bringing …
Sin city “Sin city, where crime calls home….the city where sin never sleeps” (3:1). That’s how Nahum described Nineveh, capital of the vicious Assyrian Empire, before predicting it’s going to get erased. Jonah came first A hundred years before Nahum, in the 700s BC, a reluctant prophet named Jonah delivered a similar message: “In 40 …
Intro notes to Micah “You killed the country.” Boiled to a one-liner, that’s essentially Micah’s blunt message to political leaders and judges in Jerusalem, capital of the southern Jewish nation of Judah. He didn’t tell them to change. He said God had already sentenced the nation to death. Moses had warned their ancestors that if …
Jonah delivered just a one-liner of a prophecy: “In 40 days Nineveh will be destroyed (3:4). Didn’t happen. By definition, according to Moses, Jonah wasn’t an authentic prophet: “If a prophet speaks on behalf of the LORD, but the prophet’s prediction fails, then that wasn’t a message from the LORD. The prophet only presumed to …
In the Bible’s shortest book, almost as brief as Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, Obadiah says the country of Edom is about to go extinct. This warning might run 500 words or more in English. But in Hebrew, it’s just 291 words in 21 verses. The book of Obadiah preserves the message delivered on what …
Intro Notes for Amos There’s one quote in Amos that best describes him and his hot-headed message. It’s a line he delivers to rich women in the Washington DC of his day, Samaria—capital of the northern Jewish nation of Israel: Listen to me, you pampered cows, Women grazing on Samaria’s hills, Cheating the poor And …
Intro notes for Joel Invaders are coming like a swarm of locusts. That’s God’s message, as told by a prophet named Joel. A few nibbling grasshoppers aren’t much of a problem. But in the Middle East, an angry swarm of hungry grasshoppers can explode up out of the desert sand and morph into a dark …
Intro Notes for Hosea Israel was sleeping around on God, committing adultery. Spiritually and physically. That’s the story Hosea tells. And that’s the story Hosea says he lived—married to a hooker who was apparently unfaithful to him. Ancestors of today’s Jewish people were worshiping Canaanite fertility gods. And some of the rituals seem to involve …
It took Christians nearly 2,000 years to admit that the Song of Songs is a book with no mention of God—but with a lot of sex-talk. An awful lot. That’s why some Jewish scholars argued against adding it to their Bible, which Christians usually call the Old Testament or the First Testament. Other Jews said …
Proverbs reads like someone saved a bag of 1,000 fortune cookies and turned it into a book. There’s one wise saying after another. No plot. No character development. No characters. Unless we count the imaginary Lady Wisdom, shouting in the streets, “Dimwits, when are you going to get some sense” (1:22). Proverbs is perhaps one …
Intro Notes to Lamentations Lamentations is the kind of letter a Jew might have written from a German concentration camp during the Holocaust. It’s that painful. We might think of the Holocaust of the 1940s as the worst event in Jewish history. But there’s a 2,600-year-old event that rivals it. In 586 BC, Babylonian invaders …
Isaiah is the headliner of Bible prophets—his book of prophecy comes first. Yet he didn’t seem to save many souls.
Isaiah began his ministry after experiencing a dramatic vision or a vivid dream. He saw God in heaven, surrounded by celestial beings with wings.
God asked for a volunteer to deliver his messages to the people.
Isaiah said, “Send me. I’ll go” (Isaiah 6:8).
Psalms 120-134 constitute the only unbroken collection of psalms in the Bible. Other collections, such as the Hallelujah Psalms and the Songs of Asaph, are broken up and scattered among the five Books of Psalms. However, these 15 psalms, labeled Road Trip Songs or, more literally, Songs of Ascents, appear as a unit. Songs of …
Book 5 is the largest of all the Books of Psalms. Of its 44 psalms, 11 are labeled as being ‘of David’ and another 15 make up a self-contained collection known as ‘Road Trip Songs’, or ‘Songs of Ascents.’ Book 5 also contains 12 songs of praise or thanksgiving and both the shortest psalm in …
Book 4, like Book 3, contains only 17 psalms. However, the general tone of the two books is different. Most of the psalms in Book 4, even the laments, stress praise of God rather than dwelling on the troubles that prompt the lament, and this more upbeat tone seems to respond to the question often …
There are only 17 psalms in Book 3, most of which are attributed to one of the musicians’ guilds that had originally been established by King David. Book 2 contained a number of psalms associated with the family of Korah and four additional Psalms of Korah appear in Book 3. In addition, 11 psalms are …
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