Sunday School at 9 am | worship at 10 am

Thankful for the Minor Prophets

Imagine that you’re a visiting a new Bible study group. You’re introduced to the group, there’s some small-talk, then what seems like hours of prayer requests for people you don’t know anything about followed by a brief opening prayer. And then the group leader says, “Open your Bibles to the book of Obadiah.”

Before you were nervous; now you’re terrified. Where is the book of Obadiah? Maybe you know enough to know that it’s somewhere between Psalms and Matthew, but that doesn’t narrow it down very much. Everyone else seems to have found it already. They’re all looking at you as you hopelessly flip back and forth. You hear the tempter whispering in your ear, “be sensible and look this up in the table of contents!” But you know that just makes you look like the heathen who don’t know their Bibles, who failed to learn a catchy “books of the Bible” song, who did not have Sword Drills in Sunday School. Someone helpfully points out that it’s between Amos and Jonah; if you get to Micah you went too far. You get the distinct impression that he’s trying to communicate with you; if only you spoke classical Hebrew! You find it eventually, but not before resolving to find another Bible study that studies the normal parts of the Bible.

What is the point of this story? For one thing, I hope it helps us think through how to welcome newcomers and new Christians. But even “established” Christians might struggle to find, let alone understand, a book like
Obadiah. It seems so much tougher to understand than the more familiar parts of the Bible. There are names and places and events that are not familiar to us. It doesn’t say when any of this happened, or what’s going on. Also it’s prophecy, and that complicates things—when was it fulfilled, or when will it be fulfilled?

To be honest, it’s difficult to preach or teach on these books. How do you give enough background information for people to understand what’s going on, without giving a history lecture? There’s also the fact that Christians often disagree when it comes to prophecy: do these promises apply to us, or just to ethnic Israel? It seems
difficult to dig very deep into the text without saying something that someone will disagree with. If half the
congregation is going to be asleep and the other half is going to want argue with you after the service, maybe it’s best to stick to the New Testament.

And so on the one hand we’re talking a big game about the authority and inerrancy and plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture, while on the other hand we can send the message that this really only applies to certain parts of Scripture. Yet we believe that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. If we neglect entire food groups in our physical diet, we can expect there to be consequences for our health. And if we neglect entire parts of the Bible, such as the prophets, we can expect our spiritual health to suffer.

So this Sunday I’ll be starting and finishing a one-sermon sermon series on the book of Obadiah. I hope this will encourage us to study the minor prophets. Far from being dusty old obscurities, these books are living and
effective, and have much to say to the church today.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16-17
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1Minor prophets are called minor because they’re short, not because they’re unimportant. If anything, being shorter is all the more
reason to study them—you can get a good grasp of the whole book of Obadiah or Haggai in a fraction of the time it takes to work through Isaiah or Jeremiah!