Today we conclude our conversation with Drs. Alan Fuhr and Gary Yates. As you may recall we’ve been talking to them about their new book, The Message of the Twelve: Hearing the Voice of the Minor Prophets. It’s a very helpful study of this often-neglected portion of Scripture, and we have taken the opportunity to learn about these important Old Testament books. If you’ve missed our previous conversations you’ll want to catch up here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).
Al, Gary – welcome once again!
Fuhr & Yates:
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Zaspel:
Okay, in your book you provide the background and a very helpful introduction and overview of the minor prophets. In our first interview you gave us an overview of the twelve and of your book, and in our second conversation you began taking us through the books one by one with a brief overview. Before we proceed, is there anything you can tell us about the arrangement of the books of the twelve
Yates:
Yes. That’s something that we dealt with in chapter 4, dealing with the canonical unity of the book of the 12. It’s been a major focus of study in the minor prophets of the last 20 or 25 years. There’s a good deal of controversy with all this, and one of the issues and problems is that we have a different canonical order in the Masoretic text and in the Greek Septuagint. But I think there are some things from the overall arrangement of the book that at least do show some significance. One thing is that the books are often linked together by keywords at the end of one book and the beginning of the next one that I think link them together a bit. Roughly, the order though, as we work from beginning to end, is roughly chronological. You have primarily books from the Assyrian crisis at the beginning; you have books dealing with the Babylonian crisis in the fall of Judah in the middle; and then at the end there’s more of a focus on the postexilic books. Partly what this does is move us from judgment to restoration. You have the judgments of the fall of Israel, the fall of Judah, but at the end there’s restoration and hope. But even the restoration that happened when the people came back to the land is not the full and the final restoration that has been delayed, and is not going to happen for a long time because of the continuing rebellion of the people. Along with that chronology, though, it appears that you have a couple of books, primarily Joel and Obadiah, that have been moved out of their chronological location and moved more to the front. I think that’s partly because they raise certain thematic elements that are important to the minor prophets as a whole. Particularly with Joel you have the idea of the day of the Lord, and that theme is going to be, I think, the major theme that is going to unite these books. God is bringing a day of the Lord’a judgment against Israel with the Assyrian crisis, a day of the Lord’s judgment against Judah in the Babylonian crisis, and when we get to the book of Joel there is more threat of the day of the Lord even though they have come back to the land. All of that is prefiguring an ultimate and a final day of the Lord when God will judge both Israel and the nations. And that will be the prelude to the establishment of his kingdom. So I think Joel and Obadiah are moved to their particular location because they introduce those themes. I think one final thing that I would mention about the unity of the book – there is somewhat of a cyclical pattern, because you have God through these prophets calling the people to repentance. At times there are partial examples of repentance. In the book of Joel, even though it’s chronologically late, that’s at the beginning of the book, we even have the repentance partially of the Ninevites but later they’re going to be judged by God as well. In the postexilic period, there is a partial repentance as the people obey God, listen to the prophets and rebuild the Temple but it’s pretty evident, especially in the final book of Malachi, that they had not fully or completely returned to God yet. And that ultimately needs to happen for Israel to fully experience all the blessings of the future.
Zaspel:
Okay, we made it through Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah, so now let’s pick up with Nahum. What is this prophecy all about?
Fuhr:
The book of Nahum is a fascinating little book, just three chapters long and it seemingly is so distant for the modern reader because it’s about the destruction of a long-since-dead city, Nineveh. Most folks are familiar with Nineveh from the reading of the book of Jonah. There we read about the repentance of Nineveh and God actually turning from judgment against Nineveh, but we find that the Ninevites and the Assyrian Empire as a whole, whatever repentance that they do experience, it’s not long-lived. They turned back to their wicked ways and anyone who has studied Assyrian history knows that they are among the most brutal of the ancient empires. Think of them as may be a combination of Nazis and imperialist Japanese from World War II. They were sadistic in their torture of their enemies and their efficiency in marching across the breadth of the ancient world was renowned. They had expanded their empire, they had tortured and dispersed and scattered and defeated enemies. And Judah was sitting under the thumb of Assyrian oppression. They had long-since dispersed the northern kingdom of Israel, and Judah, living under the thumb of Assyrian oppression and paying tribute to them, the time had come now where God would no longer turn a blind eye to Assyrian atrocities and he would judge them.
So the book of Nahum, which is a book, it’s actually not a collection of oracles as most of the prophetic books are, but there it seems to be a very intricately tailored book. The first chapter includes an incomplete acrostic – probably an adoption from a Psalm that was known in the day, and then the rest of the book in chapters 2 and 3 we find a very intricate chiastic arrangement there. The book of Nahum provides some hope for Judah that God would take away that oppression of the Assyrians and that Nineveh would be destroyed. It’s a word of warning in a sense to evil empires, the Assyrians, of course, included there as the primary target, that God is a God of justice and that they could not continue on with what they were doing without paying the penalty for that. The book is basically a vision of sorts when Nahum sees the destruction of the city. And of course that brought hope to Judah and should have, if it ever got to the Assyrians, would have brought some sense of fear to the Assyrians. A lot of folks, when they read the book of Nahum, focus on chapter 1 and verse 7, “the Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble and he knows those who trust in him.” And certainly the message of Nahum is one that God is one who provides protection to those that trust in him. But I think that sometimes we fail to recognize that God is an awesome God who ought to be feared. And certainly those who are turning against God, certainly empires and nations who turn against God ought to fear the Lord who is not to be ridiculed. We read in chapter 1 verse 3 (I just love this – among all the minor prophets and all of their very vivid descriptions of God this is perhaps my favorite) “the Lord has his way in the whirlwind and in the storm and the clouds are the dust of his feet.” And when you think about it, today we have opportunities to get in airplanes and fly above the clouds, but in the ancient world no one had that opportunity. And to describe God above the clouds, and the clouds being nothing but the dust of his feet is just such an awesome image and captures the attention, I think, of the reader. Think about the ancient Assyrians and the Ninevites who saw themselves as the utmost power and that no god could defeat them, and yet God, Yahweh, is the God for whom the clouds are the dust of his feet. An awesome image to hopefully provide hope for Judah and for those who are oppressed even today.
Zaspel:
Next is Habakkuk – what is his prophecy about?
Fuhr:
Where the book of Nahum seems very distant in the sense that it’s about the fall of an ancient Empire and city, the book of Habakkuk provides, I think, a connection between the ancient world and our contemporary and even very individual world of the modern reader. Habakkuk is a prophet who saw injustice in the land in the period just prior to the Babylonian captivity. So we move from the Assyrian crisis of the first few of the minor prophets to the period of the Babylonian crisis. Habakkuk sees the injustice in the land and he wonders when God is going to act, even upon his own people. He sees violence and he calls for God to act on those things. What we find in the book of Habakkuk is a very interesting dialogue between the prophet and his God. Habakkuk says, “where are you, God? When are you going to pay attention to these things and do something about them?” And God responds to the prophet and he basically says to the prophet in Chapter 1, verse 5, “I’m going to work beyond your wildest imagination. I’m going to do something that you would not believe even though it were told to you. And I’m going to raise up the Babylonians.” So this is perhaps during the period just prior to the ascension of Babylonian power in the ancient world. We don’t know exactly when Habakkuk is in dialogue with God about these things, but we might presume it’s just before the Babylonians come to be the primary power in the ancient world, and God is going to raise them up and he’s going to use Nebuchadnezzar (actually, Jeremiah calls Nebuchadnezzar, ‘my servant’) he’s going to use Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian military machine as his instrument of judgment. When Habakkuk receives this message from God he says, “but, God, I don’t quite agree with what you’re doing here. You are actually going to use a more wicked people to judge your own?” And God says, “Habakkuk, I’ve got things under control here. I know what I’m doing and I’m actually going to preserve those who are just among my people; I’m not going to, in a unilateral sense, mete out judgment against those who aren’t deserving of it.” So God is a God who does pay attention to those who are righteous among his people and he is calling upon the prophet to believe in what he’s doing, to believe that he, as a sovereign God, knows what he’s doing. What we find at the end of the book of Habakkuk – Habakkuk uses a lot of lyrical language from the Psalms. Perhaps he was very entrenched within Temple worship in his day – and we find at the end of the book of Habakkuk, in Chapter 3, that Habakkuk praises God in a Psalm. He comes to a point of disillusion and perhaps misunderstanding about God and his ways, to a praise Psalm where he praises God as the sovereign of the universe and praises him as a God who does bring forth justice and knows what he’s doing in doing so. Habakkuk is immediately identifiable in the sense that many of us have questioned God and God’s actions in our lives and our circumstances in life and Habakkuk is a book that calls us back to faith in what God is doing.
Zaspel:
The prophet Zephaniah is next. Tell us about his prophecy.
Fuhr:
Zephaniah is somewhat similar to the book of Joel in the sense that it highlights the day of the Lord motif. The book of Zephaniah is entrenched within the period of Habakkuk, so we are dealing with the Babylonian crisis again, and we’re dealing with a people (thinking about Judah) who have turned their backs against God after the repentance of Josiah. They have turned their backs against God once again. So Zephaniah brings a warning of impending judgment, the day of the Lord, as a day of God’s wrath. But the book of Zephaniah actually takes us from God’s wrath all the way to God’s mercy, grace, and restoration. So we find the day of the Lord shifting in the book of Zephaniah from a day of God’s wrath to a day of God’s restoration. Perhaps nowhere else in the Bible do we find as much of a flip as we do in the book of Zephaniah from judgment to grace and mercy. We see the tension between those two in the book of Hosea, but in the book of Zephaniah we see the movement between those two. The day of the Lord in book of Zephaniah, Chapter 1, is a day that is described as a very terrible day and the language that is repeated throughout Zephaniah, Chapter 1, highlights and brings to the attention of the reader the great terror that should’ve been felt in the day of God’s wrath and judgment. But then we find that turn later on in the book of Zephaniah to the point where in Chapter 3, we find that God is no longer a divine warrior who metes out judgment against his people, a warrior to be feared, but rather God is a divine warrior under whom one finds protection. So you find in the book of Zephaniah that it’s a good thing to be on the side of that divine warrior in the day restoration and grace.
Zaspel:
And Haggai?
Yates:
When we get to Haggai it brings us into the last section of the book of the 12, dealing with the postexilic period, the time of restoration, the promise of all that. The message, though, that’s there is a bit of a surprise because, based on what we’ve heard from earlier prophets, we expect this to be a time of glorious renewal and restoration and the people blessed in incredible ways. But that hasn’t happened. When the people came back to the land they’re still under foreign oppression, they’re still living in economic poverty. The problem is that they have come back to the land, but they really haven’t returned to God; and that’s the issue that needs to happen. The biggest evidence of that, is that they have failed now for about 20 years to rebuild the Temple. So what happens is that God raises up the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. And they have a sort of parallel, tag-team ministry where they are challenging the people saying, “you’ve been back in the land long enough and you need to rebuild the Temple.” When they came back to the land in 538, they were enthusiastic about that, they immediately laid the foundation and built an altar there, but the project came to a halt. There were economic reasons; there was opposition, persecution, fear of people in the land or what the Persians might think, and there was an overall spiritual apathy among the people. So Haggai and Zechariah are challenging that.
In the first chapter, Haggai tells the people, “God has withheld his blessings from you. You’ve had these poor harvests. You’re in economic despair because you haven’t been faithful to God. As you’ve planted crops and as you’ve worked and labored, you’ve put your money into a bag that has holes in it because God has withheld his blessing.” Specifically, God had withheld his blessing because they had built their own houses and put their priorities and their efforts into that, but had abandoned rebuilding the Temple, and that reflected a spiritual priority that was out of place. When I was writing the chapter, I remember seeing a book that connected this to what Paul said to Timothy, “all men care about their own things, not things that are important to Christ Jesus.” I think this challenge to spiritual priorities is a message that comes out of Haggai. When the people hear this message, though, one of the unusual things that happens in the book is that they actually do listen to the prophet. Within three weeks they are back at the project of rebuilding the Temple, and within about five years, from 520 to 515, they were able to complete the second Temple. It certainly wasn’t as great or glorious as the Temple that Solomon built, but the Lord is assuring them, “I’m not concerned about the architecture as much as I am about the place where I will meet with my people and I will bless you as a result of this.” There are some incredible promises of blessing once the people respond to God. God promises, “I will be with you, I will help your leaders to finish this project, I will wipe away your defilement.” And, actually, one of my favorite messianic passages in all of the minor prophets is found at the end of Haggai in Chapter 2 verses 20-23. Back in Jeremiah, God had said, “I have rejected the house of David. Jehoiakin, this King that was reigning before the exile, is nothing more than a signet ring that I’m about to throw away.” But now you have a grandson of Jehoiakin that is serving as the governor of Judah, and the Lord says, “he hath now become my signet ring.” And I think he anticipates the blessing of the house of David that ultimately is going to come with the future Messiah and with the coming of Jesus and the kingdom that will take place at his second coming.
Zaspel:
What about Zechariah? One of the larger of the minor prophets.
Yates:
Yes, and probably the book that I think, in studying and working through in this project, I learned the most from. Again, the same issues that are there that we just talked about. God’s challenging the people through the prophet to rebuild the Temple, promising that when they do that, that the full measure of the blessings that he is promised for them will come about. What you have in the first part of Zechariah (and this is a tough section for many people to read) is you have a series of these night visions that God gives to Zechariah in the middle of the night. (And sometimes we might wonder what he had for a midnight snack when you see some of these visions.) But all of them are simply giving the idea that the Lord will bless their rebuilding; the Lord will renew them; the Lord is going to be with them to empower them in all of this, so the city of Jerusalem is going to be bigger than it ever has been before. When this figure, the Satan, the accuser, stands and says, “look, this high priest, Joshua, that’s serving in Judah is representative of the people and they are not worthy to stand in God’s presence. His garments are covered with filth.” God doesn’t even respond to the accusation, he simply cleanses it. But there’s also the problem of ongoing disobedience to God, continued covenant unfaithfulness. One of the visions is a giant scroll flying through the air, something like 30 feet long, and it has writing on both sides, probably indicating all the ways that these people have violated the covenant. They still need to repent, they still need to fully return to God. And when they do that, again, these leaders that are helping them to rebuild the Temple, like Zerubbabel, they anticipate the rule and the reign of the future Messiah, who will be both a king and a priest. In the middle section of the book there’s more emphasis on repentance. There were a number of ceremonies that the Jewish people had to commemorate things that happened during the exile. So there’s the issue, do we keep doing those things? Zechariah’s response to that is, that’s really not the primary issue, the primary issue is that God is looking for the kind of repentance that affects your relationship with him and that ultimately affects the way that you treat the poor, the needy, and the disadvantaged. So there’s this emphasis on justice and all the things that we see in other prophetic books. And then finally, I think one of the unique contributions to the minor prophets is what we have in the last section, Zechariah 9–14. There’s a very clear reflection here that the restoration that’s happened in the immediate present is just in anticipation of what will happen in the future. So some of the important messianic prophecies and promises and typologies that ultimately point us forward to Messiah are found in Zechariah 9–14. And what you see in Chapters 12 and 14 in these kind of apocalyptic texts are: the judgment of Israel is going to happen all over again; the nations are going to assault Jerusalem; there’s going to be terrible death, bloodshed, violence, judgment from God. But after that happens, God will restore his people; God will restore his city; and we even see in Chapter 14:8 and 14:9 that the nations that are left over after this judgment has occurred are actually going to join with Israel in worshiping the Lord. So there’s a future kingdom that’s coming. It’s not just for Israel, it’s for all nations. And that’s the culmination of God’s plans for salvation history.
Zaspel:
And Malachi wraps it up. Tell us about his prophecy.
Fuhr:
Malachi is a somewhat unique book the sense that it’s constructed of these hypothetical disputation speeches, where the people are spiritually apathetic and they are excusing their sin and they are voicing these to God and God is returning by replying to their accusations. He is saying, “no, you guys who think that you know what’s going on and why you know perhaps you’ve got reasons to think that I may be mistreating you or maybe ignoring you. Really, the problem’s not with me, the problem’s with you.” So in these disputation speeches God replies to the rationalization behind the spiritual apathy of his people. Malachi is obviously the last book of the Old Testament and it’s one of the closest books in terms of chronological arrangement to the New Testament. So we’re dealing with a period where the people have returned back to the land and they’ve experienced life back in the land, and yet it’s not to the full fruition of expectation that the earlier prophets have brought. They are not living under their own authority; they are under the authority of the Persians. And they are not receiving the full experiences of blessing that the earlier prophets had promised. So the people start to walk away from God and rationalize their sin by basically saying, “God really doesn’t care, he doesn’t really reward, he doesn’t really love us.” And, of course, in the book of Malachi we find God responding to that through his messenger, Malachi. As a matter of fact, in these disputation speeches, one of my favorites is in Chapter 1, where the people say, “God, you don’t love us. Evidently, you don’t care about us.” Probably the reason they were saying such is because they weren’t experiencing the full material blessings that the prophets had promised, and yet God says, in response to them, “you need to look no further than the Edomites.” Gary had mentioned earlier the destruction of Edom that was promised in the book of Obadiah, and by the time we get to Malachi, that prophecy of Obadiah has largely been fulfilled. And we find God saying, “if I didn’t love you, you would be just like the Edomites. You would be destroyed right now. But here I have you back in the land and my promises to you are going to find full fulfillment and you need look no further than the fact that you are my chosen, my elect people, to see my love for you. The very fact that you’ve experienced my grace and mercy rather than the full measure of my wrath is proof enough of my love for you. It’s not just about material blessings and such.” But we find that the people continue, through these disputation speeches, to rationalize various sins that are evident within the land. But all of these basically point the finger back upon the people rather than upon God. So the guilt lies upon the people’s shoulders and the wrongdoing is not God’s wrongdoing. Then at the end of the book we find God promising the people that if they will remember him, he will remember them. He has not neglected, nor has he forgot them. And that’s a segue into the promises of fulfillment that we find introduced with the New Testament Gospels and with the coming of the Messiah.
Zaspel:
Tell us one message from the Minor Prophets that stands out as particularly important for us today.
Yates:
We talk about this a little bit, briefly, in the final section of the book. For me the one message that is most important is the distinctive way that God is portrayed in this part of Scripture – the depths of his love, his grace, his covenant faithfulness, how that extends not just to Israel but to the nations. All of that is true, but yet there is this very strong message of judgment, that God is someone that we need to take seriously. It’s often conveyed in images like the lion, the bear, the loving husband, the jilted husband, all these kinds of images and metaphors. You don’t have systematic theology in the minor prophets as much as you do just powerful images of God that, I think, say in our minds and grip our hearts and grip our imaginations in some pretty powerful ways. As someone who teaches Old Testament, I am concerned that I see often in the church today – and some bad theology on Twitter, which I guess we should expect – just the idea that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are at odds with each other and that Jesus basically comes to overturn the Old Testament images and understanding of God. I don’t think that’s true at all. In fact, the Old Testament pictures God as a God of grace and mercy and salvation and judgment. And I think we have the same thing in the New Testament. God’s grace and mercy is revealed to us a new and fresh ways in Jesus, but you still have the warnings in Hebrews that God is a consuming fire and that judgment is on its way. I think we need that balanced understanding of God that I don’t think is very popular in our culture right now, today.
Fuhr:
I think that the message of social justice is very important in the minor prophets. In our contemporary settings you will hear politicians and other leaders talk about social justice issues, and sometimes I think we have skewed God’s vision of social justice in our modern political arena. When the prophets speak to social justice they are dealing with those kinds of corrupt practices and such that we would describe with no other words other than sin. I mean these things that are an affront to all human sensibilities and certainly to God’s sense of right and wrong. And the people practice these things, thinking that they can get away with them, and the prophets tell us that no, you won’t get away with these things. Also, just to add to that, and I’m thinking primarily in the book of Amos here – you find this connection to social justice and religious ritual. And you find that you can’t have one while neglecting the other. In other words, you can’t practice your religion without also recognizing God’s concern for people. That’s certainly echoed in the New Testament as well, but the prophets make that very, very clear. I may have mentioned this in an earlier interview, but I had a friend of mine one time say that where the word of God is a double-edged sword, (think of the book of Hebrews there), the minor prophets speak like laserguided missiles., And they just get right to the heart. Again, thinking about some of these very practical issues in our world today, such as idolatry; thinking about greed; thinking about social injustice; thinking about religious hypocrisy – and certainly, as American Christians, we certainly see plenty of that and perhaps experience some of that in our own lives. The prophets speak to these things and give us a glimpse of what God’s thinking is concerning some of our activities and actions. Certainly if there’s any part of the word of God that applies well to a practical set of circumstances today, the minor prophets are that. And for folks to neglect the minor prophets, they really are neglecting a very important segment of the word of God. So I think that’s really the heart behind what we were trying to do with this book. We were trying to bring, hopefully, some of the historical and literary and theological elements of these books to the attention of the reader, but we also wanted to make sure that the reader recognized that these books are very, very relevant for today. So I think the primary message of the minor prophets does speak to very applicable issues.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Alan Fuhr and Gary Yates about their new book, The Message of the Twelve: Hearing the Voice of the Minor Prophets. We encourage you to get a copy. It’s a very accessible and valuable resource that will help acquaint you with these prophetic books. And get a copy for your pastor to help him in his sermon preparation.
Al and Gary, thanks for your good work and for talking to us again today.
Yates:
It’s been a pleasure, thanks for having us.
Fuhr:
Yes, thank you very much, Fred.