Anonymous Asks (341)

“What is the core message of the Minor Prophets?”

Sometimes a question is too general to be useful. That’s not a criticism of the anonymous person who asked today’s poser. He is probably trying to get a clear, simple reply to an area of Bible inquiry he finds interesting. Sometimes that is easy to do. Other times it isn’t.

This would be one of those.

No Easy Answer

The twelve Minor Prophets whose books appear at the tail end of our Old Testament prophesied over a period of about 400 years in pre-exilic Israel and pre- and post-exilic Judah. Their audiences were in many cases generations apart, living under vastly different circumstances and in need of vastly different sorts of communication from God. Some, like those who heard the ministry of Haggai and Zechariah, needed encouragement and instruction to move forward in fulfilling God’s agenda in Jerusalem. Some, like those who read the book of Jonah, needed a reminder that God’s grace extends far beyond his “chosen people” to a sinful world. Some, like those who lived in the times of Hosea, needed to hear how much God hated their idolatrous ways. Some needed to hear that God was going to judge Judah’s enemies, and others needed to hear that God was about to judge Judah. Amos says both.

If you read the twelve Minor Prophets beginning to end, you will find at least as many different messages as there were prophets, and probably more besides, and you will find that they addressed tens of thousands of different people in all sorts of spiritual circumstances.

The Purpose of Water

To try to distil so many distinct communications down to a single “core message” is like asking “What’s the purpose of water?” The answer depends on whether you are fish or human, whether you need a drink, rain for your crops, something to dip your oars in, or feel dirty and want to run a bath. No single answer will come close to satisfactorily explaining why God elected to make more than half the world out of water. A theologian with a hobby horse might respond, “So he could drown the evil Nephilim.” Absolutely. But that will not serve as an exhaustive answer to a question too general to be useful.

It’s tempting to answer something about Christ, like “Messiah is coming.” That would sound very spiritual, but even that would be a massive stretch. Although the Lord Jesus is a notable and visible presence in some prophecies (Zechariah, for example), in others he is very difficult to locate with any degree of certainty. Find him in Nahum if you can. He’s there, but only in the sense that Nahum mentions God, and Christ is a member of the Godhead. Thus, a statement like “The Lord is good” applies to the Son and the Holy Spirit just as it applies to the Father. So while it is true that “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” and that the resurrected Christ could show his disciples “in all the scriptures the things concerning himself”, not all of the Minor Prophets are obviously Messianic in precisely the same way.

In Summary

Any answer to today’s question that could be true of all twelve Minor Prophets would be so general you could get it from 100 other places in scripture. God will be what he will be. God keeps his promises. Sin leads to punishment and eventually death. These are truths you can learn anywhere from Genesis to Revelation. They are not specific to prophecy, Major or Minor.

As much as we like to cut to the chase in these days when attention deficits are at an all time high, I have learned that the answers to many important questions in scripture are anything but simple and concise. If you’d like to learn more about the core messages of each Minor Prophet, I recommend our Mining the Minors series. You probably won’t get through 212 posts — I’m not sure anyone has — but each one is only a five-minute read, and I like to think you’ll find a few points of interest there that you won’t find anywhere else.