We Christians, we love to read our Bibles!
The Psalms sing to our hearts about God’s faithfulness in our times of trouble.
The Gospels – wonderful accounts of our Lord’s short time among us.
Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles – simple, direct histories that illustrate the stability resulting from faithfulness to God and the destruction that comes from rejecting His ways.
The Epistles – delightfully specific details of God’s great work on behalf of His people.
The Minor Prophets…
The Minor Prophets. Cryptic. Opaque. Confusing. Full of references to places most of us don’t recognize. Cultural practices far from us in geography and time. Metaphors based on symbols once well-known but now long-forgotten. Parts may seem barely better than gibberish.
For many, reading the minor prophets is a chore from which, even if we brave it, we derive little pleasure, and perhaps little benefit. We may feel like Sisyphus, pushing that boulder up the hill again and again, to no effect.
Yet with a little background, a little narration, a little explanation, the minor prophets can move us as much as the other Scriptures we love to read. They do make sense – once we are properly acclimated.
Our goal here is not to explain every obscure phrase. We leave that to scholars.
Instead, we will hop through each book, touching on highlights, narrating and explaining what at first reading seems obtuse.
Our hope is that once seeing the lay of the land, the reader can engage a prophet’s book without stumbling, naturally understanding the main topics and therefore able to focus on the content rather than on a decryption puzzle.