Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 75 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The second course of the cycle opens where the first left off: the Old Testament's latter prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve. Dr. Essex introduces the men behind the books, prophet, seer, man of God, three titles for one office, and sets the exile at the center of everything these books say. Listen for the claim that carries the whole course: the prophets are men of Torah who fill in the skeleton Moses left, and Deuteronomy is the pattern they preach from.
The latter prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and what the Hebrew canon calls the Twelve, our Minor Prophets. Though the Twelve arise over several centuries, the course will argue that they are to be understood now as one book, and every Jewish canonical list treats them that way. The individual oracles are smaller than the major prophets, but the corpus holds a very important place in the canon: these are books God commanded to be written down so that later generations, and later biblical writers, could hear what each prophet proclaimed to Israel or Judah in a previous day.
The canon's threefold shape sets the reading order of reality: the Torah is the foundation, and understanding the Torah is foundational to understanding the latter prophets. These were men who knew Moses backwards and forwards, who meditated on him, and whose proclamation runs on Mosaic terminology. Behind them stand the former prophets, which gave God's own prophetic perspective on roughly eight hundred years of Israel's history in the land, from the conquest under Joshua to the destruction of the temple and the Babylonian exile.
Every latter prophet looks forward assuming an exile is coming on Israel and Judah, and then looks beyond it to the final restoration. Moses had already predicted the exile in the Torah: you have been rebellious while I have been among you, and after I am gone the covenant curses will come, exile the ultimate curse. The former prophets show how his words came to pass. The latter prophets, led by the same Spirit, look past the exile and fill in the detail of what Moses had revealed about the end of the days. They never change Moses and never go beyond him; they fill in his skeleton. The writings then portray the godly man living among the nations, awaiting the promise.
Providentially, the traditional labels for the prophets have always been keyed to the exile. Isaiah is pre-exilic, though the last portion of his prophecy speaks to the exiles as if present among them. Jeremiah and Ezekiel are exilic: both minister up to the destruction of Jerusalem and keep prophesying after it, Jeremiah raised up in Jerusalem for the generation going into exile, Ezekiel carried off in the second deportation of 597 BC and raised up in Babylon as prophet to the exiles. The Twelve runs from pre-exilic voices through Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah on the eve of the southern exile to the post-exilic Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, so the finished book of the Twelve is a post-exilic work.
The Twelve also teaches Israel how to read the return. What happened from 537 to 515 BC, and on to the end of Nehemiah around 425 BC, was real, but it was not the restoration the prophets had announced: no Messiah, no new covenant, only a remnant back in the land while Israel remained largely scattered. So the Old Testament closes with the promises of the end of the days still unfulfilled, and by the time of the New Testament the nation is awaiting its Messiah and the messianic age. This is how the Old Testament lays the foundation for what we read in the Gospels.
Not every prophet wrote a book; there is no book of Elijah or Elisha, and many spoke to their own generation without being called to write Scripture. But the men who did write belonged to the same company. In 1 Samuel 9, Saul's servant proposes visiting the man of God whose every word surely comes true, and the narrator adds an aside for his readers: he who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer. Man of God, seer, prophet: three titles, one individual. And 1 Chronicles 29:29 points readers to the chronicles of Samuel the seer, Nathan the prophet, and Gad the seer, prophetic writings that were real but not God-breathed, which God did not preserve.
The title prophet is defined inside the Torah itself. When Moses protests that he is unskilled in speech, the Lord answers in Exodus 7:1, see, I make you as God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet: the prophet is the spokesman, the one who speaks for another. Deuteronomy 18:18 says it of God directly, I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. Of the seer terms, used about twenty-eight times between them, the emphasis falls on the reception of revelation, while prophet emphasizes its communication; but they name the same office. These are the Lord's men, bound to him, who receive his message and speak it with his authority.
Isaiah 30 gathers the titles in one bitter scene. The Lord tells Isaiah to write his message on a scroll as a witness for the time to come, because this is a rebellious people who say to the seers, do not see, and to the visionaries, do not prophesy what is right; speak to us pleasant words, prophesy illusions. False prophets arose to tell Israel what it wanted to hear, and Peter draws the line straight to us: just as there were false prophets among the people, there will be false teachers among you. Essex adds the pastoral point of the whole course: the greatest encouragement for an expository ministry is the example and counsel of these prophets, because their situations will be yours.
Deuteronomy 18 sets the office against its counterfeit. The nations Israel will dispossess listen to diviners and practicers of witchcraft, seeking by demonic means to steer the present and read the future; Israel is forbidden all of it, because the Lord will raise up a prophet like Moses from among their brothers, the mediator the people themselves begged for at Horeb when they could not bear God's direct voice. Verse 22 gives the test of any prophet in the meantime: if the thing does not come about, the Lord has not spoken it. So God regularly had his prophets speak of things near at hand, as Samuel did with Saul's donkeys, and the near fulfillment validated the words that reached beyond their generation. Having read Kings, you already know Isaiah passed the test: he announced that Assyria's siege would fail, and in one night the angel of the Lord struck the Assyrian army and the siege was lifted, so you open his book knowing he is a God-vindicated prophet.
Deuteronomy 34:10 looks back over the whole story: since then no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, with all the signs and wonders he was sent to perform. The later prophets are true spokesmen, and Isaiah and Ezekiel are given overwhelming visions of the Lord, but none combines Moses' intimate, ongoing access to God's presence with a ministry of validating signs and wonders. That unfinished expectation prepares the Gospels: John shows Israel's leaders still asking for the prophet, and presents Jesus, who speaks what he hears from the Father, as the prophet like Moses, and greater. Isaiah himself will preach a second and greater Moses, a greater covenant, a greater exodus, a greater victory.
The first writing prophet of Scripture is Moses: Deuteronomy 31 records that he wrote this law and gave it to the priests so it could be read to the assembled nation. And the way Deuteronomy came into being models how the latter prophets' books did. Moses proclaimed orally, then near the end of his life was led by the Spirit to write his oral presentations down, with interpretive comment, as a continuing witness. So with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel: they speak through a ministry, and toward its end they are led by God to write down what they had been led to proclaim.
Deuteronomy's five oracles supply the prophets' very structure. The first speech gives the what and the why of the Lord's dealings with his people, prophetic insight into history's reasons, exactly as 2 Kings 17 explains the fall it has just narrated, and the latter prophets will do the same. The second speech restates the covenant stipulations and applies them to the new situation, as the prophets will press Torah on their hearers: you think you have kept this command, let me show you what it requires. It all culminates in chapter 28, blessing for obedience and progressive, intensifying curses for rebellion, ending in exile. That is why Joel can look at a locust plague and see Deuteronomy 28: a covenant curse under way, a precursor of the day of the Lord, a summons to repent.
Deuteronomy 29 and 30 give the prophets their ending too. When the land lies devastated like Sodom, the nations will ask why the Lord has done this, and the answer is already scripted: because they forsook his covenant and served other gods. Idolatry is the root sin of Israel, and the prophets will expose it on every page. Yet the curse is not the final word: in exile God will finally get Israel's attention, and in the future he will circumcise their heart, on the basis of another covenant, one not like Sinai's, joined to a coming mediator and king, a second Moses. The song of Moses rehearses the judgment, the blessing of Moses previews the tribes replanted in prosperity, and when the same ideas, terminology, and structure meet you again and again in the latter prophets, you will know where they learned them.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fifteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What books make up the latter prophets?
2. How does the Hebrew canon treat the Minor Prophets?
3. Why does Essex call the prophets men of Torah?
4. What event does every latter prophet assume and look beyond?
5. What is the relationship of the latter prophets' message to Moses?
6. Why are Jeremiah and Ezekiel called exilic prophets?
7. How should the return of 537 to 515 BC be read, on the Twelve's teaching?
8. What does the narrator's aside in 1 Samuel 9:9 establish?
9. How does Exodus 7:1 define what a prophet is?
10. What did the rebellious people of Isaiah 30 demand of the seers?
11. What is the Deuteronomy 18 test of a true prophet?
12. By Deuteronomy 34's measure, what set Moses apart from every prophet after him?
13. What pattern does Deuteronomy set for how the prophetic books came into being?
14. Why can Joel read a locust plague as a word from God?
15. What does Moses script the nations to say over the devastated land, and what sin does it expose?
All fifteen correct. Lecture 1 is complete.
Essex says the greatest encouragement for an expository ministry is the example and counsel of the prophets, men told to their faces, speak to us pleasant words. Where do you feel that same pressure today, and what would speaking what is right cost you?
The prophets never change Moses; they fill in his skeleton. What does that pattern teach about how new light from God relates to what he has already said, and how might it guard you against teaching that claims to go beyond Scripture?
God validated his prophets with near fulfillments so Israel could trust the distant ones. What fulfilled words of God are you standing on when you trust the promises that remain open, and how does the empty return of 537 BC sharpen that hope rather than dull it?
The promise of Deuteronomy 18:18: I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.
The lecture's own directions for the week: reread Deuteronomy 28 through 30, the pattern and theology the prophets preach from, and keep your reading of Kings in mind, since the fall of Jerusalem it narrates is the event every latter prophet stands before or after. The course turns next to the first of the latter prophets, Isaiah.