Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 90 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session completes the Book of the Twelve. Dr. Essex reads Zephaniah as the last pre-exilic pillar of the day of the Lord, then crosses into the post-exilic three, where the hearts of the returned remnant prove as unchanged as their fathers'. Listen for the interpretive decisions along the way: the desire of the nations in Haggai 2, the crown set on the high priest's head in Zechariah 6, the worthless shepherd and the wounded false prophet, and whether the Elijah of Malachi 4 is literal.
Zephaniah, the ninth section of the Twelve, prophesies in the days of Josiah, the last good king, when reform was outward only, as Jeremiah's early ministry likewise found: leaders and people went along with Josiah, and the moment he died they returned to their idols and their false prophets. More than a century after Joel, Zephaniah says again: the day of the Lord is near. His two themes are that day and, at the book's end, Israel's restoration, and his purpose is plain: Yahweh's control of all the nations will be proved in the coming day of the Lord.
The judgment falls first on Judah and Jerusalem (1:4, I will stretch out my hand against Judah), then sweeps the compass in chapter 2: the Philistine cities of Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ashdod; Moab and Ammon; the Ethiopians; and Assyria with Nineveh, each with near-term fulfillments through the Babylonians. Chapter 3 turns back to the oppressing city, which in context is Jerusalem herself, judged in verses 1 to 7; then verse 8 lifts to the ultimate horizon: wait for me, declares the Lord, for the day when I rise up; my decision is to gather nations, to pour out on them my indignation, for all the earth will be devoured by the fire of my zeal. As Habakkuk was counseled, so here: those who anticipate the day wait in faith.
Out of that day emerges the remnant of Israel (3:13): they will do no wrong and tell no lies, they will feed and lie down with no one to make them tremble. Then the great restoration song of 3:14 to 20: the Lord has taken away his judgments, the King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst, a victorious warrior; do not be afraid, O Zion, and the Lord will restore the fortunes of his people before the eyes of all the peoples of the earth. One interpretive note: 3:9's purified lips has been read by some as a reversal of Babel, a universal language; the majority, following the context of my dispersed ones bringing offerings, read cleansed hearts, the forgiveness of the returning worshipers. And a preaching admission: proportionally, Zephaniah is nearly all wrath; a faithful forty-five minute message would give restoration only its final ten.
The first six sections belong to the Assyrian crisis, alternating Israel and Judah; Micah anticipates Assyria's breaking, which happened historically in 701 BC under Hezekiah. Did that deliverance mean the day of the Lord had passed and Judah stood restored? Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah answer no: the surviving kingdom kept sinning, and Babylon was coming. Then the exile came and ended, and the final three prophets, post-exilic, face the parallel question: with a remnant back in Jerusalem, is the day now past? Their answer is likewise no: outward circumstances changed, hearts did not, the same old people with the same old problems, mirroring Hosea at the book's head, and the day of the Lord still ahead.
Haggai speaks to the first returned generation, back sixteen years under Cyrus's decree to build the temple, with the altar restored, sacrifices offered, the foundation laid, and the work stopped under the opposition Ezra records. Four times he summons them to consider (1:5, 1:7, 2:15, 2:18): you have sown much and harvested little; you earn wages to put into a purse with holes, an image Essex updates from his own seminary years to money poured endlessly into a car that never quite runs. Consider whether your circumstances connect to your unfaithfulness in the Lord's work: rise up and build. Ezra and Nehemiah are absent from these books for the simple reason that they had not yet come; Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest lead this generation, Ezra arriving only in 458 BC.
Haggai dates every message: five messages from late August to mid-December of 520 BC, a single autumn of ministry. The first brings the rebuke for the unbuilt house, and within a month Zerubbabel, Joshua, and all the remnant obey, the Lord stirring their spirits, with the reassurance, I am with you. As the work proceeds, discouragement sets in, for the rising house cannot match Solomon's, so 2:1 to 9 promises coming glory. In December comes the rebuke for uncleanness: unclean people must deal with their uncleanness to build God's house; and the book closes (2:20 to 23) with a personal word of encouragement to Zerubbabel.
First, 2:7: they will come with the wealth of the nations, a word that can mean desire, whence the venerable messianic reading, the Desire of nations. Essex takes the desirable things: the context of verse 6 is the shaking of all nations in judgment, and the nations after judgment are not desiring the Messiah; they bring their wealth to Yahweh's house. Second, 2:9's latter glory greater than the former: the majority refer it to Christ's presence in the second temple; Essex reads the temple as the site viewed whole, Solomon's house, this house, and the final temple of Ezekiel's vision, so that the latter glory is the day all nations come to worship there, while covenantal interpreters' New Jerusalem reading stumbles on Revelation 21's templeless city. Third, 2:23: I will make you, Zerubbabel, like a signet ring, deliberately reversing Jeremiah 22, where Jeconiah was the signet pulled from Yahweh's finger. The majority read Zerubbabel as representative of the not-forgotten dynasty; Essex leans further: the ring goes back on, and God will reestablish the Davidic house through a future son of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel himself the token of the curse reversed, without, he adds, removing the need for the virgin birth.
Zechariah, with Hosea the longest of the Twelve, names Yahweh as Yahweh of hosts fifty-two times in fourteen chapters, the commander of heaven's armies in sovereign control, pictured in the night visions as a general whose riders reconnoiter the earth and report. His name states his purpose: Yahweh remembers. The book opens (1:1 to 6, contemporary with Haggai's autumn) with the call to repentance: do not be like your fathers; your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live forever? Yet my words overtook your fathers. The prophets die; their words come true. Two years later (chapters 7 and 8) the people must be confronted again: their fasts were man-made ordinances arising in the exile, and Yahweh seeks a repentant heart, not scheduled humiliation.
Zechariah 6 stages the book's boldest sign: take silver and gold from the exiles, make an ornate crown, and set it, not on Zerubbabel the governor, where every Davidic expectation points, but on the head of Joshua the high priest, and say: behold, a man whose name is Branch, for he will branch out from where he is, and he will build the temple of the Lord; he will bear the honor and sit and rule on his throne, and he will be a priest on his throne, and the counsel of peace will be between the two offices. Zerubbabel and Joshua together built the second temple; the sign announces that one person, king and priest in himself, will build the temple to come. Like Micah, Zechariah fixes hope on the coming shepherd-king; and most commentators judge that next to Isaiah, Zechariah gives the clearest Old Testament portrait of the Messiah.
After the eight night visions (1:7 through chapter 6, dated to early 519 by Darius's second year) and the fasting question, chapters 9 to 14 divide into two burdens by the headings at 9:1 and 12:1. The first: the events leading to the king who comes righteous and humble (9:9), who could bring blessing, but who in chapter 11 is betrayed, valued and cut off, leaving Israel to a worthless shepherd. The second: Israel's turning, they will look on me whom they have pierced (chapter 12), a fountain opened for sin and impurity (13:1), and, with Jerusalem besieged, the Lord going forth to fight, his feet standing on the Mount of Olives (chapter 14), a literal return to the literal mountain, Essex holds, aided by Acts 1's promise that he will come as he went, issuing in the day of the Lord, Israel's restoration, and the nations' worship at Jerusalem.
At 11:17, woe to the worthless shepherd who leaves the flock, with withered arm and blinded eye: Unger and Feinberg agree, and Essex with them, that this is the Antichrist, the counterfeit Israel must endure for rejecting the true king; McComiskey's alternative, Titus the Roman destroyer, remains a minority reading. At 13:6, what are these wounds between your arms?, the classic messianic reading, which Unger defends by joining verse 6 to the smitten shepherd of verse 7, falters on the context: verses 4 and 5 concern the false prophet, ashamed of his visions in that day, and the wounds are his own, self-inflicted marks he must explain away. Essex sides with Feinberg and the majority: verse 6 closes the false-prophet paragraph; verse 7 begins the true Shepherd's.
Essex confesses annual guilt at racing through Zechariah, relieved by the resources available: Merrill Unger's exegetical commentary, distilled from twenty years of teaching Hebrew exegetical method at Dallas on this very book; and Charles Feinberg's God Remembers, from the parallel class he taught at Talbot for a quarter century, alongside his Minor Prophets volume. Unger had been Feinberg's student, and where the two disagree, Feinberg would say those were the places Unger did not listen very carefully. Dr. MacArthur, notably, expounded exactly two Old Testament books from beginning to end, Zechariah and Daniel, and the tape series remains available. A classroom question also draws out the king-and-priest pattern: David with the ark, Solomon dedicating the temple, kings allied to the sanctuary without holding the priesthood, Moses and Aaron, Zerubbabel and Joshua, two offices always paired and always pointing to the one Messiah who will unite them, under whom the sons of Zadok will serve in the kingdom; and another question confirms that Old Testament believers away from the temple could still pray directly to Yahweh, as the Psalms show.
Malachi, my messenger, is the prophet's actual name, as Isaiah and the rest bore meaningful names. His book runs on a fixed pattern, six disputations, each with Yahweh's statement, the people's contesting question, and the prophet's answer: I have loved you; how have you loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother? Yet I have loved Jacob. Then: priests despising his name with corrupt sacrifices; treachery against the wife of your youth in divorce; wearying the Lord by saying everyone who does evil is good in his sight, where is the God of justice?, answered by the Lord suddenly coming to his temple; robbing God in tithes and offerings; and arrogant words against him. The form itself is the diagnosis: a people so spiritually dull that the prophet must quote their own hearts back to them line by line, unable to see how Torah applies to their lives.
Malachi ends the Twelve: remember the law of Moses my servant; behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord, and he will restore the hearts of the fathers to the children, lest I come and smite the land with a curse. Is this John the Baptist? Jesus said that for those who believed, Elijah had come, yet the New Testament presents John as coming in the spirit and power of Elijah, literal John, not literal Elijah, which means Elijah's coming remains future. The MacArthur Study Bible and the Bible Knowledge Commentary read a future Elijah-like figure; Essex takes the literal reading: Malachi's first hearers, told I will send you Elijah the prophet, would have expected Elijah, and a literal Elijah will come with an Elijah-like ministry, confronting sin and calling Israel to decide who is God, perhaps with signs as of old, which John never did (John 10:41). Whether he is one of Revelation 11's two witnesses Essex declines to say: it is amazing, he notes, how many men have tried to figure out what the Bible does not say.
The Twelve end where the prophets as a whole point: a dull, stiff-necked people holding the word they cannot hear, and the impregnable, eternal word of God that overtakes every generation as it overtook the fathers. The prophets declare that Israel broke Torah, that God's judgments in history are portents of the day of the Lord, and that beyond that day God will change the heart of his people, deliver the waiting remnant, and restore Israel under the Messiah as a blessing to all nations: a link between the Torah behind them and the Christ ahead of them. And since the prophets remain the least known and least preached part of the Bible, Essex ends with the charge he began with: preach them, whole, in their place in the Twelve; the resources exist, and the congregations have never heard it done.
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 twenty-four are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. During whose reign did Zephaniah prophesy, and what marked that era?
2. What is Zephaniah's stated purpose?
3. Who is the oppressing city of Zephaniah 3?
4. How does the majority read the purified lips of Zephaniah 3:9?
5. What question do the three post-exilic prophets answer, and how?
6. What situation did Haggai address in 520 BC?
7. Why are Ezra and Nehemiah absent from Haggai and Zechariah?
8. What image does Haggai use for the remnant's futile economy?
9. Over what period do Haggai's five dated messages run?
10. Why does Essex read Haggai 2:7 as the desirable things rather than the Desire of nations?
11. How does Essex understand the latter glory of Haggai 2:9?
12. What does the signet ring word to Zerubbabel reverse?
13. How does Essex's reading of Haggai 2:23 go beyond the majority?
14. What title dominates Zechariah, and what does it declare?
15. What is startling about the crown in Zechariah 6?
16. What do the two burdens of Zechariah 9 to 14 trace?
17. How does Essex read the Lord's feet on the Mount of Olives in Zechariah 14?
18. Who is the worthless shepherd of Zechariah 11:17, on the reading Essex shares with Unger and Feinberg?
19. Why do Feinberg and the majority read the wounds of Zechariah 13:6 as a false prophet's?
20. What did Feinberg say about the places where his former student Unger disagreed with him?
21. What pattern structures the book of Malachi?
22. What does the disputation form itself reveal about the people?
23. Why does Essex hold that the Elijah of Malachi 4:5 is the literal Elijah?
24. What does Essex say about identifying the two witnesses of Revelation 11?
All twenty-four correct. Lecture 19 is complete.
Zephaniah's proportions are nearly all wrath with restoration at the end, and Essex admits his own preaching reverses the balance. What do we owe the actual proportions of a biblical book when we teach it, and when is rebalancing legitimate?
Haggai told the remnant to consider whether their leaking-purse economy connected to the Lord's unbuilt house. How would you carefully, without turning every hardship into a verdict, consider your own circumstances before God?
The crown belonged on the governor's head by every expectation, and God ordered it set on the priest's, to announce one coming King-Priest. Where else does God's way of keeping promises overturn the expected form while keeping the substance?
Malachi's people answered every charge with how?, genuinely unable to see their sin. What practices, and what people, has God given you to say the specific thing you cannot see about yourself?
The prophets close with words that overtake generations: the fathers die, the words come true. Which word of Scripture do you most need to let overtake you now, rather than your children later?
Zechariah 9:9
Read Zephaniah 3:8 to 20 and mark where wrath turns to song, then Haggai whole in one sitting, it is two chapters, alongside Ezra 4 and 5. Read Zechariah 6:9 to 15 and chapter 14 slowly, and finish with Malachi, naming each disputation as you meet it. Next session: the course turns to the Writings, the final third of the Hebrew canon, beginning with the Psalms.