Apicontent

Zephaniah announces God’s purifying judgment on Israel. It will remove evil and open up a new future where all people can flourish in peace.

The book of Zephaniah contains some of the most intense images of God’s justice and love found in the prophetic books. Zephaniah warns Israel and the surrounding nations that the day of the Lord is near. God will judge the nations with a burning fire as He purifies them from sin, evil and violence.

Judgment and hope

God performs this act of justice because He’s passionate about protecting and rescuing His world from evil. He loves us so much that He must purify us. Only then can He bring restoration where He removes evil forever and creates a New Jerusalem for His faithful remnant from all nations to gather and flourish in peace and praise Him. Together, God’s justice and love give the world future hope.

Haggai challenges Israel after the exile to remain faithful to their God and rebuild the temple.

The people of Israel were conquered by Babylon because they broke their covenant with God through idolatry and injustice. The book of Haggai was written 70 years after this prophesied exile and recounts the experience of a small group of Israelites, led by Joshua and Zerubbabel, who had returned to rebuild Jerusalem.

Remember the covenant

Haggai challenges the returning exiles to remember their covenant, remain faithful to God and build the temple before constructing their own homes. While the new temple didn’t meet their expectations, their efforts and faithfulness would be blessed. They could also be encouraged by God’s promise to build a New Jerusalem for His international kingdom, defeat evil, and live in their midst. Future prophetic books contain more details about when these promises would be fulfilled.

Zechariah’s visions foster hope in the future promise of the messianic kingdom, and challenge Israel after the exile to remain faithful to God.

Almost 70 years after the exile, the Israelites were experiencing hardships and wondered if prophetic promises of a New Jerusalem would ever be fulfilled. The book of Zechariah answers this question through several dream visions.

Things just got weird

These bizarre images remind God’s people that they must remain faithful to the covenant if they want the New Jerusalem, Messianic kingdom, peace on earth and end of evil to come to pass. Even though the book doesn’t follow a neat, orderly pattern and contains scary and bizarre images, it shows glimpses of God’s hand at work guiding history toward His own purposes. We can look above the chaos and hope for the coming of God’s kingdom, which will motivate faithfulness in the present.

Malachi accuses Israel of selfishness after the exile and announces that the day of the Lord will purify Israel and prepare them for God’s kingdom.

One hundred years after exile, the Israelites who had returned to Jerusalem were as evil and corrupt as their ancestors. The book of Malachi addresses their corruption regarding issues like sacrifices, marriage and tithing. It also affirms that God does love His people and will fulfill prophecy.

A final word on the future Messiah

The entire Scripture is one unified story that tells us the truth about the human condition and sin while announcing God’s promise to one day send a messenger and then show up personally. He will defeat evil and purify a faithful remnant, establish a New Jerusalem and bring peace, healing and justice forever. It’s that promise that prompts God’s people to denounce sin, remain faithful to His covenant and hope for the future.

The book of Psalms has been designed to be the prayer book of God’s people as they wait for the Messiah and his coming kingdom.

Written to join the Hebrew Torah, or the first five books of the Old Testament, the Book of Psalms is a remarkable collection of poems from David, Moses, and other Jewish writers.

Joy, pain, and prayer

Take one look at Psalms makes it clear that it is much more than enlightening literature: it too is God’s Word with equal importance like the Torah. The Psalms also carry an excellent order throughout its chapters and is separated into five main books. Each book carries a specific theme complete with its own introduction, key points, and endnotes.

Through the Psalms, we learn about the importance of prayer and the acknowledgment of pain, as well as the power of praise and fulfillment of prophecy. Note how the Psalms correspond particularly well with Isaiah, Zechariah, and God’s covenant with David in Chapter 7 of 2 Samuel.

The book of Proverbs invites people to live with wisdom and in the fear of the Lord in order to experience the good life.

Proverbs offers human words or human wisdom as a vehicle for the divine Word. The two voices we hear in Proverbs 1-9 have been fused together to help us understand that in the observations and sayings of Israel’s human elders, we will hear echoes of the divine, transcendental wisdom.

You can trust in God’s wisdom

Linked to Solomon and other wise men, the book of Proverbs includes hundreds of short, clever sayings designed to teach every person how to live and act wisely. Each saying touches on a common area of life and shows us what kind of world we live in and what it looks like to live well before God and toward others.

The wisdom in Proverbs is often described as a lady, but it’s not an impersonal force. It’s an attribute of God Himself. By fearing or respecting God and reading and obeying the wise, practical counsel found in this book, we develop the important skills and moral mindset we need to live successful, good and goodly lives in God’s world.

Job explores the difficult question of God’s relationship to human suffering, and invites us to trust God’s wisdom and character.

Set in Uz, an obscure land far from Israel, during an unknown time period, the book of Job focuses on questions about God’s justice and why good people suffer. At the same time, it also asks the question we rarely think to ask, why do good people prosper?

Can you trust God is good?

Throughout the book, Job, his wife, and his friends speculate on why he, an upright man, suffers. Job accuses God of being unjust and not operating the world according to principles of justice, and his friends believe that Job’s sin caused his suffering. Job decides to talk directly to God.

God reminds him that the world has order and beauty but is also wild and dangerous. While we do not always know why we suffer, we can bring our pain and grief to God and trust that He is wise and knows what He’s doing.

The Song of Songs is a collection of ancient Israelite love poems that celebrates the beauty and power of God’s gift of love and sexual desire.

A peculiar book in the Bible, the Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon, is not technically a book. It’s a love song between two lovers! But according to ancient Hebrew writings, this song is considered the Song of Songs in the same way Jesus Christ is the King of Kings. What makes this song greater than any other love song? And what is it doing in the Bible?

A “lovely” poem

Read further to discover there’s more than meets the eye. Several themes begin to take shape within the poetry of this song, along with pearls of wisdom strung through its text about handling the fiery passions of sexual desire. Allegories of God’s love for His people are also woven through the poem’s tapestry, creating a beautiful picture of what God intended love to be since Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. We can enjoy this same gift today with obedience.

God uses a faithful non-Israelite to bring restoration to his people.

The book of Ruth is a beautifully crafted look at how God’s good purpose interplays with the human decisions. It’s a tale of love, loss, faithfulness, and redemption.

The Faithful Gentile

Picking up “in the days when the judges ruled,” the book of Ruth tells the story of Naomi, the Moabite widow Ruth, and the farmer Boaz. The four chapters of the book are each designed with intentional symmetry. The first and last chapters reflect how loyalty turned this story of tragedy and death into a story of joy and birth. The inner chapters show how Naomi and Ruth make a plan, followed by an encounter between Ruth and Boaz, followed by Naomi and Ruth rejoicing.

Curiously, God is hardly mentioned in the book of Ruth. At a time when we look for God to be active through a judge or king, God instead works out his will through the everyday faithfulness of his people. This faithfulness not only benefits Naomi and her family but goes on to bless the world through the family of David, the line from which the Messiah would eventually come.

A collection of five funeral poems offered on behalf of Jerusalem after its destruction by Babylon.

The Book of Lamentations may not be the most popular book in the Bible, but it is an essential ingredient for helping humans to understand an important aspect of their relationship with God – the expression of grief and distress. This special book is a collection of five lament poems recounting the tragic fall of Jerusalem to Babylon.

Jerusalem has fallen

This catastrophic event was the direct result of Israel’s constant rebellion against God’s Covenant despite His persistent warnings through prophets to Jerusalem’s royal lineage.

Now surrounded by war, grief and suffering, the people of Israel acknowledge their sin and cry out to God for restoration and repentance in the lament poems, which are a way to process emotion and confusion at the disorder and chaos and to express themselves to God. Reading Lamentations helps us today to understand that communicating our distress to God about what’s wrong in our lives is an appropriate response to the evil in the world, rather than keeping it bottled up inside.