(Part 1)

JBTM 89
Preaching the Prophets
Paul D. Wegner, PhD
Paul D. Wegner is Director, Academic Graduate Studies Program;
Professor of Old Testament Studies at Gateway Seminary in Ontario, California.
At first glance we might not expect that a message from an Old Testament (hereafter
OT) prophet could have any relevance to life in our postmodern world, but the sins of
the Israelites and the crumbling of their society are not so very different from our own. Not
only that, OT prophets and modern-day preachers share some significant similarities. 1 Both
are called by God to communicate his messages to their people. Both have a responsibility
to communicate these messages clearly and to exhort their people to obey God; to do so
poorly, or fail to do so results in suffering for their people. The OT prophets needed to warn
their nation against the dangers of wandering away from God and into Baalism, bringing as
a consequence God’s punishment. Today the dangers are just as real, although some of our
modern gods—money, pornography, pleasure, etc.—may not seem like an idol but can just
as easily steal our hearts away from the true God. Where are the modern day “watchmen”
that we need to call us back to God?
There are some important differences, however, between OT prophets and preachers
today. First, God sent the prophets before the full revelation in the biblical canon was
given. Prophets not only helped the people understand how God’s revelation up to that
point applied to their lives, they also declared new revelation from God. Second, the words
of the OT prophets came directly from God and thus carried his authority. Pastors, on the
other hand, teach people how to follow God based upon what has already been revealed by
him in Scripture. It is therefore crucial that we exegete and communicate Scripture clearly
and correctly.
It is unlikely that God’s commands given through the prophets well over 2,000 years
ago can be applied directly to our historical contexts. For example, God told Jonah to go and
announce destruction on the city of Nineveh (Jon 1:2; 3:2–4), Isaiah to walk around naked
(Isa 20:2–4), and Hosea to marry a harlot (Hos 1:2), but it would be most unwise for us to
think that God is commanding any of us to do these same things. So how do we apply OT
passages? Throughout church history people have attempted to find new and fresh ways to
apply OT passages to their own historical contexts by using methods such as allegorical,
typological, rabbinic, or pesher hermeneutics. For example, the Habakkuk Commentary
¹Gary V. Smith has written a book entitled The Prophets as Preachers: An Introduction to the Hebrew
Prophets (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1994).