Why Should Christians Study the Minor Prophets?

What can we learn from the last twelve books of the Old Testament? Today, Derek Thomas explains the importance of the Minor Prophets and provides several tips for effectively studying these portions of Scripture.

Nathan W. Bingham: Joining us this week on the Ask Ligonier podcast is Dr. Derek Thomas, and we’re recording live from Ligonier’s 2023 National Conference. Dr. Thomas, why should we study the Minor Prophets?

Dr. Derek Thomas: Well, first of all, they’re part of the Scriptures, so that would be one answer—and we should be students of the whole Bible, not just the New Testament, and not just, say, the book of Psalms, but the whole Bible. And the twelve Minor Prophets conclude the message, the redemptive message, of the Old Testament.

They vary considerably. I suppose the entry point would be Jonah—and who doesn’t like the story of Jonah? But it’s also a story about the immense love of God for people who are gentiles. And it’s a narrative of a prophet being sent to the Ninevites with the gospel. And Jonah didn’t think the Ninevites deserved the gospel, so he runs hundreds of miles in the opposite direction, only to be thrown into the sea and swallowed by a whale. And even at the end of the book, he’s still disgruntled. And so, it teaches us many things, that God uses broken people.

My entry point into the Minor Prophets as a very young Christian was the book of Amos, and Amos uses very simple country Hebrew. I was reading it in English at the time, and I discovered Alec Motyer’s commentary on Amos, which is absolutely fabulous, and it brought Amos to light and made it tremendously relevant.

Micah is a prophet who is Isaiah Mach 2. He’s not as wordy as Isaiah, but he is a contemporary of Isaiah, and he’s more out in the country, and Isaiah was in Jerusalem. But the message is very similar to Isaiah, and therefore it’s a message about Christ, and it’s a message about the coming Redeemer and the fulfillment of the promise of God that a King like David would come and rule and reign.

Many of the Minor Prophets have aspects of genre, of literature, that make it perhaps initially difficult to understand, but many of them have visions of the day of the Lord, the coming apocalypse, the coming day of judgment, the promise of a new heavens and new earth. So, they’ve visionary. Many of them use poetic language, and it’s a left brain, right brain kind of thing, whether you can go with the flow of poetry and imagery and so on. But I mean—I think this is probably true of every book of the Bible—but the Minor Prophets require a good commentary and a good study Bible, like the Reformation Study Bible, to understand the nuances of what they’re saying.

And I think once you fall in love with the Minor Prophets, anticipating as they are the coming of Christ—in Joel, for example, the coming of Pentecost, Peter quotes Joel about the pouring out of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost—it helps you understand the total narrative of redemption from beginning to end.