Why Choose Davis College for the Study of the Prophets?

This article was written by Dr. George Snyder and published in the August 2008 edition of the College catalog news piece.

Dr. George Snyder co - chaired our successful regional accreditation self-study. Dr. Snyder stays current with scholarly literature because the Bible as the active word of God is always culturally relevant, but his first love is our students with whom he spends much time either having a friendly chat in our college cafe or a serious conversation in his office.

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 7:25 during the fall semester I teach the prophets to sophomores at Davis College. It challenges students and myself to engage at that time of day with ancient texts, written by poets to an audience whose immediate concerns hardly reflect our own. But by means of careful explanation, personal application, and relevant discussion - including some weird humor as it is 7:30 in the morning - most students learn to listen to the prophets as God's spokesmen for them today.

Popular Christian eschatology quickly runs to the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve shorter books, Hosea through Malachi, to discern what these Old Testament writers forecast concerning the future - either that fulfilled in the New Testament or that which will happen when Christ returns. Granted these biblical authors often speak to a time lying in Israel's future, but we would be missing their main point to assign their message only to later generations.

So if not primarily "future" oriented, what then are the prophets about? I use a simple model that I believe accurately pictures the message of the prophets. To begin, all prophets preached the same message, "repent," since God always desires his people who have strayed from his instruction to return to his path. (The first words of Jesus' ministry were "repent for the kingdom is at hand.") But God knows that his people require encouragement to obey, so the prophets offer three motivations to get God's disobedient people to change their behavior so that they once again please him. The first warns: if you do not repent (which means to reverse your direction), God will judge you. This judgment may take the form of famine, plague, defeat, or in the extreme, exile, depending on how insensitive God's people have become to responding to his word. Yes these threats would occur in the future, but their message seeks to change present behavior.

Of course God would not be much of a god, if he only threatened, so after words of warning the prophets always follow with encouragement: on the other side of judgment lies deliverance - if drought then abundant harvest, if plague then healing, if defeat then victory, if exile then return. But this simple theology-judgment for disobedience, blessing for obedience - places God in a very small box, thus the third motivation.

The prophets picture a glorious future, in the end all is well; all will be restored to what once was, or even better to what could have been. But even this final, glorious end was spoken not to tell us what would happen but to affect the prophets' audience's behavior. If Israel only would repent, they could reap the benefits without having to go through all of that suffering to learn the lesson.

Thus the ancient prophets are spokesmen for us. Unless we are the only generation of believers who practice what God preached, we need to repent. The degree to which we hear God's prophetic message - that of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve - is the degree to which we participate in God's offered blessing. We would love to have you join us every Tuesday and Thursday morning as we learn to listen to the prophets.