My newest book is now rolling off the presses, a verse-by-verse study of Joel, Amos and Obadiah. It is called “Joel, Amos, Obadiah: Turmoil Among the Nations.” We are studying through the Minor Prophets in my class, and each time I get a logical grouping of them done, it is becoming a book.
Based on years of anecdotal evidence, I am confident in saying that the Minor Prophets are the least read, least studied and least understood books of the Bible. It is almost as if people think that the books with the “normal-sounding names” like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are somehow better than books with names we would rarely, if ever, choose for our kids, names like Habakkuk, Haggai, Hosea, Nahum and Zephaniah.
Believe me when I tell you, though, that these little books very much live up to the old saying: “Great things come in small packages.”
Joel starts with bugs. Locusts, to be precise. The land was being overrun by a swarm of such immense size and destruction that Joel knew it was a judgment from God. Even today, in merely natural swarms, they can cover 100 square kilometers (more than 38 square miles), in which will be found 4 billion to 8 billion locusts. In food terms, they can devour enough food to feed 3.5 million people every single day. With a supernatural-size swarm, Joel knew the entire population of his people was at risk of dying. He went on to bring prophecy of the Day of the Lord out of the present calamity of his own day.
Amos was a hillbilly preacher who was looked upon with disdain as soon as he entered the ministry. His clothing was tattered, his shoes were never shined, and no one before him in his family had ever been a preacher. His fingernails usually had dirt under them from his farming activity, where the hands of the “polished clergy” of his day were always clean and soft from their consistent clerical lifestyle. See, he not only kept livestock, he also worked the ground. And yet, God called him from the sticks to go North to “the big city” and preach right in the faces of both politicians and even other preachers!