Issue 38 Hidden Treasures in the Minor ProphetsBlog | It’s all connected: God, humanity & nature in the Minor Prophets
It’s all connected: God, humanity & nature in the Minor Prophets
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 31.03.24
The world of the Minor Prophets was very different to ours, yet their treasures are anything but minor! To discover them, we need to understand their various contexts as these twelve books were probably written and edited between the eighth and fourth centuries BC. As we explore, we’ll discover how powerfully they speak to our context of political chaos, spiritual confusion and ecological collapse.
Intertwined Relationship
The first thing to note is the agrarian theme of these prophecies. Farming rhythms, human dependence on reliable rainfall, and our co-dependence with other creatures upon nature, shape the imagery and content. In Habakkuk, God’s judgement is compared to a leopard, wolves, an eagle and a desert wind (1:8-9), whilst the people being judged are like fish in the sea caught up in a net (1:14-17). Creation is pictured variously as a victim of human sin (Habakkuk 2:17, Zechariah 11:1-3), an object of judgement (Micah 1:2, Zephaniah 1:2-3), a means God uses to warn the wicked (Amos 4:6-10), and an agent of God’s justice (Joel 1:10-13, Haggai 1:10-11).
All twelve books are embedded in the Old Testament worldview, seeing relationship with God intertwined with relationship with neighbour and creation in a triangle of interdependence. It’s like a spider’s web, where breaking one strand, for instance by injustice towards the poor, inevitably affects relationships with God and nature. Hosea 4:1-3 vividly describes how human sin causes a kind of uncreation where beasts, birds and fish die, and the land dries up or ‘mourns’. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the relevance of this to today’s global context, as God’s ‘very good’ creation (Genesis 1:31) has become polluted, degraded and dangerously unstable through human greed and selfishness.
The myth of progress
Second, all the Minor Prophets address an era when God’s promises of land and safety appear to be broken, and threats of exile loom. Military defeat, political failure, spiritual unfaithfulness and economic instability are reflected in changes in the natural world. In our world today, the myth of human progress shatters on the altars of overconsumption and inequality, just as with Micah, Amos and Haggai. We need prophets today to address the fake news and selective truth-telling of our media and politicians, and to speak out in a world where we seem to have forgotten that inequality and injustice have spiritual and ecological consequences.
God of justice
