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Wisdom-Trek / Creating a LegacyWelcome to Day 1341 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomMastering the Bible – Most Prophecy is Already Fulfilled – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1341 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better. When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.


Mastering The Bible – Most Prophecy is Already FulfilledInsight Forty-Five: Old Testament Prophets Preached at Different Times and PlacesSince the books of the prophets are grouped together in English Bibles, it appears to most Bible readers that the prophets lived and ministered at roughly the same time. That isn’t the case.


The biblical prophets are divisible into two categories. First, there are the prophets who didn’t write any books we have in the Old Testament. Some famous prophets like Elijah and Elisha are in that category. They didn’t write anything as far as we know. Then there are the ‘‘writing prophets,” those who left us with material in the Old Testament. The writing prophets are typically categorized into the “major prophets” (the name given to lengthy books like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) and “minor prophets” (short books like Micah, Habakkuk, and Obadiah).


Regardless of the organizational groupings into which any of the prophets might fall, they lived over a span of hundreds of years. They also ministered in various parts of the promised land.


Most prophetic books contain enough information to situate a prophet chronologically. For example, prophets like Elijah and Elisha lived in the tenth and ninth centuries BC (ca. 950—850 BC). We know that because their ministries overlapped with King Ahab. Isaiah lived in the second half of the eighth century BC since his life intersected with the kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. Prophets like Jeremiah, who mention the end of the line of the kings of Judah, can be safely situated just before the fall of Judah to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (ca. 586 BC).


If a prophet lived prior to 722 BC, the date of the fall of the ten-tribe northern kingdom of Israel, they may have ministered to either Israel or Judah. Solving this question depends in part on whether kings of the north or south are mentioned in their written material. It can also be resolved by the mention of a hostile foreign empire, like Assyria (northern kingdom enemy) or Babylon (southern kingdom enemy), or by means of a focus on Israel/Samaria or Judah.For example, Ezekiel’s prophecy opens at the river Chebar in Babylon, allowing us to know he was among the captives taken from Judah. Hosea’s book begins with the list of the same kings who reigned during Isaiah’s lifetime (Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah). Hosea ministered in to the apostate northern kingdom, since he mentions the threat of Assyria (Hosea 8:8—9) and focuses on the northern kingdom of Israel. Isaiah, on the other...