This is the BAML podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his GoHose Brent Billings. Today we study the apocalyptic

message of Zachariah, a contemporary to a guy who sought to encourage God's people with image-driven

messages of forthcoming hope. Yes. Fourth coming hope. It's on the way. It's on the way. Here it comes.

Or maybe it's even already here. Who knows? But we're going to dive in. I got a bunch of notes

this time. I'm going to do some reading. Sorry for all our listeners if you hate it when I do that.

But especially when I talk about apocalyptic literature, I love to choose my language really

particularly careful because we do so many things with apocalyptic literature that aren't helpful.

So that's what I got. But yeah, I can pretty much guarantee you we'll have a couple of tangents

along the way though. So okay, good. Good. Consider it to bonus material. I like that. We'll hold Brent

Billings to that. All right. One of Haggai's contemporaries, maybe even a well-known acquaintance,

was the prophet Zachariah. When one does the dating of the return of Ezra Niyamaya and considers

that they are referred to as young men in their prophecies, it stands to reason that Haggai and

Zachariah were toddlers when the first few waves of returnees hit the ground in Jerusalem.

To give these prophets some real-life context, these two boys grew up in the mess and the struggle.

That was the remnant as their families tried to rebuild. And it's really possible that these guys

might have even knew each other. They've been really good friends. You don't have a, I mean,

maybe there are a whole bunch of waves that we're not told about, but you don't have this massive

group of hundreds of thousands of people returning to Jerusalem. And prophets are usually

schooled. It's not, you know, just wake up one morning and become a prophet. You actually have

a, there's a training. Think of it kind of like a Bible college, a prophet college. You have a

training and it's very, very possible that Haggai and Zachariah may have been trained together,

may have known each other. Possibly even been good friends. We don't know that, but it's

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