Today is the fifth day of December. Welcome to the daily audio Bible. I am Brian. It is great to be here with you today around the global campfire as we gather together in this season of peace on earth and goodwill toward men.

In the northern hemisphere, the colder months, we get cozy around this global campfire and keep each other warm.

Back in the summer, it was like more of a campfire, right? We are all just enjoying the evening now. We are all squeezed in together, keeping each other warm as we come around the global campfire.

Of course, all of you in the southern hemisphere are experiencing more of the warmer time and so it's...

You know what? It is what we make it, right? Here we are around the global campfire for the next step forward.

Our next step forward actually leads us into brand new territory in the Old Testament.

We are moving into the prophetic book of Hosea. As we move into Hosea, we are moving into the final grouping of books that we will encounter in the Old Testament.

These books are called the Minor Prophets. We have moved through the major prophets and we talked about it back then that the major prophets aren't more important than the Minor Prophets.

It's not like these are the Minor League prophets and we already read the professional prophets.

It has more to do with the material that is contained within the writing and so these Minor Prophets are much shorter than the major prophets.

Which means that we will move through them at a reasonably quick clip. There are 12 books in the Minor Prophets beginning with Hosea and then ending with the final book in the Old Testament Malachi.

So think about it. This is the fifth day of December. There are 31 days in December, which unless I'm counting wrong, leaves us 26 days left in the year and we will move through 12 books.

This is just the Old Testament. We will move through 12 books in the Old Testament in the next 26 days. So, pretty quick and we'll be moving pretty quickly but we'll keep ourselves oriented and we'll talk about all the different things that we're reading and why we're reading them but we'll be moving pretty quick.

We have some territory to move through in the New Testament as well fairly quickly but then we will eventually actually just days from now arrive at the final book in the New Testament, the Book of Revelation.

And that will carry us to the end of the year.

But now we are opening the threshold and stepping into the Book of Hosea and Hosea probably lived somewhere around the 8th century BC.

He was from the Northern Kingdom. So we have to kind of remember back through our journey through 1st and 2nd Kings, 1st and 2nd Chronicles.

We remember the disintegration of the United Monarchy, of Israel as one cohesive nation made up of 12 tribes.

After King Solomon's reign, the nation of Israel split into two different nations, the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

The Northern Kingdom was defeated and taken into exile by the Assyrian Empire and then century, centering a half later, the Babylonian Empire was able to conquer and destroy Jerusalem carrying the Kingdom of Judah off into exile.

Hosea probably saw the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. This was his homeland. Although there are many scholars that believe that even though that's true, Hosea's prophecies may not have been collected together cohesively until later.

And that may have actually happened in the Southern Kingdom of Judah after a Syria had taken over the Northern Kingdom and carried Israel, the 10 tribes of the Northern Kingdom into exile.

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