later Babylon, were used to punish them. God has warnings for today, men are disobedient, and so one day they too

will have to be punished by God, as the Jews were of old.

(2) When Judah were slaves in Babylon.

When Judah had finally gone into slavery in Babylon, God again sent prophets to them. The following belong to

this time:

Jeremiah, as you can see, prophesied for a long time. He foretold the length of time Judah would spend in

Babylon. See how long this was in Jeremiah chapter 25, verse 11.

Daniel also made some wonderful prophecies about the future of the Jews. Do you remember what happened to

Daniel? He foretold that after Babylon, the Jews would be subject to Persia, and then Greece. Finally, in the time

of the Lord Jesus, the Jews would be subject to Rome. Daniel spoke of the death of the Lord Jesus (the Messiah),

you can read this in Daniel chapter 9, verses 25 and 26. The Messiah was to be cut off, He was, He was crucified.

(3) After Judah had been freed from Babylon.

The prophets who spoke after the return of the Jews to their own land were:

Malachi spoke of the coming of John the Baptist, who would come before the Lord Jesus Christ.

Zechariah spoke of the future (second) coming of the Lord Jesus to this earth, when He will gather the Jews back

to their own land, and be king over all the earth. In Zechariah we see the Jews at last as the people that God

intended them to be. They will have the first place among all the peoples of the world, and people of all countries

will travel to Jerusalem to worship the Lord Jesus. This has not happened yet; we live in the time when we are

awaiting the return of the Lord Jesus.

We have now looked at all the books of the Old Testament except one. Did you notice which one we missed?

Look at the book after Jeremiah the prophet.

The book is about the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. Do you remember we read about this in 2

The book is called The Lamentations of Jeremiah. Jeremiah sits crying as he thinks about the things which had

happened to Jerusalem, and his sad words are written in this book.

The sadness of Jeremiah over Jerusalem must have been like the sadness of many of the Jews many years later,

when they were being ruled by the Romans. Do you remember that Daniel had foretold this? Into this sadness the

Lord Jesus Christ came to be the King of the Jews, and to save His people from their sins. To read about His

coming we must turn to the New Testament.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John tell us about the coming of God to this earth as the Lord Jesus. They tell how He

lived here and what He did, and finally how He died on the cross, rose from the dead and went back again into

heaven. Each gospel writer saw the Lord Jesus in a different way, and so wrote about Him. We must now see what

they had to say about Him.