Introduction: Imagine this: You're forced out of your home. Everything you've known—your neighborhood, your church, your place of work—is gone. Your city is burned, your nation conquered, and you're marched hundreds of miles into a foreign land where people don't speak your language, don't respect your God, and don't understand your culture. You're surrounded by loss, confusion, and the growing fear that maybe God has abandoned you.

• Now ask yourself: how do you keep faith alive in Babylon?
• That was the reality for Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—prophets who did ministry not in times of glory, but in seasons of devastation and disorientation. These weren't fair-weather prophets. These were exile prophets, called to speak God's word not from the palace, but from the margins.
• In the last message about the Old Testament, I’m going to explore how God uses voices in exile to spark courage, give hope, and turn captivity into a platform for revival. Because maybe you're feeling displaced too—confused, discouraged, unsure of where God is in your story. And maybe, just maybe, the message of the exile prophets is exactly what we need right now.

1.     Ezekiel:

God will strengthen

• Ezekiel is one of seven prophets who prophesied during Israel's captivity in Babylon. The others are Jeremiah, who prophesied both before exile and during exile. This is probably true for Obadiah as well. And of course, the most famous prophet during this time is Daniel. And the others are Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.
• In terms of Ezekiel’s background, he came from a priestly family, probably grew up in Jerusalem, and received his calling around the age of 30.
• One of the things Ezekiel became known for was his prophetic drama.
• Ezekiel 4:4-8 'Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the house of Israel upon yourself. You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side. I have assigned you the same number of days as the years of their sin. So for 390 days you will bear the sin of the house of Israel. After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the house of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year. Turn your face toward the siege of Jerusalem and with bared arm prophesy against her. I will tie you up with ropes so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have finished the days of your siege.'
• That's not too bad. There was another time he had to shave his head to communicate something prophetically. But none of those things compare to what he was about to experience.
• Ezekiel 24:15-18: 'The word of the LORD came to me: Son of man, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes. Yet do not lament or weep or shed any tears. Groan quietly; do not mourn for the dead. Keep your turban fastened and your sandals on your feet; do not cover the lower part of your face or eat the customary food of mourners. So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died. The next morning I did as I had been commanded.'
• When Ezekiel lost his wife, he saw this as a sign of hardship and great loss coming.
• Adding to that, he had some of the most amazing visions in Old Testament history. One of his greatest visions is known as the Valley of Dry Bones.
• Ezekiel 37:1-10 'The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, Son of man, can these bones live? I said, O Sovereign LORD, you alone know. Then he said to me, Prophesy to these bones and say to them, Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD. So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet — a vast army.'
• This was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost, 50 days after Jesus rose from the dead. This was the pouring out of his Spirit on a dead, dry, legalistic religion.
• Ezekiel was also known for seeing a new temple — more glorious than any before it — that would ultimately be fulfilled in Christ and his church.

2. Daniel:

is my Judge

• This book belongs to a unique section of literature known as apocalyptic.
• If you remember from when we studied the book of Daniel earlier this year, the book is written in two languages: Aramaic and Hebrew. The first six chapters are written in Aramaic, because the truth within those six chapters is meant for everyone.
• Chapters 7 through 12, for the most part, are written in Hebrew — in what we would call apocalyptic language, which means language about the end times. These final six chapters contain a number of visions that apply specifically to God's people.
• Therefore, these stories were written to give hope and strength to God's people as they lived through their 70 years of captivity.
• In addition to that, Daniel models how God's people, through faith, can be a shining light right in the midst of great darkness — thus partly fulfilling the calling to be a blessing to the nations.
• Daniel is also significant in that he gives us some of the most profound insights into the future of God's people.
• The king of Babylon at that time, a man named Nebuchadnezzar, had an amazing dream of an enormous statue with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet partly of iron and partly of clay.
• While Nebuchadnezzar was watching the statue, a rock not cut by human hands completely demolished it. The wind swept the broken pieces away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.
• Daniel interpreted the statue as representing four successive human kingdoms, in descending order of value and power (as indicated by the use of diminishing metals).
• Traditionally, these metals have been interpreted as the following...