The work of the prophets was brutal. God call them to take an unpopular, seemingly illogical message to the Hebrew people, telling them that their time was up, and judgement was coming.

To the Hebrew people, this didn't make sense. After all, they were God's chosen people, and God wouldn't have any people to worship Him if anything happened to them. Why would God do anything to them? And look at the prosperity they were experiencing -- surely God wanted them to be prosperous so that other nations would be jealous that their gods were not as great as the Hebrew god.

God waited, generation after generation, for the Hebrew people to change their ways. God even allowed the Northern Kingdom to fall, with the warning that their wickedness caused their destruction, and the same would happen to the Southern Kingdom if they didn't change. The remaining Hebrew people, instead of heeding the warning, gloated that the Southern Kingdom must have been more righteous than the Northern Kingdom, and continued in their arrogant ways.

There was more to the message of the prophets than destruction. There, in the aftermath of the well-deserved and long-delayed judgement, was hope to come. Hope in a restored relationship, in the person of the Messiah.