Regarding Prophets and Prophecies 2 Peter 1:16-21 January 14, 2018 Rev. Dave Benedict The Bible and the Future. What can we know for absolute certain about our future in Christ and what is speculation? What are we encouraged to speculate about, and what are we told not to speculate about? That s the series we began last week. And we began by exploring the absolutely certainty of our eternity with Jesus in heaven. Today you will be with me in Paradise, Jesus told the criminal on the cross next to Him as they faced their deaths. His words are for us, too, as we face ours. A certainty. It s as clear as a bell in our Bibles. The difference between certainty and speculation is not as clear elsewhere in our Bibles, so, if we are going to understand what they tell us about the future, we have to pay close attention. And we begin today by examining prophets and prophecy. Did you have a "Magic Eight Ball"? We had one when I was growing up. It was great. It was filled with water, or anti-freeze, or something, and there was a cube floating in the liquid, and there was a little window on it. If you asked the ball a question, shook it, and then looked in the little window, the cube would float up with a message showing in the window, a message just for you. You could ask it any question, any yes-or-no question, and it would answer you. It could predict your future! Will I be rich and famous? "Outlook not so good." Dang it! My brother asked it, Will Dave marry Myrna Blazek? (I really hoped the answer would be no.) "Yes!" Aaarrrgh! I've never lost my fascination with the future. Have you? Don't your ears pick up a bit when you hear someone claiming to know your future? If not, you are either remarkably disciplined, or you are dead. Because it seems to be a deeply human quality, a fascination with knowing the future. Have you ever gone through a supermarket checkout line without seeing headlines bombarding you with predictions about the future? Prophets abound in the tabloids, from Nostradamus to Jean Dixon. But it is the Bible that generates the most interest in prophecy. Among Christian and among non-christians. After all, the Bible predicts the end of the world is coming. Countless Christians have devoted their lives to the study of Bible prophecy, developing methods of interpretation and intricate systems
through which try to understand what God was trying to tell us about our future, particularly about the moment when Christ will return. And yet, Jesus tells us no one knows, not even Himself, which day the Father has established for the 2nd coming. He will come like a thief in the night. So, what are we to think? What is Bible prophecy all about? Can we know what it says, or is it just a matter of personal interpretation? What can we know about the future? What should we know about the future? What did God intend by putting all this prophetic language in the Bible? Whether we're interested in prophecy or not, we need to know the answers to these questions. And the answers we get will depend upon how we answer this question: What is the nature of Biblical prophecy? Before we can make any sense out of Biblical prophecy, we need to clearly understand its nature and how it works. However, given the typical assumptions about prophecy these days, we are in a terrible position for understanding what Biblical prophecy is all about. We have almost no chance of it, unless we change some assumptions. The first basic assumption we have to change about Biblical prophecy is this: a prophet is someone who predicts the future. Isn t that how we think about a prophet; someone who can predict the future, whether the prophet is Isaiah or the latest tabloid idea of a prophet? And so, we say the difference between a true prophet and a false prophet is whether their predictions come true. But, again, that way of thinking about prophets puts us on the wrong track. In the Bible, a prophet was someone who spoke for God. That s it. A Biblical prophet was someone who spoke for God. And the primary job of the prophet was to call people back to a faithful relationship with God, not to predict the future. Whenever a prediction was made, it was always in the context of calling God's people back to faithfulness. Only when we've settled on that (a prophet is one who speaks for God), can we apply the Biblical test for a true prophet found in Jeremiah 28, when the word of the prophet comes to pass, then that prophet will be known as one whom the Lord has sent. That rules out the tabloid prophets, even if they hit a lucky streak. Here s the second assumption we have to discard; it s about the nature and purpose of prophecy. Almost all of us, Christian and non-christian alike. assume that Biblical prophecy is about predicting future events. We have an
insatiable curiosity about the future, and so, we re all ears when it comes to prophecies in the Bible. But Biblical prophecy is not about future events; it is about God's plan for human history. Its emphasis is not the event, it is the Plan the direction history is flowing at God's command. Future events predicted by Biblical prophecy are secondary to the plan God is unfolding for His world. Reading Bible prophecy is not like reading tea leaves, not like looking into a crystal ball, a window into the future which let's us see coming events. Reading Bible prophecy is looking into the mind of God. And our problem, Christians and non-christians alike, is that we ve let ourselves become fixated on future events to the point that we've lost sight of the Plan. Here, in brief, is God's Plan. His Plan is to use human history to win back His creatures from their alliance with the devil and their bondage to sin. That's it. That is the purpose of human history and that is the subject of literally every prophecy in the Bible. God s plan for redeeming His Creation. Every event predicted by the Bible, whether that event has already happened or is yet to come every event predicted by the Bible is simply a piece of God's unfolding plan. God's plan has three major moments within it; 1) the calling of a people, the people of Israel, into a covenant relationship with Him I will be your God and you will be My people; 2) the arrival of the Messiah, Jesus, God in-the-flesh, on our planet to re-establish the Kingdom of God on earth and to atone for our sin, and 3) the end of human history, the great Judgment, the beginning of eternity with a new heaven and a new earth. Every prophecy in the Bible can be traced, directly or indirectly, to one of these major moments. God placed prophetic words in the Bible to keep us alert and ready to help Him accomplish His plan, not to tickle our individual fancies with inside information. If we focus on the events of prophecy, if we spend energy speculating if a certain episode might be the beginning of Armageddon, or if someone in the news is the Antichrist, or about the number of earthquakes or wars in a certain decade, or if current events indicate that Christ will come in our lifetime, then we have missed the nature and purpose of Biblical prophecy. It's about the Plan; the future has meaning because the future is part of God s Plan. Prophecy is in our Bibles to keep us alert if we should become lax in our readiness to participate in His plan; it is to encourage us if we should begin to despair that His plan is really unfolding; it is to strengthen us if we should
begin to doubt in His plan; it is to revive us if we should begin to grow weary in our efforts on behalf of His plan. Biblical prophecy is about His plan. So, let s not be people who turn to Isaiah, or Daniel, or even Revelation only looking for predictions about the future, ok? God has a bigger purpose for prophecy. So. Now it s time to look at some of the key examples of Biblical prophecy. But let's remember to start out with a clear understanding of how Biblical prophecy works. Biblical prophecy is that portion of Scripture in which prophets speak for God. Biblical prophecy is any message God puts into the mouths of His prophets. Biblical prophecy can be words of judgment or condemnation, like these from Amos 8:11; The days are coming, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I will send a famine through the land, not a famine of food or thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. Men will stagger and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it. Judgement in the hope it will cause His people to return to Him. Prophecy can be words of encouragement, like Isaiah 60:1-3; Arise, shine, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you. Other times Bible prophecy is a reminder to us, telling us something we should already know, like Micah 6:8; He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. It can even be an expression of God's longing for our love, like Hosea 2:14; Therefore, I am now going to allure Israel; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. In that day, declares the Lord, you will no longer call me "my master"; you will call me "my husband". In fact, what God most often tells us through Bible prophecy is "Come back to me". Listen to the prophet Joel, 2:12 and 13; Even now, declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning. Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity. When we go to Biblical prophecy looking only for predictions about future events, we miss the point, entirely. God is calling His people, each of us, back to covenant faithfulness. He has been faithful to His part of the covenant;
we have not. Biblical prophecy, in all its forms, is primarily a call for us to come back to the God who loves us and to live faithfully with Him. There is, indeed, a category of Biblical prophecy called predictive prophecy, in which God opens up the future to reveal how He is working out His glorious plan of redemption. Predictive prophecy does, in fact, claim to reveal the future. And, because it comes from God, the Bible's predictions are always 100% correct. But here is the essential thing for us to remember about predictive Bible prophecy. We are always much more able to see how God has fulfilled His predictions by looking backward in history than we are able to look forward, speculating about how God is going to act in the future. And that's the way the Bible wants it, it seems. Think about this piece of prophecy from Psalm 22; Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bone; people stare and gloat over me. The divide my garments among themselves and cast lots for my clothing. You and I can clearly see the last moments of Our Lord in this passage; the Roman soldiers gambling for His clothing in the courtyard of Pilot, the crowds chanting for His blood, the brutal Roman death squad, the physical pain of this horrendous style of execution. But for almost a thousand years, Hebrews had no idea what that piece of prophecy was alluding to. They knew it predicted something. Rabbis speculated about it endlessly. But no one was even close to guessing how it would be fulfilled. That is the nature of Bible predictions. They are rarely given to us so we can speculate about the future; they are given to us to demonstrate that God has done what He said He would do, that He is always active, always faithful. And the best perspective for that is hindsight. Christ s disciples were students of the Hebrew Scriptures, including the Prophets. Even so, did any of them have a clue about Jesus and His mission before His death and resurrection? No. But look at Peter in Acts 2, explaining the miracle of tongues at Pentecost; Fellow Jews, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These men are not drunk, as you suppose. It is only nine in the morning! No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams. That is what you've just seen.
Hindsight. It is the best way to understand the predictions of the Bible. God will do what He has promised. OK. With that, let's look go back to the three key moments of God s Plan I just referred to. 1st. He called a people into a covenant relationship with Him, in order to give human beings a role in our own redemption. 2nd. He sent Jesus to live among us, to bring the rule of God back to earth, to atone for our sins, and to rise from death to defeat sin and death. 3rd. Jesus will return in glory to judge the world and to begin the eternal reign of God in a new heaven and a new earth in which sin and death will be no more. Those are the key moments of God's plan, and every word of Biblical prophecy can be traced to one of those moments. Not one piece of prophecy exists by itself, unrelated to God's plan. That is a hugely important concept to hang onto if we want to understand the way prophecy works in our Bibles. If you made a pie graph of all Biblical prophecy, and if you divided the pie into three pieces, one for each major episode of God's redemptive plan, the largest slice of the pie, far and away, would be the prophecies which relate to the calling of Israel into a covenant relationship with God. It defies human logic, but God built his whole plan of redemption around the participation of the very sinful people He is trying to save. It is, therefore, no wonder that so much of the word of God through the prophets is connected to this idea of a covenant people. Over and over again, God reminds them of the covenant He established through Moses in Exodus 6:7; I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. We see that language all the way through the prophets, like in Jeremiah 11:4 and Ezekiel 34:31. Much of what we hear from the prophets concerns the way Israel has broken the covenant. Here is Hosea 6:4-7; What can I do with you, Judah? Your love is like the morning mist, like the dew that disappears. Therefore, I cut you with the words of my prophets, I killed you with the words of my mouth; my judgments flashed like lightening upon you. For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings. Like, Adam, you have broken the covenant, you were unfaithful to me. Flip through the major and minor prophets and see how much of their writings have to do with calling Israel back to covenant faithfulness with their God. The second largest piece of the prophecy pie relates to God's plan for bringing a messiah, a savior to the world.
As Israel sorted through the words of the prophets, they came to the conclusion that God was going to send them a deliverer. We heard that kind of prophecy all through our advent season, like Isaiah 7:14; The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel, God with us. There are over 300 prophecies about the coming messiah in the Old Testament: where He would be born, Bethlehem Ephrathah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel; His names, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace; His role, he will save his people from their sins; His majesty, I will appoint Him my firstborn, the most exalted of the kings of the earth; His suffering, He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our inequities, and so on and so on. Yet, Israel missed Him when He came because their self interest shaped their interpretation of these prophecies. Now, in hindsight, we can see clearly that God did what He said He would do; He sent us a savior. The smallest piece of our prophecy pie, by far, pertains to the final moments in God's plan of redemption; the end of history as we know it. But there is no end to the speculation it produces among us. Who are Gog and Magog? Who will be called up to meet Christ in the sky when He comes, just those Christians living or will all Christians come up out of their graves? What is the "mark of the beast"? Who is the Antichrist? And the main question on people's minds: will it happen within my lifetime? You can probably deduce by now that I don't think we were meant to become consumed with speculation about the end of history. We were meant to know that it is coming, and that we can trust that God will do what He has promised because we can see how He has fulfilled his prophecy in the past. But let's save that discussion for next Sunday, when we will look at the future through fiery prophets like Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation.