Beef Up Your Bible Reading 11

Prophecy is not predicting the future. It’s a prophet’s job to proclaim a message from God. Sometimes that message includes predictions, but not always. Having said that, it is the predictions that cause the most difficulty, so here are some tips to help you with them.

Prophecy relies heavily on picture language so don’t take everything the prophets say literally. You shouldn't find it difficult to tell what you're meant to take literally and what you're not. The context should make it clear, but even if it doesn't, a passage you're not meant to take literally just won’t make sense easily if you try to.

Descriptions of cosmic events (the sun growing dark, the moon turning blood-red, stars falling from the sky) aren’t meant to be taken literally. They’re picture language used to get across the idea that God is going to intervene in history in some catastrophic way. Don’t assume that prophecies that use them always point to the end of time.

Judgement prophecies are conditional. God says so:

“If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it.”

Jeremiah 18:7 – 10

Jonah knew that (Jonah 4:2) and if you remember it you’ll avoid getting headaches over the thought of God changing His mind.

Some prophecies appear to have been fulfilled more than once and some appear to have been fulfilled but not completely. For example, in Daniel 11 there are predictions that were fulfilled in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes (~175 BC) but if you read on into chapter 12 you’ll find, as part of the same message, predictions that don't sit comfortably with the story of Antiochus. The predictions have been fulfilled but not completely, there’s another more complete fulfilment to come, the first merely foreshadows it. Keep such possibilities in mind and you’ll find many prophecies, including Jesus’ words in Matthew 24, much less confusing.

As in all your Bible reading, when you’re reading prophecy look for the meaning that the writer intended when he wrote it. There’s no hidden meaning; there’s no deeper meaning. I mean, really? Do you think your knowledge is so much greater than that of an inspired prophet that you can find something in his words that he didn’t think of? And anyway, who’s going to know if whatever hidden or deeper meaning you might come up with is right until after the thing predicted happens, so what’s the point of looking for it? Look only for the writer’s intended meaning and its implications (implications of which he would have been aware) and do that in the same way you do it with every other passage in the Bible.