As near as anyone can tell, we owe most of the Old Testament text to the efforts of Samuel's College of the Prophets. Not only did they try to keep fresh copies of what they received, but probably wrote and edited most of what we have. Aside from the Pentateuch, Chronicles, and David's and Solomon's books, there's not much they didn't put together.
The actual writing of the prophets deserve their own studies, each in their own context. However, there are common elements. Most obvious is the common Hebrew culture, which we have tried to see is so different from ours. More than that is the issue of the word "prophecy" itself. How often have you heard someone say instructively prophecy is more about "forth-telling" than about foretelling? Yet so often the same teacher goes on to talk almost entirely about the foretelling. Such lip service will hardly promote a genuine understanding of the prophets in the Bible.
For far, far too long, leaders in various churches in the West have been pouring concrete around certain ideas. It makes us comfortable when things aren't too flexible, too malleable. We want stuff to stay where we put it, and know when we come back, it's still there, still the same. But it's a false security. When we invest too much in this world, we find our hearts and our loyalty tied to these things, and struggle to attach our affections to the indefinable and mysterious Spirit Realm.
We like to have clear signposts to mark our progress along a path with a fixed and known goal. We have a cultural revulsion for simply enjoying the journey, and find fault with those who don't know where they are going. In the Kingdom, we are not permitted to know the end point of this journey. We say we are walking to the Light, but that's just an expression, a way of saying we are not going to stay where we are, but draw closer to the Lord of Light. Our fleshly mind is ill equipped for such undefined existence. Everything in us rages against the necessity of resting in Him with no concern for tomorrow, as it were. It's not even proper to think of what we are doing, but in terms of our loyalty to Him by the moment. Our human nature rebels against that.
So it's no surprise so very many teachers and preachers insist the prophets were dropping hidden clues about certain milestones of the future, a future yet ahead of us. It is next to impossible to break away minds from such a false understanding. The most important thing to understand about Bible prophecy is they did not reveal secrets, but went back over the very plain teaching which had always been there, but so often ignored. When Elijah spoke to King Ahab, it was not to reveal deep secrets of God's plans for the future. It was to remind Ahab of what he should have known about God's nature. That Elijah did occasionally foretell something coming down on Ahab's head was just a minor element in the much bigger message. Elijah revealed what man could know about God, based on previous revelation, which Ahab rejected. Most prophetic material in the Bible is aimed at calling people back to the God they should already know.
For those of us lacking the vast heritage of Hebrew oral lore, there is much in the prophets which tells us new things. Still, the point remains, the fundamental nature of all prophecy is: This is what God is like. Telling what God has done demonstrates what matters to Him. Telling what God will do is more about what matters to Him. Most of the time, warning of future events is nothing more than explaining how God operates when we sin. The ability to deliver specific warnings about this or that future event is utterly meaningless if we do not see it in the context of knowing God, the Person. Only a fool could assert God would not send prophetic messages these days about future events, however unlikely that may be, but it takes a greater fool to ignore what's most important in any prophecy.
Further, the only purpose for bothering to reveal anything about God is so we can obey Him. Indeed, there is a sense in which Scripture has only one real purpose for existing -- so we know what God requires of us. Not in the sense of rules and regulations, as you surely understand by now, but in terms of how our loyalty works out in daily living. God is not harmed by our wasting lots of time doing things which don't matter, but our blessings will surely glow like the sun if we begin to filter out those things. We don't need to know about tomorrow, and we surely waste time in trying to nail down some obscure prediction based on wild and silly readings and semantic juggling. The only reason prophecy is so hard to follow sometimes is because the Western churches long ago rejected reading prophecy from the Hebrew viewpoint. To assume the Pharisees, and modern Judaism, reflect Hebraic thinking is to ignore everything Jesus taught. We have to travel far, far back into ancient history, to a distant land and a people long gone, as it were. We have to go back to where God first revealed Himself to make sense of how He last revealed Himself in His Son, whom we propose to follow.
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By Ed Hurst
05 May 2009
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