How hard can it be to read and understand personal correspondence?

That principle is at the heart of all conditional prophecies.

Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Unconditional Prophecies Must Be Distinguished From Conditional And Sequential Ones

• Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28-32 list some of the typical kinds of blessing or judgments that will be faced, depending on what the nation’s or individual’s response is. I Kings 21:20-24 and 27-29 make it clear that what is said of nations, with their alternative prospects, is also true of individuals.

• When King Ahab repented, God reversed his dire words of doom and declared that the threatened judgment would not come in his day, since he had humbled himself before God’s word.

Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Unconditional Prophecies Must Be Distinguished From Conditional And Sequential Ones

• Sequential Prophecy. This third type of prophecy is very much like the “already” and “not-yet” type of inaugurated prophecies that we have discussed above.

• The predictions contained within them place several events together in one prediction, even though they will be fulfilled in a sequence and a series of acts perhaps stretching over several centuries.

Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Unconditional Prophecies Must Be Distinguished From Conditional And Sequential Ones

• A number of predictions in this category have been used by those who were less than sympathetic with the Bible’s own point of view to prove that many of the Bible’s predictions never were fulfilled, or at least in the way that the text claimed they would be. Usually this list includes the following:

• 1. The prophecy of the destruction of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar (Ezek. 26:7-14; 29:17-20)
• 2. Elijah’s prophecy against King Ahab for his murder of Naboth (1 Kings 21:17-29)
• 3. Isaiah’s prophecy of the destruction of Damascus (Isa. 17:1)

Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Unconditional Prophecies Must Be Distinguished From Conditional And Sequential Ones

• The prophecy of Ezekiel 26:7—14 may be taken as a typical case.

• It must be noticed that Ezekiel 26:3 specifically says that the Lord would “bring many nations” against Tyre.

• And indeed Nebuchadnezzar, as the king of Babylon, is specified in v. 7 as one of those many nations.

Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Unconditional Prophecies Must Be Distinguished From Conditional And Sequential Ones

• What most interpreters fail to notice is that verse 12 has a sudden shift in the number of the pronoun from the singular form in verses 8-11 (“he”) to the plural in v. 12 (“they”). When this is put together with the “many nations” of verse 3, it is clear that we are dealing with a sequential prophecy.

• History confirms this interpretation. Nebuchadnezzar, after besieging I Tyre for thirteen years (about 586—573 B.C.), was only able to drive the city of Tyre off the Canaanite coastline to an offshore island one-half mile out to sea.

Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Unconditional Prophecies Must Be Distinguished From Conditional And Sequential Ones

• Even Ezekiel 29:18, the very context that had made the prediction about his role in coming against Tyre, recognized Nebuchadnezzar’s frustration at not being able to conquer Tyre.

• Several hundred years later the Macedonian Alexander the Great came along, and he too was almost frustrated in his attempt to meet this Phoenician Tyrian force in their own element of the sea.

Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Unconditional Prophecies Must Be Distinguished From Conditional And Sequential Ones

• However, in accordance with Ezekiel’s prophecy in approximately 323 B.C. he scraped up their “stones, timber, and rubble” (26:12) from the old, abandoned on-shore site and literally cast them “into the sea” in order to build a causeway out to the island-city of Tyre, which he easily took.

• Only this type of handling of the text fits the explanation for “many nations” and illustrates what a sequential prophecy entails.

Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

• Unconditional Prophecies Must Be Distinguished From Conditional And Sequential Ones

• But notice that the text contained the clues for its own proper understanding. Our interpretation was not imposed on the text on the basis of our knowing what the fulfillment would be.

• Terms Borrowed From Israel’s Past History May Be Used To Express The Future

• Few features in prophecy are more common than the expression of the future in terms that have been borrowed from Israel’s historic past.

Principles for Interpreting Prophecy

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