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

The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• On the face of it, it would appear as if Jesus answered yes and no. John the Baptist was the fulfillment of the promise that Elijah would come before the great Day of the Lord comes, but he came only in the “spirit” and “power” of Elijah.

• If you are able to receive it, Jesus admonished, there would still be a future coming of an Elijah.

• Who that would be and in what way it would happen were left unresolved by any further revelation. But it is clear that prophecy had both a “now” and a “not-yet” aspect.

The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• It is little wonder, then, that so many have trouble deciding how definite the prophetic word is when it has such a complex number of fulfillments, even if all of these multiple fulfillments have a single, organically related, and unified meaning.

• The best way to describe this wholeness is to illustrate it by the messianic line. Each son born in the Abrahamic and Davidic line was a real fulfillment, a down payment on the climactic fulfillment coming at the end of the series, each functioning as God’s placeholder and as a tangible evidence in history that God’s word about the Messiah’s first and second comings was trustworthy.

The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• All the while, each son continued to be a pointer to the One who would embody all that any in the series ever was and more.

• It is here that the concept of corporate solidarity comes into the discussion, for each in the Davidic line was at once part of the One (who was to come) and the many (in the line of the “Seed”).

The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• Organic Unity. Frequently, the pattern of biblical revelation is to begin by presenting one of the great topics of prophecy in a broad and bold outline, leaving it to subsequent revelations to expand and develop the theme.

• This interdependence of prophetic discussions within the biblical text becomes most important for the interpreter; we cannot assume that each prediction is a sealed unit to itself.

The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The prophecies about Christ begin in germ form in Genesis 3:15.

• But they go on from that point to reappear with Noah (9:26-27), Abraham (12:3; 15:2-8; 18:18), and the rest of the patriarchs and the line of David. Likewise, Balaam’s oracle (Num. 24:17-24) contains the prophetic germ of many of the later prophecies against some of the same nations who had taken up their positions against the people of God (e.g., Amos 1-2; Isa. 13-23;Jer. 46-51; and Ezek. 25-32).

The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• Sometimes the same prophet repeated a similar prophecy on the same topic.

• Thus the prophet Daniel repeated the same subject of the destiny of the four world empires, as opposed to the coming of the kingdom of God with the leadership of the Son of man, in Daniel 7 as he had described earlier in chapter 2.

The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• Daniel 2 treats the external aspect of these world powers, while chapter 7 looks at them from their interior aspects.

• Similarly, the two-horned ram and the shaggy he-goat of Daniel 8 are but a repetition of the second and third world empires of Daniel 2 and 7 (as Daniel is told in 8:20-21).

Prophet’s Self-Understanding

• Prophet’s Self-Understanding

• One of the most often-repeated answers to the question about the prophets’ awareness of what they wrote is that “the prophets wrote better than they knew.”

• Contrary to this repeated aphorism, the prophets understood what it was that they preached and wrote.

• This is not to say that they were fully cognizant of all that they wrote or that they knew what all the ramifications of their writings were.

Prophet’s Self-Understanding

• Prophet’s Self-Understanding

• The time and the exact manner in which God would fulfill his promises in the future was often as much unknown to them as it is to us.

• They did not preach words, however, that had no meaning for them until we modern, New Testament exegetes understood it for the first time.

• God did not inspire the writers of Scripture at the cost of bypassing their rational faculties.

Prophet’s Self-Understanding

• Prophet’s Self-Understanding

• The evidences for the prophets’ self-awareness of their messages are fourfold.

• The Prophets Were Aware of the Results of Their Prophecies

• So cognizant of what was being asked of him was Jonah that he fled in the opposite direction.

• He did not want his preaching to be the occasion of the repentance of a nation that had had such a bloody and cruel relationship to his own (Jonah 4:3).