Episode 56 – Biblical Prophets and Prophecy Part 1

Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

Script: (Bible quotes from the American Standard Version)

I will raise them up a prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. … And if thou say in thy heart, How shall we know the word which Jehovah hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of Jehovah, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which Jehovah hath not spoken: the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously, thou shalt not be afraid of him!

Deuteronomy, Chapter 18, verses 18 and verses 21 and 22, American Standard Version

And we have the word of prophecy made more sure; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in your hearts: knowing this first, that no prophecy of scripture is of private interpretation. For no prophecy ever came by the will of man: but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit.”

Second Peter, Chapter 1, verses 19 through 21, American Standard Version

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VK: Hi! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. I’m here today with RD Fierro, author, founder of Crystal Sea Books, and part-time environmental engineer. He does most of the vacuuming in the offices. But today he’s put away the vacuum cleaner and we’re going to start a new series on Anchored by Truth to focus on one of the strongest lines of evidence for the Bible’s inspiration: fulfilled prophecy. RD would you like to give us a little introduction for this series and maybe tell us what we’re going to talk about today?

RD: I’d love to. As some of our listeners may remember Anchored by Truth focuses almost entirely on demonstrating that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God. Our foundational premise is that any book that claims to be the revelation of an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful supernatural deity would have to possess, at a minimum, two defining attributes. First, that revelation would have to be consistent with what we can see from that Being’s created order and recorded history. Second, that revelation would have to contain evidence of supernatural origin.

VK: And in previous episodes of Anchored by Truth we have offered four lines of evidence that we believe demonstrate that the Bible possesses those attributes. One – the Bible is historically reliable. Two – the Bible has a remarkable unity for a book that was authored, from a human standpoint, by dozens of people over a period of hundreds of years. Three – reading the Bible has changed thousands upon thousands of peoples’ lives for the better. And 4 – the Bible contains a substantial body of fulfilled prophecy and many of the prophecies were made hundreds of years before their fulfillment. Well, before we get too far into our serious stuff let’s take a humorous look at some facts about the Bible using one of Crystal Seas Books’ Life Lessons with a Laugh. This one is about how hard it can be to name something properly.

---- Life Lessons – AI 1 – naming B-RITE

VK: Ok. So we now know that more than 3 dozen people were involved in actually recording the documents that were assembled into the book we call the Bible. But those 3 dozen people were all guided by a single mind: the mind of God. And one of the ways we know that is because sprinkled throughout the Bible are prophecies of all sorts – some of which have been fulfilled and some that are still awaiting fulfillment. So, let’s start with a basic question. Why did God put so much prophecy in the Bible?

RD: Well, obviously no one can understand the mind of God exhaustively but I think that we can make some fairly straightforward observations about Biblical prophecy. I think it’s likely that God put prophecy in the Bible to provide us evidence that the Bible’s source was supernatural. Most of the time, as humans, we can’t tell what the weather’s going to be in a few days, who’s going to win an election, or what teams will be in the playoffs. But many of the Biblical prophets gave very precise prophecies that were fulfilled dozens or even hundreds of years later in exactly the prophesized manner. So for any human to be able to do that, clearly they had to have been given information from a supernatural source.

So, I think that it’s pretty obvious that one big reason – maybe the big reason – God included prophecy in the Bible was to ensure honest inquirers would be able to know the Bible was His special revelation. But there are other reasons as well.

VK: Such as?

RD: Well, certain Biblical prophets uttered their prophecies for very practical reasons such as providing needed advice to their communities or even the whole kingdom. For instance, Chapter 6 of 2 Kings relates a story where the prophet Elisha – that’s Elisha, not Elijah, Elisha was Elijah’s successor – kept warning the king of Israel about the strategy the king of Syria was going to use when they were warring against one another. The king of Syria got so frustrated he thought he had a spy in his camp, until one of his advisors told him that it wasn’t a spy. It was the prophet Elisha who was warning the king of Israel. The Syrian king then sent an army to capture Elisha but that didn’t work out too well for the Syrians.

VK: As I recall, God struck the Syrians with blindness and then Elisha was able to lead them into a place where they were surrounded by the Israelite army. Fortunately, for the Syrians Elisha told the king of Israel he wasn’t allowed to kill the Syrians. In fact, Elisha told the king of Israel to feed the Syrians and then send them home. But the whole affair did end the war, at least for the time being. Ok. Besides, Biblical prophets providing prophecies that had an immediate practical benefit what other purposes did prophecy serve?

RD: This purpose is a little more subtle but it’s an important one. By commissioning certain people to serve as prophets, God used the prophets as a means of setting his people apart. In other words Biblical prophets helped preserve the Hebrew nation as God’s distinctive and special people. This was important because had promised that the Messiah would come from the Hebrew nation. So if that nation had gotten lost in history, which just about every other nation from that period in history did, it would have been much harder, or impossible, to demonstrate that Jesus when he entered the world came from the Jewish nation with a Jewish history.

VK: Ooooh. That does sound pretty important. And obviously God took his prophets pretty seriously, because in our opening scripture from Deuteronomy we heard how He gave His people a way to distinguish between false and genuine prophets. A Biblical prophet had to be 100% accurate. In ancient Israel if someone claimed to be a prophet but they proved to be what the Bible termed a “false prophet” they were subject to the death penalty. So, obviously God took the issue of prophecy very seriously. Was there a reason false prophecy was such a serious issue?

RD: Well, when you look at the prophet’s role more closely the prohibitions on false prophecy start to make more sense. Today we primarily think of the term “prophecy” as meaning telling the future or forecasting. And certainly that was part of the role for Biblical prophets. But their primary role was being God’s representative before the people. We can contrast this role with that of the priest’s role which was to represent the people before God. So the roles of prophet and priest were complementary. The priest made intercession for the people using the sacrificial system established by God in the Torah – the law – the first five books of the Old Testament. But a prophet brought God’s word to the people so in the Bible there are frequently phrases like “the word of the Lord came to” so-and-so, or “thus says God.” So, when a false prophet claimed to be something he wasn’t he wasn’t just passing out bad information, he was misrepresenting himself as being a messenger of God. That’s something that a perfectly holy God couldn’t allow or ignore - in part because of at least one other reason for Biblical prophecy.

VK: What’s that?

RD: God used prophecy as a way of shepherding His chosen people and really the entire world to His desired ends, or, in other words, to bring about His will in history. In a certain sense, Biblical prophecy wasn’t just about telling His people, and ultimately all of us, about events that would happen in the future. God also used the prophetic utterances of His prophets in the achievement of His desired ends. In other words prophecy has been part of the means God has used to bring His will to fruition.

VK: Uh-oh. This again sounds like we’re starting to wade out of the shallow waters and into the really deep end of the pool. You’re saying that Biblical prophets weren’t just about telling people about the end. You’re saying they were part of bringing those ends about?

RD: As I sometimes say to Jerry in the Life Lessons, “exactamundo.”

VK: I think we’re going to need an example of what you’re thinking about.

RD: Well, here’s an obvious one. Scholars vary on the count but it’s safe to say there are more than 200 prophecies about Jesus found in the Old Testament. Some lists contain 400 or more. So, when it came time for Jesus to be born into history as an infant in Bethlehem, the people of that era had a huge number of tests they could apply to Jesus to see if he really could be the promised Messiah. Remember, that today we have the conclusive evidence of Jesus being the Messiah because we’re on this side of the resurrection, but the people who first heard Jesus’ message in person didn’t have the final element of proof that we do. But they did have lots of other tests to apply. The prophetic evidence that proved that Jesus was the Messiah was so important that when John the Baptist’s messengers asked Jesus if he was the Messiah or whether they should look for someone else Jesus cited Messianic quotations from Isaiah to prove his authenticity. Said slightly differently, Jesus used Old Testament prophecies to prove that he was the Messiah, so – at least in part - Jesus used prophecies to demonstrate to His first audience that their long awaited Messiah had arrived.

VK: Wow. That is an amazing thought. God not only gave prophecies to certain of his people, but later he actually used those prophecies to help achieve the specific purpose of identifying Jesus as the Messiah. Do you have any other examples of God inspiring prophecy that he then used later as a part of bringing his plans to fruition.

RD: Yes. Shortly, on Anchored by Truth we’re going to delve into one of the more important books of prophecy in the Bible, the book of Daniel. As a young boy Daniel was taken captive by the Babylonians along with a number of other Israelites from Jerusalem. Through God’s providence, Daniel ultimately became a very senior court official in both the Babylonian court and in the Persian court after a confederation of the Medes and Persians defeated the Babylonians. Shortly after Daniel was taken to Babylon, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem entirely and essentially the whole nation of Judah went into captivity at Babylon because of the blatant idolatry that had become rampant in Judah. All this had been prophesied by the prophet Jerimiah.

VK: This doesn’t sound very encouraging.

RD: No it doesn’t, but along with all the warnings that Jerimiah had given to the people of Judah he also had told them that the exile wouldn’t be permanent. He told them that after a period of 70 years of captivity Judah would be restored to its own land. Daniel and the other Jews in captivity knew about Jerimiah’s prophecy so the Bible says that after the 70 years had passed Daniel began praying to the Lord to know when the return would begin. Well, shortly after this the Persian emperor Cyrus issued the edict that permitted the Jews to begin to return to their own land. But of course after 70 years of being away from Judah many of the Jews would have built new lives in and around Babylon and its provinces.

VK: So, you’re thinking that many of the Jews would have become comfortable in their new lives and would have been reluctant to go back to what was in essence a ruined wasteland. It would have been very difficult to travel that distance in those days, especially to undertake such a difficult task as rebuilding a city and nation from nothing?

RD: Precisely. But because of Jeremiah’s prophecy many of Jews had kept alive the hope of a return so they were much better prepared to make the journey and do the hard work once they knew the time of Jeremiah’s prophecy had been fulfilled.

VK: I think I see where you’re going with all this. It’s one thing for a supernatural Being – God – to reveal the future to one of his servants. That shows that that God possesses supernatural knowledge. But it’s another thing entirely for that God to then use the supernatural knowledge he had communicated as part of the way in which He unfolds His plans in time and history. Knowing something is one thing but God doesn’t just have supernatural knowledge. He has supernatural power. He shapes all events for his purposes and even though there may be decades or centuries between the revelation and the consummation, that time means nothing to an eternal Creator.

RD: Well said. And the fact that God uses shorter-term prophecies along the way of his grand plan unfolding tells us that God is always present with his people. In other words, God is not only the Creator he is also the Sustainer. He has passed knowledge of the future at certain points in human history to show that he knows the future and can reveal it as he chooses. Sometimes that knowledge provides an immediate benefit as in the case of Elisha and the king of Syria. That demonstrates that God is immanent – always present with his future. But God isn’t just immanent. He’s also transcendent.

VK: And we see God’s transcendent hand at work when we see how he uses His own prophetic disclosures at one point in history to shape events at a future point in history. Ultimately, all of this underscores that God is sovereign over the affairs of men and nations – and all history for that matter. The Bible’s inclusion of prophecy not only demonstrates the Bible’s supernatural origin but also clearly reveals the danger to us of not fully familiarizing ourselves with God’s plan for His people and His creation. If God took the time to make a special revelation of His character and will He rightfully can expect man, as one of His creatures, to study that revelation. Sounds like a wonderful time for a prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer for the renewal for the church – the body of believers that God has called to receive His special revelation found in the Bible.

---- PRAYER FOR RENEWAL OF THE CHURCH (radio version)

VK: We’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.”

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not famous but our Boss is!”

(Bible Quotes from the American Standard Version)

Deuteronomy, Chapter 18, verses 18 and verses 21 and 22, American Standard Version

Second Peter, Chapter 1, verses 19 through 21, American Standard Version

https://www.adefenceofthebible.com/2018/10/14/alexander-the-great-conquered-the-known-world-but-he-spared-jerusalem-why/