Episode 57 – Biblical Prophets and Prophecy Part 2

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 New Living Translation)

This message was given to Amos, a shepherd from the town of Tekoa in Judah. He received this message in visions two years before the earthquake, when Uzziah was king of Judah and Jeroboam II, the son of Jehoash, was king of Israel… Then Amaziah sent orders to Amos: “Get out of here, you prophet! Go on back to the land of Judah, and earn your living by prophesying there! … But Amos replied, “I’m not a professional prophet, and I was never trained to be one. I’m just a shepherd, and I take care of sycamore-fig trees. But the LORD called me away from my flock and told me, ‘Go and prophesy to my people in Israel.’”

Amos, Chapter 1, verse 1 and Chapter 7, verses 12 through 15, New Living Translation

Now lie on your left side and place the sins of Israel on yourself. You are to bear their sins for the number of days you lie there on your side. I am requiring you to bear Israel’s sins for 390 days—one day for each year of their sin. After that, turn over and lie on your right side for 40 days—one day for each year of Judah’s sin. “Meanwhile, keep staring at the siege of Jerusalem. Lie there with your arm bared and prophesy her destruction. I will tie you up with ropes so you won’t be able to turn from side to side until the days of your siege have been completed.”

Ezekiel, Chapter 4, verses 4 through 8, New Living Translation

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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 clinical dietician. He picks out the condiments and toppings for the sub sandwiches when we have lunch at the office. And as you’ll hear from today’s life lesson sometimes your dietary choices are more important to your conscience than your waistline. All that is going to be part of our continuing examination of Biblical prophecy that we’re centering around the study of the book of Daniel. RD would you like to tell us a little about what we’re going to talk about today?

RD: Absolutely. As we talked about before on Anchored by Truth fulfilled prophecy is one of the most important lines of evidence that demonstrates that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. As human beings we can’t be sure what the weather will be like tomorrow or who will be in the next sports championship game. But the Bible contains records of prophecies that were uttered hundreds of years before being fulfilled exactly as prophesied. For that to happen – repeatedly as it does in the Bible – then there must be a supernatural source of inspiration behind all the people who uttered the prophecies. In this series we want to focus on one of the most important of the Old Testament prophets, Daniel. But for today we want to expand on a very brief look at Biblical prophets generally. So, just like last time we did a broad overview of the purposes for Biblical prophecy – today we want to look at the kinds of people who were given those prophecies.

VK: But, just as a refresher, let’s remind the listeners that there are at least four big reasons that God gave prophetic insights to certain people during Biblical times. You’ve already mentioned that fulfilled prophecy was one way that God used to demonstrate that the Bible was His special revelation. But, in addition to that, God also used prophecy as a way of preserving a distinctive people and nation for himself: the nation out of which He would bring the Messiah. Prophecies were also given for some very practical reasons like helping the Israelites defeat enemies or avoiding danger. And finally, God actually used some of the prophecies he gave at one time as part of his bringing His plans to fruition at a later time. For instance, some of the prophecies He gave concerning the Messiah helped the people in Jesus' day know that Jesus was that Messiah because he possessed the requisite attributes. Well, before we get too much further let’s listen to another one of Crystal Seas’ Life Lessons with a Laugh. This lesson is all about the Daniel’s diet.

---- Life Lessons – Daniel 1 – A Diet for a Clean Conscience

VK: Ok. So, that’s why you never get green peppers on the subs? You think they may have been offered to an idol.

RD: My brain knows they weren’t but my digestive system doesn’t want to take the chance.

VK: All right, that’s far enough on that subject. So where would you like to begin talking about Biblical prophets?

RD: Well, with a couple of seemingly simple observations. First, I’d like to remind the Anchored by Truth listeners of something we mentioned last time. In our day and age we tend to think of the word prophet and think primarily of someone who knows the future. In other words, prophet to us is about foretelling or forecasting. But the primary role of a Biblical prophet was to be God’s representative to the people whereas the priest was to be the people’s representative before God. So, while prophets often exhibited supernatural knowledge such as future events or where lost items might be found, their primary purpose was deliver God’s messages to His people. God gave the prophets supernatural knowledge to authenticate them as His messengers. As such, it’s important to recognize that being a prophet was a calling from God – not an individual ability.

VK: I see where you’re going. What you’re doing is drawing a distinction between Biblical prophets and other individuals who may have claimed to possess a special ability to see the future, like Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, or Jeane Dixon? And during Biblical times it would have been dangerous to claim to be a prophet because if your prophecies weren’t 100% accurate the penalty for being a false prophet was death. God took the business of falsely claiming to represent Him very seriously.

RD: Exactly. There is no record of a Biblical prophet claiming to possess an individual ability to see the future. In other words being a prophet was an office not a skill. And many Biblical prophets were apparently only called to their office for limited periods of time and for very specific purposes. For instance, in our opening scriptures the prophet Amos specifically rejected an allegation that he was a professional prophet. He said that he was just a shepherd and a tender of sycamore figs – very humble occupations in his society. Amos would have been from the lowest rung of his cultural ladder, but nevertheless God called him to go prophesy to a neighboring nation. Amos was from the southern kingdom, Judah, but God sent him to prophesy in the northern kingdom, Israel. And that brings us to another point. In the Bible, there is a group of books that are generally known as the prophetic books and this group is often divided into the major and minor prophets.

VK: But this division has nothing to do with the importance of the prophet, right? The only reason one group is called the major prophets and the other the minor prophets is because the major prophets wrote longer books. In other words “major” and “minor” has to do with the volume of material we have in the Bible, not the importance of the person or his message.

RD: Absolutely correct. The minor prophets were just as important to the unfolding of the Lord’s plans as the major prophets and we got some of our most critical information about Jesus from the so-called minor prophets. For instance, Micah was a minor prophet but Micah told us that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. So in his gospel when Matthew wanted to demonstrate to his readers that Jesus was the promised Messiah one the facts he cited was that Jesus was born in Bethlehem as Micah had prophesied. And in a tragic way Micah’s prophecy helps illustrate the integration and unity of scripture.

VK: In what way?

RD: Well, Micah’s prophecy of the Messiah’s birthplace was well known in ancient Israel, so well-known that it led to a tragic fulfillment another well-known prophecy. Just about every nativity scene set up at Christmas includes the three Wise Men who had come from the east – likely from Persia or Arabia or possibly both. Since the Wise Men weren’t that familiar with the details of where the Messiah was supposed to be born they stopped in Jerusalem to get information and naturally since they were important and distinguished visitors they came in contact with the king, Herod. Apparently, the Wise Men thought that the Jews would be as excited about worshipping the Messiah as they were. Unfortunately, Herod was a wicked and murderous king who resented any threat to his power, but naturally Herod couldn’t simply say that to these visitors. So, Herod lied to the Wise Men and told them that once they found the new king to let him know so he could go and worship also. Well, thanks to Micah’s prophecy the Wise Men were able to find Jesus in Bethlehem but God warned them in a dream not to go back to Herod so they went home by a different route. When Herod found out that they weren’t coming back he ordered that all the male children under 2 years old in and around Bethlehem be killed which Matthew noted fulfilled another prophecy by a different prophet, Jeremiah.

VK: So, Micah’s prophecy was part of the chain of events that resulted in the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy but both of these prophecies had been uttered hundreds of years earlier. This means that there’s no way any human – absent supernatural inspiration – could have known how the two prophecies would intersect in the future.

RD: Precisely. Micah prophesied sometime between 750 B.C. and 686 B.C. Jeremiah’s call to be a prophet came in 626. So, there was at least 60 years between Micah and Jeremiah and both gave their prophecies more than 600 years before their fulfillment. But since, as scripture puts it in Isaiah 46:10, “God makes known the end from the beginning,” God knew exactly how the prophecies would be fulfilled when He told the two separate prophets what to write. This helps illustrate that there is a single mind behind all of scripture. And these two prophets are good illustrations of another important point.

VK: Which is...

RD: Micah was from the town of Moresheth. Jeremiah was from the town of Anathoth which was a town reserved for priestly families. So Jeremiah came from the priestly line in ancient Israel while Micah probably didn’t. Yet both of them had huge impacts on the kings of their times but oddly enough their impacts were in opposite directions. Micah helped inspire a good king, Hezekiah, to undertake reforms that preserved Judah and Jerusalem during his time. But Jeremiah preached to a king and nation who had no interest in listening to his warnings so near the end of Jeremiah’s life Judah fell to the invading Babylonians. Jeremiah is sometimes called the “weeping prophet” because his life and times were filled with so much misery that at one point he wanted to stop being a prophet. This is a clear illustration that God chose the people He wanted to use and that it wasn’t up to the prophet to decide how he would be used.

VK: You know that’s a powerful thought, especially in our day and age. God remains sovereign over the affairs of people and nations no matter what seems to be happening around us. Sometimes we get frustrated because there seems to be so much evil in the world – but God is still sovereign over everything and everyone.

RD: Yes, he is. But it can be challenging to remember that in our struggle to remain faithful. The prophet Habakkuk had many of the same questions we do when God revealed to him that God was going to allow Judah to be conquered by the Babylonians because Judah had drifted so far into idolatry. But it was from that struggle that we got one of the most famous and challenging statements in all of scripture that the Lord gave to His people. In Habakkuk 2:4 the Lord said, “The just shall live by faith.”

VK: And that’s what we’re still called to do. As you sometimes say that the Lord is more interested in our faithfulness than our success. Thus far today we’ve seen that Biblical prophets came from all levels of the Jewish culture, high and low. We’ve seen that being a prophet was more about bringing God’s messages to His people than just foretelling the future. We’ve seen that some prophets were even reluctant messengers but they brought their messages anyway because they recognized the need to be faithful to their calling. And as we heard in our 2nd scripture today sometimes God told His prophets to do some really odd things like lie on one side for over a year to emphasize the message He had commanded His prophet to bring. So what other observations do you want to make today about the Biblical prophets?

RD: Well, I know we don’t have much time left but I think that it’s really important to note at least two more things about the Biblical prophets. First, even though all the prophetic books in the Bible were written by men, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t women who God also tasked to be prophets or, more properly, prophetesses. For instance, Miriam the sister of Israel’s first high priest Aaron was called a prophetess. So was a woman named Deborah who lived during the period of the Judges that followed the exodus from Egypt. Deborah led the Hebrew army to victory over a Canaanite army that was oppressing the Hebrews at the time and in Judges 4:4 the Bible says that Deborah was leading Israel at the time. And around the time of Jesus’ birth there was a woman named Anna who was called a prophetess who had a ministry that lasted for more than 80 years. In Luke 4:38 the Bible says that Anna recognized Jesus as the Messiah when he was still a baby and was taken to the temple in Jerusalem for the ritual consecration.

VK: Interesting. God can and does use people of all kinds to serve him. God used people from all levels of the Hebrew society to be prophets and He used both men and women. And given that some prophets like Anna and Jeremiah had prophetic ministries that spanned decades He’s obviously willing to use both young and old people as long as those people are dedicated to Him and His word, which today means acknowledging the Bible as His inspired, inerrant, and infallible word.

RD: Precisely. Well, the final point that I think listeners should know is that even though there is a group of books in the Bible that are commonly labeled “the prophets” that there were other books in the Bible that contain records of prophets and prophecies. For instance, Moses was clearly a prophet but his life is recorded in the 2nd through 5th books of the Bible which are part of what is commonly called “the law” or the Torah. David, of David-and-Goliath fame, was the 2nd king of the Bible but his life and times are primarily covered in 1 and 2 Samuel. And there are numerous accounts of other prophets mentioned in Kings and Chronicles. And of course in the New Testament there are other prophets and prophecies including Paul, John, and Peter and of course the greatest of all Biblical prophets, Jesus. The point is that, contrary to what is claimed by some critics, prophecy is woven throughout the Bible and it is part and parcel of the truth that God chose to reveal in His special revelation. This is a characteristic of the Bible that helps distinguish it from all other books. Since so many of these prophecies were given at times and places that we have now been able to see their fulfillment it gives us a substantial body of evidence to see that the Bible had a supernatural source of inspiration.

VK: And that’s a great lesson for us all today. There are a number of prophecies in the Bible that have yet to be fulfilled such as those that pertain to the second coming of Jesus. But there are hundreds of prophecies in the Bible that have already been fulfilled at some time during history. So, that remarkable body of prophecies given and fulfilled tells us that God will fulfill His remaining prophecies at some point in the future. This also helps illustrate that God is not only sovereign but He is also eternal. Regardless of the gap in time – from our perspective – between the time the prophecy was given and the time that God chooses to fulfill it, the eternal God will bring His will to fruition. As God it would be impossible for Him to do otherwise. Sounds like a wonderful time for a prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer for the messengers that God sends forth in today’s world to spread His good news – Christian Missionaries.

---- PRAYER FOR CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES (# 9)

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)

Amos, Chapter 1, verse 1 and Chapter 7, verses 12 through 15, New Living Translation

Ezekiel, Chapter 4, verses 4 through 8, New Living Translation