Scripture and prophecy - Part 1
Today is the first post in a little three-part series on a topic that’s been coming up lately in my life different ways in: prophecy.
Traditionally—that is, how people in the Old Testament understood the concept—prophecy was about speaking the words of God. A prophet was someone who was perceived to have a special sensitivity to God so that he/she received words from God meant to be spoken to the people. The prophet was God’s mouthpiece.
When various Old Testament texts say that a person was filled with God’s spirit and began prophesying, the reader should not imagine he started uttering unintelligible words or predicting the future. It most likely means he began doing what we might call “street preaching.”[1] When prophets spoke to people on behalf of God it was always with intelligible words for the purpose of getting them to take action. “Repent of your sin and turn to God!”
Occasionally a prophet’s warning included a prediction of some future event. Jonah famously told the Ninevites that if they did not repent of their sin and turn to God, they would be destroyed. And that’s pretty representative of the predictive quality of prophetic speech. In other words, prophetic predictions are typically pretty vague. Prophets do not typically say things like, “On June 6 a man wearing black will ride into town on a white horse and set fire to the sixth house on the left.” Instead, they say things like, “If you don’t stop what you’re doing, God will bring judgment on you.”
The reason I bring this up is because it seems many Christians today assume that prophecy = this more exact form of future telling. Like prophets predicted specific future events. I’m guessing the primary reason for that is because some NT figures seem to interpret some OT passages in this way. For instance, in his first sermon following Jesus’ resurrection and the receiving of the Holy Spirit, Peter cites a text written by King David in the Psalms in which David says God will not leave his soul among the dead or allow his body to rot in the grave. Peter tells his audience that David was essentially predicting the future.
Peter’s take is that David was a prophet and as such could look into the future and write about what would happen. David wasn’t writing about himself. He was predicting Jesus.
And in my pastoral experience, that has become the way the average Christian thinks about prophecy. David wasn’t writing about himself. He was writing about Jesus. When Isaiah referred to the “suffering servant,” he wasn’t writing about himself or Israel, he was writing about Jesus.
To be clear, I don’t deny that is possible. It is distinctly possible that God gave prophets the special spiritual sensitivity to see or perceive future events; visions, dreams, etc. But there are some problems with that way of thinking about it.
First, no one at the time, including David, understood it that way. Had they, Peter’s explanation would not have been as revolutionary as it was. It may not even have been needed. Or if it was needed, all Peter would have needed to say was, “We all know David was looking into the future and anticipating God raising someone from the dead. We just didn’t know who that was. I’m here to tell you it is Jesus!”
In other words, the very fact that Peter has to tell people that David was looking into the future is evidence that no one understood it that way, including David. If you could travel back in time and ask David, “Who were you writing about in this poem,” he most certainly would say himself. He would tell you about all of the people who were secretly (and not so secretly) trying to kill him and then he would say, “But I know God will rescue me from this pit. God will never allow me to rot in this grave.”
There are many times in the Gospels and Acts when someone, including Jesus, asks almost rhetorically, “Did not the scriptures clearly predict?”[3] The answer, of course, is no! If the scriptures clearly predicted anything, Jesus and his followers would not have had to work so hard to help people connect the dots.
That does not mean the scriptures don’t predict anything. Jesus said they do and his earliest followers would go on to not only affirm that but, as we just saw with Peter, interpret scripture in that way for their evangelistic purposes. The scriptures do predict.
Just not clearly, not in the way the average person seems to think they do. If they did, the earliest Christians, especially when reasoning with Jews in synagogues which was their initial strategy, would not have had to “persuade” people, often with mixed results. The very fact that the earliest Christians had to “prove” Jesus was the Messiah by referencing these texts and arguing that they were predictive in nature is pretty convincing evidence that they were not clearly predictive in nature.
The other major problem with thinking about prophecy as “clearly” predictive of Jesus is that the prophets’ words would have had no import for the audience that first received them. If Isaiah’s suffering servant was always Jesus and everyone knew he was talking about someone who would come in the future, those words would have been essentially useless to people at the time. But they were not useless. The very fact that they survived means people found them very useful precisely because they understood them to have import in their own lives, not just as predictions about the future.
Christians look back on OT passages from the vantage point of Jesus’ resurrection and see in them anticipations of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. They are right to do that. Jesus did that. His earliest followers did that. But that does not mean those passages were originally about Jesus in the sense that the original authors understood they were writing about future events or that their audience believed that’s what they were doing.
It just means that in the light of Jesus their words take on new significance.
In the next two posts I’ll offer a couple of ways of thinking about prophecy that I think are more consistent with how Jesus and his disciples understood and applied it.
[1] See for example 1 Samuel 10:10
[2] Acts 2:29-31
[3] For example Luke 24:25-26
Traditionally—that is, how people in the Old Testament understood the concept—prophecy was about speaking the words of God. A prophet was someone who was perceived to have a special sensitivity to God so that he/she received words from God meant to be spoken to the people. The prophet was God’s mouthpiece.
When various Old Testament texts say that a person was filled with God’s spirit and began prophesying, the reader should not imagine he started uttering unintelligible words or predicting the future. It most likely means he began doing what we might call “street preaching.”[1] When prophets spoke to people on behalf of God it was always with intelligible words for the purpose of getting them to take action. “Repent of your sin and turn to God!”
Occasionally a prophet’s warning included a prediction of some future event. Jonah famously told the Ninevites that if they did not repent of their sin and turn to God, they would be destroyed. And that’s pretty representative of the predictive quality of prophetic speech. In other words, prophetic predictions are typically pretty vague. Prophets do not typically say things like, “On June 6 a man wearing black will ride into town on a white horse and set fire to the sixth house on the left.” Instead, they say things like, “If you don’t stop what you’re doing, God will bring judgment on you.”
The reason I bring this up is because it seems many Christians today assume that prophecy = this more exact form of future telling. Like prophets predicted specific future events. I’m guessing the primary reason for that is because some NT figures seem to interpret some OT passages in this way. For instance, in his first sermon following Jesus’ resurrection and the receiving of the Holy Spirit, Peter cites a text written by King David in the Psalms in which David says God will not leave his soul among the dead or allow his body to rot in the grave. Peter tells his audience that David was essentially predicting the future.
29 “Dear brothers, think about this! You can be sure that the patriarch David wasn’t referring to himself, for he died and was buried, and his tomb is still here among us. 30 But he was a prophet, and he knew God had promised with an oath that one of David’s own descendants would sit on his throne. 31 David was looking into the future and speaking of the Messiah’s resurrection. He was saying that God would not leave him among the dead or allow his body to rot in the grave.[2]
Peter’s take is that David was a prophet and as such could look into the future and write about what would happen. David wasn’t writing about himself. He was predicting Jesus.
And in my pastoral experience, that has become the way the average Christian thinks about prophecy. David wasn’t writing about himself. He was writing about Jesus. When Isaiah referred to the “suffering servant,” he wasn’t writing about himself or Israel, he was writing about Jesus.
To be clear, I don’t deny that is possible. It is distinctly possible that God gave prophets the special spiritual sensitivity to see or perceive future events; visions, dreams, etc. But there are some problems with that way of thinking about it.
First, no one at the time, including David, understood it that way. Had they, Peter’s explanation would not have been as revolutionary as it was. It may not even have been needed. Or if it was needed, all Peter would have needed to say was, “We all know David was looking into the future and anticipating God raising someone from the dead. We just didn’t know who that was. I’m here to tell you it is Jesus!”
In other words, the very fact that Peter has to tell people that David was looking into the future is evidence that no one understood it that way, including David. If you could travel back in time and ask David, “Who were you writing about in this poem,” he most certainly would say himself. He would tell you about all of the people who were secretly (and not so secretly) trying to kill him and then he would say, “But I know God will rescue me from this pit. God will never allow me to rot in this grave.”
There are many times in the Gospels and Acts when someone, including Jesus, asks almost rhetorically, “Did not the scriptures clearly predict?”[3] The answer, of course, is no! If the scriptures clearly predicted anything, Jesus and his followers would not have had to work so hard to help people connect the dots.
That does not mean the scriptures don’t predict anything. Jesus said they do and his earliest followers would go on to not only affirm that but, as we just saw with Peter, interpret scripture in that way for their evangelistic purposes. The scriptures do predict.
Just not clearly, not in the way the average person seems to think they do. If they did, the earliest Christians, especially when reasoning with Jews in synagogues which was their initial strategy, would not have had to “persuade” people, often with mixed results. The very fact that the earliest Christians had to “prove” Jesus was the Messiah by referencing these texts and arguing that they were predictive in nature is pretty convincing evidence that they were not clearly predictive in nature.
The other major problem with thinking about prophecy as “clearly” predictive of Jesus is that the prophets’ words would have had no import for the audience that first received them. If Isaiah’s suffering servant was always Jesus and everyone knew he was talking about someone who would come in the future, those words would have been essentially useless to people at the time. But they were not useless. The very fact that they survived means people found them very useful precisely because they understood them to have import in their own lives, not just as predictions about the future.
Christians look back on OT passages from the vantage point of Jesus’ resurrection and see in them anticipations of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. They are right to do that. Jesus did that. His earliest followers did that. But that does not mean those passages were originally about Jesus in the sense that the original authors understood they were writing about future events or that their audience believed that’s what they were doing.
It just means that in the light of Jesus their words take on new significance.
In the next two posts I’ll offer a couple of ways of thinking about prophecy that I think are more consistent with how Jesus and his disciples understood and applied it.
[1] See for example 1 Samuel 10:10
[2] Acts 2:29-31
[3] For example Luke 24:25-26
Recent
Archive
2026
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
Categories
no categories
No Comments