‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
85th teaching
9.15.2014
“the Prophets”
Review:
So to get everyone up to speed,
we should all know by now that we’ve entered into our third section in
Christology. We’ve covered three sections so far in Christology, can anyone
remember what they are?
The first section was our introduction: “Who is
Jesus Christ?” talking about His identity, whether He was a real man or a
legend. The second section was a study on “the Nature of Christ”, when we
talked about His deity and His humanity. And thirdly, now we’re in the section
of Christology which we’ve called “the Life of Christ”.
Now with the Life of Christ, we’re not starting
with the beginning of His earthly ministry or with His birth to a virgin. We’re
starting way before that with His Pre-incarnate State and trying to answer the
question: What was the Life of Christ like before He was incarnated, made
flesh?
So far we’ve attempted to answer that with a study
entitled “In the Beginning”, where we examined the apostle John’s statements
about the eternal Logos that became flesh, the Logos, the Word that was with
God and was God before anything else existed.
After that study, last week we got closer to the
incarnation but we still were not there yet. Anyone remember the title or
subject from last week’s study? “Theophany”. Remember, what are two words that
start with ‘A’ which describe what the Life of Christ was like during the Old
Testament, before his incarnation. He was appearing and He was anticipated.
“Appearing” is what we studied last week with the subject of theophanies.
Okay, so what exactly is a theophany? How is it
different from an anthropomorphism? Is “theophany” a word that is unique to
Christianity? What is a hierophany? What is a christophany? How can there be
any appearance of God if the Bible says that no one has seen God at any time and
if God is invisible, isn’t that a contradiction? Who is the Angel of the Lord
in the Old Testament? Who was the first to come up with that interpretation?
Now theophanies, if you remember, can come in all shapes and forms. But I also
gave you five characteristics of most theophanies, five things that almost all
theophanies have in common; do you remember any of them? Can you remember any
good examples of theophanies in the Bible?
End
of Review
Turn to I Peter 1:3-12
Guys,
something’s in the air. Something approaches. You can almost feel it. It is
coming. There’s no way to stop it. It’s almost here and it will come before you
know it. Are you ready… for Christmas?
Or maybe the thought of it sickens? After
all, it’s still only September. Ah but the department stores are ready to
switch out the Halloween paraphernalia, skip over Thanksgiving and go right for
the Christmas decorations. And if you think that I can’t talk about Christmas
because it’s only September, you’re going to disappointedly discover that I can
talk about whatever I want.
But for many of you, Christmas may
have sadly lost some of its, well, let’s just call it magic. The sights, the
smells, the lights, the songs, the feelings all may fall flat for you now. It
might all just be trite, cliché, boring, dull. You’re grown up. But… remember
when you were a child? Remember the anticipation of Christmas?
I personally didn’t really grow up
celebrating Christmas, but I was still just young enough to feel all the
anxiousness of waking up that morning, rushing upstairs and looking at the
lights (Mom left them on all the night before) and smelling the tree and seeing
those marvelous presents, the most beautiful sight I had ever seen before the
day I saw my wife walking down the aisle, which also bears upon the subject of
anticipation just the same. But on Christmas, hopes are high, the heart glows
with wonder and every heartbeat is a beat of anticipation.
And that, I suggest to you, is exactly
what it was like for the prophets of God. They saw the visions. They heard the
voice of God describing to them this figure that was coming, the Savior, their
Messiah. Imagine if you would their anticipation. How do you think they would
feel, hearing of this glorious Child who would soon be born, hearing of the One
who would come and set the world right again? These were men, and even women,
who lived in turbulent times. Many of them saw their own nations crumbling
around them. Their hearts would be aglow with the wonder and the anticipation,
with the waiting for the long-expected Jesus.
Their hearts beat to the rhythm of the
words of Wesley’s hymn: “Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people
free; from our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee. Israel's
strength and consolation, hope of all the earth thou art; dear desire of every
nation, joy of every longing heart.”
Read
I Peter 1:3-12
Peter says that the prophets, men like
the governor Daniel, the nomad Elijah, the deliverer Moses, the epic-writer
Isaiah and the weeper Jeremiah, were filled with curiosity, with anticipation,
and sought to understand the things they were prophesying about, things that
ultimately they would not see but which they were prophesying for the
generations of believers to come. Peter even says that the angels desire to
look into these things. The anticipation was high.
And as we mentioned last week, and
just now in our review, this anticipation of Christ is what characterized the
Old Testament period prior to His Incarnation. He appeared in various
Theophanies, or more properly Christophanies, and He was being anticipated in
prophecies, being anticipated by the prophets themselves and even by the
angelic beings of heaven who desired to understand the work of God in bringing
salvation into the world.
Now before we get into discussing the
prophecies concerning Jesus the Messiah, what are known as the Messianic
prophecies, let’s take it slow. Let’s talk about the prophets and the concept
of biblical prophecy first. Next week, we’ll actually get into the specifics of
the prophecies of Jesus. This week, let’s have a pause and collect our thoughts
on the prophets and their prophecies more broadly.
Tonight’s study is entitled simple:
“the Prophets”. Here are our points for tonight, three questions to ask:
1. What is a prophet?
2. What is prophecy?
3. Why care?
1.
What is a prophet?
Or we could even ask: Who is a prophet?
Well a prophet, biblically, can come
from any walk of life, from any occupation or ethnicity. Amos the prophet was
just a farmer. Women could be prophetesses, like Moses’ sister Miriam. A
prophet didn’t even need to be an Israelite, as in the case of Balaam the
prophet in the book of Numbers.
Now, you ever get these flyers stuck
under the windshield wipers on your car. I get flyers on mine all the time for
self-proclaimed men of God, healers, miracle-workers and prophets. Now don’t
get me wrong. I’m not saying that I don’t believe God does not speak to people
today nor do I believe that God does not heal or perform miracles today. But I
don’t think Elijah walked around leaving flyers for his ministry under the
windshield wipers of people’s donkeys in the ancient world.
Therefore, with all the hubbub and
hullabaloo of modern American Christianity’s obsession with self-proclaimed
healers and prophets, we’ve got to ask ourselves what makes a prophet? Who is a
prophet? Can there be prophets today?
And again we must realize that
everything’s got to measure up against God’s revelation through Scripture and
through Jesus Christ His Son.
Hebrews
1:1-2 are great verses to introduce us to the biblical prophets. It says “God, who at various times and in various
ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days
spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom
also He made the worlds…”
In other words, the primary method of
God communicating to mankind in the past was through the prophets, these
mouthpieces of God who would bring the Lord’s words to the people and reveal
God’s mind and intentions, often for the future, to the people. It says that
God spoke by the prophets in various times and in various ways.
Just like with the theophanies, we
realize that God is no one-hit wonder. God used dramatically different prophets
with dramatically different ways of bringing forth their message. Moses was
given the ability to turn his staff into a snake. Isaiah had to walk around
naked for three years to prove his point. Ezekiel was made to lie on his left
side for 390 days. In terms like that it seems like Jonah was one who got off
easy with just having to spend three days in the belly of the fish.
But with all of the weirdness and
drama of the old prophets, we realize that their time at the forefront of God’s
spoken word is over. Hebrews said
that God has spoken to us in these last days primarily by His Son Jesus. Jesus
is the ultimate revelation of God. Jesus is the final word on everything God
wants to say.
Now that doesn’t mean that there can’t
be other prophets. There are prophets in the book of Acts in New Testament
times, after Jesus had come and gone. John the apostle could be characterized
as a prophet for his writing of the book of Revelation.
So then, if the Bible seems to make it
clear that there can be prophets even after Christ, although in a much more
minimal role of communication, what constitutes a prophet? After all, even the
Bible acknowledges that there is such a thing as a false prophet. Indeed there
are probably more false prophets in the history of the world than true
prophets. So how do you tell the difference?
Let me give you three characteristics
that make a prophet:
a. Representative.
It has been said that a priest
represents man to God but a prophet represents God to man. The prophets of old
were representatives sent from the Lord bearing His message. Again, that
reminds us of the diminished role of the prophets. Jesus is the ultimate representative
of the Father.
Note that this alone excludes a vast
majority of modern-day self-proclaimed prophets. You get the idea that they’re
not so much representing God as they’re representing themselves, naming their
churches and congregations and ministries after themselves. If the prophets
were to represent God, if even the Holy Spirit glorifies the Son and not
Himself, then what are some of these modern-day prophets doing with all of the
spotlight on them?
I’ve got the perfect example. I get
these flyers on my car all the time for Tony Alamo Ministries. His name’s in
the title for crying out loud. If it makes you uncomfortable that I’m naming
the guy, don’t be uncomfortable. This guy is slime. And here’s why. His flyers
already read a little bit on the weird side, taking verses out of context,
claiming visions, proclaiming strange messages and so on, but today I looked
him up. Turns out he’s serving a sentence of 175 years in prison in Tucson,
Arizona for the rape, abuse and sexual assault of multiple children. In July of
2009, he called himself “just another one of the prophets that went to jail for
the Gospel”.
Ladies and Gentlemen, is that what a
prophet looks like? I get that the prophets were persecuted. I get that the
world they preached to rejected them. But were Isaiah or Ezekiel convicted sex
offenders? C’mon.
That leads us neatly into the second
characteristic of a true prophet. One, a true prophet represents God not
himself, and two…
b. Righteous.
A true prophet lives a righteous life
and pursues the things of God. The best measure of whether a prophet is
trustworthy or not is how that prophet lives. Deuteronomy 13:1-5.
The prophets had to proclaim a holy
message, not an evil one, and their lives had to be holy walks after the Lord. The
prophets were known, even to their enemies sometimes, as men of God. That title
means that they were men that had devoted their lives to the Lord, often times
leaving their occupations and homes and even families to wander the wilderness,
to travel from town to town to proclaim the Lord’s message.
Take Elijah, for example, a man who
represents the Old Testament prophets. Elijah was one of the greatest Old
Testament prophets. In II Kings 1,
Elijah, not a sex offender but a fugitive from a wicked king, has a troop sent
out after him to capture him and take him into custody. They find him on a
hill. Notice that the kings’ men call him “man of God”. The passage reads: “‘Man of the God, the king has said, ‘Come
down!’’ So Elijah answered and said to the captain of fifty, ‘If I am a man of
God, then let fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty men.’
And fire came down from heaven and consumed him and his fifty.”
Even though these were servants of the
wicked king, they recognized that this fugitive Elijah was a man of God. They
didn’t claim that God was on their side. They were at the point that they had
so rejected the Lord that their enemy was a man they could call the man of God.
They didn’t slam his character. They didn’t make false accusations. It was his
devoted life that they called out and fought against, even as Elijah was a
representative of the Lord.
So the prophets were known as men of
God, not men of shady character, not disreputable men because they could be
accused of embezzling or sex offenses. They got in trouble because they lived
of God in a nation that was rejecting God.
We may not be prophets, but if we’re
taking this Christian life seriously, then we are men and women of God. And the
Lord says to us in I Timothy 6:11, “But you, O man of God, flee these things…”
What things? Well, he just mentioned the love of money, greediness, the desire
of riches, pride, obsessions with disputes and arguments over words, envy,
suspicions and so on. “O man of God, flee
these things and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience,
gentleness.”
The prophets are great role models for
you and I, so far as ordinary humans go. And they were ordinary. James 5:17 says Elijah was a human
being just like you and me. He wasn’t superman. He was a just a regular man who
dared to stand up against wickedness and devote his life to the Lord and look
what an amazing adventure his life turned out to be.
Our lives should be characterized by
these things: the pursuit of righteousness, not so we can be recognized as
prophets, but so we will exemplify real Christianity. John 13:34 “By this all will
know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” The
biggest statement you can make to an unbelieving world that you are follow the
one true God is if you love God’s people.
So the true prophets were
representatives of God and pursuers of righteousness, and thirdly, speaking of
loving God’s people, the prophets were also…
c. Patriots.
The prophets may have been rebels.
They may have rejected the wicked kings they lived under but realize that the
prophets were also intensely patriotic. They loved their country. They loved
the people God had chosen to become His own people so much that the prophets
would agree to bring those people some very awful news a lot of the time:
repent, because the judgment of God is coming.
It’s not much of a stretch to apply
such a thing to ourselves. Are you and I patriotic? Do you love your fellow
Americans enough? Would you be content to watch them walk slowly into the
eternal fires, knowing that you have the message of salvation? Do you love
enough to tell people the hard news that they’ve got to repent or spend an
eternity in Hell, and that the refuge, the way of escape, is in Jesus Christ?
These questions ring true, and no
truer than in discussions of prophecy. Sometimes I’ve sat under teachings of
prophecy, eschatological sermons that make you feel like the end is so near, so
impending and so irresistible that revival is impossible. Sometimes you can
feel that the end is so close and the world is so hard that what’s the point of
evangelizing? The world is going to hell anyways.
But what kind of talk is that? The
prophets were intensely patriotic, loving their fellow countrymen so
passionately that they preached their messages with urgency. Prophecy should do
just that. Studying prophecy should lead to urgency not giving up on humanity.
Don’t let up. Don’t let people off the
hook. You don’t know how close the end is. You only know it’s closer today than
it was yesterday. And the Bible says “Today”
is the day of salvation.
*So what is a prophet? Who is a
prophet? Could be anybody, but a true prophet of God will be someone at the
very least who is representative of the Lord, a pursuer of righteousness, and a
lover of people, a patriot.
2.
What is prophecy?
The Bible seems to carry two meanings
to the word prophecy. The word
prophesy literally means “before speak” or “to speak before”, and so we often
think of it as foretelling the future. You may have heard that it can also mean
not only foretelling the future but forthtelling the truth of God. That is,
prophecy can mean prediction and it can also mean preaching. So it’s a word
with dual-meanings.
But obviously we’re talking about the
predictive aspect of biblical prophecy. Studying specific prophecy that has to
do with the end times is known as Eschatology, one of the sections of theology.
So though there are many prophecies in the Bible that have been fulfilled
throughout history, there are many which await fulfillment in the future.
Lewis Sperry Chafer says: “In all ages
it has pleased God to pre-announce certain things He proposed to do. These
announcements are termed prophecies. All prophecy is history pre-written…”
Let’s talk a few facts about biblical
prophecy:
First,
realize that prophecy is a foretelling not a forecast. That means that prophecy
is not something that somebody guesses at. Prophecy has nothing to do with
guessing the future. Prophecy has nothing to do with seeing certain trends and
making a prediction based on existing information. That’s not what the prophets
did. They simply proclaimed things that were often total surprises long before
they ever happened. Sometimes a hundred years would go by, sometimes even more,
before the prophecy could be fulfilled.
A good example of that is the prophecy
of seventy weeks in Daniel 9. We
don’t have time to do all the interpretation and mathematics now but we can
look it up at any time. This prophecy predicted the coming of the Messiah and
His being “cut off” and it has the
audacity to set a timeline of several hundred years, something Daniel himself
would never actually see, and something Daniel himself could not possibly guess
at.
So prophecy is not the same as
guessing.
Secondly,
prophecy is a revelation from God. Along the same lines as the first fact we
just discussed, we realize that prophecy came from God through the prophet. It
was not something that the prophets came up with themselves. It’s not that they
went into a trance or looked into their crystal balls or divined the future all
by themselves. Biblical prophecy has nothing to do with human insight and all
to do with what God would show to the prophet. God alone knows the future.
Human beings do not, unless they’re told about the future by God.
Thirdly,
prophecy occupies a large part of Scripture. Now I didn’t count all of the
verses but I’ve heard it said numerous times that prophecy occupies nearly one
quarter of the whole Bible, that is 1/4th of all Scripture was
predictive at the time it was written, though as we’ve mentioned, a lot of
those prophecies are now fulfilled.
But it’s easy to see that prophecy is
a huge part of Scripture. There are prophecies in almost every book in the
Bible. The Old Testament contains sixteen books entirely devoted to prophecy:
the major prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel), and the so-called
minor prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk,
Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi). Realize that they’re not called the
minor prophets because they were all children, nor because they’re less
important that books like Isaiah or Daniel. They’re called minor prophets
because their writings are generally much shorter than the major prophets.
Also, realize, this large portion of
even the Old Testament represents material, revealed truth of God, that we
hardly know anything about. I think we’d all be pretty hard pressed to quote
the minor prophets off-hand, or even to name all twelve of them without looking
them up in the index. That means there’s a huge portion of God’s Word that you
and I haven’t a clue about. We’ve got some work cut out for us. That should
stir up your imagination and your interest and some passion to get to know what
could be a whole quarter of Scripture that you might know next to nothing
about.
Even in the New Testament, there’s one
book solely devoted to prophecy and it might be the most famous example of
biblical prophecy there is in all its mystery and confusion and awe: the Book
of Revelation.
So there are seventeen whole books of
prophecy in the Bible and they might be the books that we know the least about.
Pick one and get to work studying it. I think we sometimes get the idea that
studying prophecy is for super-advanced Christians and apologists and thinkers
and all that. Not true. Prophecy was meant for the common people. Prophetic
messages went out to the laymen, the everyday-man, joe-schmoe down the street.
Prophecy is not some super mysterious, secretive thing for a select few. It’s
for everybody to know and understand. Understanding it can be difficult, but
that’s no reason to neglect one quarter of God’s written Word!
A fourth
fact about prophecy, sometimes the prophecy is conditional. This is important
when people claim that there are failed prophecies in Scripture, prophecies
that were made but which never came true. Check to see if they’re conditional
prophecies, meaning, prophecies that God said would come to pass if certain things happened.
Some perfect examples of conditional
prophecies are the prophecies of the Old Testament prophets who proclaimed that
God’s judgment would come upon Israel and Judah if they did not turn from their
wicked ways. God was proclaiming a conditional future, a conditional outcome,
should they choose to continue in that path.
A fifth
thing to consider about prophecy is that it seems to sometimes have
dual-fulfillments. That might sound strange so let me give you an example: In Matthew 2:13-15 we read: “Now when they had departed, behold, an angel
of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, ‘Arise, take the young Child
and His mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word; for Herod
will seek the young Child to destroy Him.’ When he arose, he took the young
Child and His mother by night and departed for Egypt, and was there until the
death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through
the prophet, saying, ‘Out of Egypt I called My Son’.”
That seems to be a quote from the
prophet Hosea who said in Hosea 11:1,
“When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called My son.” Plainly, the original prophecy seems to
not really be a prophecy at all, but a historical statement, a historical truth
that God delivered His people, His son He calls them, Israel out of Egypt during
the Exodus.
But what the prophecy-quote in Matthew
has done then is take a historical prophetic word from Hosea originally applied
to Israel and apply it to the true Son of God, Jesus Christ, who went down to
Egypt and was later called up out of it. The prophecy shows that Jesus is the
ultimate Son of God, using the same language of Israel as the children of God,
or son of God, in order to draw a prophetic parallel and provide a historical
example for the ultimate fulfillment of this prophecy.
Now that’s complex, but it makes clear
that biblical prophecy can have dual fulfillments. Another quick example is the
abomination of desolation, a term that historically refers to an event that
took place in between the Old and New Testaments in which the Greek king
Antiochus Epiphanes spites the Jews by sacrificing a pig, an unclean animal, on
the altar of God, thereby desecrating the temple. But in Matthew 24, Jesus prophesies about a future time in which the
abomination of desolation will stand in the holy place and He warns the people
to flee Judea in that day. Therefore, that’s a prophetic term that had a
historical fulfillment and it will also have a future fulfillment, it was a
historic example and it shall have a future parallel.
The sixth and final fact about prophecy is to always consider the
literal interpretation as the best interpretation. Interpreting biblical
prophecy literally, interpreting the rapture as a real event, the tribulation
as a real period of time, the judgments as real judgments to come, is always
the best bet. Otherwise, you’re stuck with allegorical and metaphorical
interpretations of prophecy.
This is where the book of Revelation
has suffered the most in the hands of foolish teachers. The second you take a
prophecy to be a metaphor or an allegory, a picture of something else, and
strip it of its realism and literalness, you can come up with all kinds of wild
ideas and interpretations. And so throughout history you have people who
believe either that the tribulation and the judgments will never happen, or
that we’re living in them now, or that they’re merely represent anything the
interpreter thinks it represents rather than what it literally appears to be.
Now certainly, there is pictorial
language in revelation. We don’t expect the Antichrist to literally be a Beast.
We expect him to be a man. But the beast picture in Revelation still
communicates a literal fact about the Antichrist, namely his vicious nature
toward the saints, and that’s clear from the passages about him in the
prophecies. It’s not like it’s a stretch to make that interpretation.
What’s more, the Old Testament
prophecies and the fulfilled prophecies of the Bible were all markedly
fulfilled literally. They are characterized by their realism. When Isaiah
prophesied that a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son and shall call His name
Immanuel, it’s not like it turned out that the virgin was a metaphor for a
nation, and the son was a metaphor for a philosophy, and conceive was a
metaphor for economic growth. You get what I’m saying? Mary was a literal
virgin, the Child was a literal Child, and the conception was a literal
conception, a fetus that she carried to term and she gave birth to a real baby.
*So what is prophecy: foretelling and
forthtelling, prediction and preaching. Prophecy is not the same as guessing.
Prophecy comes from God not man. Prophecy forms a large part of Scripture, get
to know it. Prophecy is sometimes conditional. Prophecy can be dual-natured.
And prophecy is best interpreted literally.
3.
Why Care?
Turn to Deuteronomy 18:15-22.
Even since ancient times, the Word of
God has placed great emphasis on the distinction between true prophecies and
those of false prophets. How do you know the difference? One way as we
mentioned was if the prophet’s message takes you away from God rather than
turns you toward God. That’s a false prophet. You would simply have to wonder
why God would send a true prophet to preach to turn away from God. That’s a
false prophet not sent from God.
Another way to tell between a true and
a false prophet is if their prophecy comes true or not. If it does not come to
past, if it wasn’t conditional, if every literal interpretation fails and the
prophecy is not fulfilled then you can assume that the prophet is in fact a false
prophet.
The Bible places great emphasis on
accurate prophecy. God knows the future and He can’t get this stuff wrong. Not
even once.
That makes the accurately fulfilled
prophecies of the Bible one of the great proofs for its divine authorship. Proof
that the Bible is the Word of God is in the prophecies that have come true.
Remember SPAM? Don’t ever forget it. It’s an acronym for 4 great proofs for the
Bible being what it claims to be: the inspired Word of God. Statistics.
Prophecy. Archaeology. Manuscripts.
So why care about prophecy? Because
it’s one of the greatest proofs that Christianity is legit.
Now in order to fully appreciate
biblical prophecy, we can look at it in comparison to the prophecies made by
non-Christians, by other religions even. The Bible has some really accurate,
very literal and sometimes very detailed prophesies in it, but we can’t really
appreciate that statement unless we have something to compare these prophesies
to.
Let’s take three quick examples:
a. Islam
One of the great copy-cat religions of
the world, it’s no surprise that Islam claims that the Quran has prophecy in it
just like the Bible does. I found this website (alislam.org) which contains
some Islamic FAQs, some sermons, some articles and products to purchase and
links to all kinds of Islamic paraphernalia. Now nestled neatly in there was an
article by a Ansar Raza entitled “Fulfilled Prophecies of the Holy Quran”. It
even opens with the criteria of an atheist to judge any prophecy by: that a
prophecy must be clear, detailed, the fulfillment must be unusual or unique,
the prophecy must predate the fulfillment, the fulfillment cannot be an
educated guess, and the fulfillment cannot be staged or manipulated.
Those are great criteria, but listen
to some of the prophecies this article claims have been fulfilled out of the
Quran. “Their skins will bear witness against them as to what they have been
doing” (41:21) apparently proof that the Quran predicted criminal fingerprint
identification. What?
My favorite: “They will alter Allah’s
creation” (4:120). A five word verse. Can you guess what they say fulfills
this? Plastic surgery, genetic engineering and cloning. Yep, the Quran
prophesied plastic surgery. Everything from the invention of dynamite, the
establishment of zoos, telephone communication, women’s rights, air travel have
all apparently been predicted by the Islamic faith on the basis of some really,
really unclear and vague verses quoted without context. And why of all things
would their god Allah take the time to predict the invention of plastic surgery
of all things. Yeesh!
You can be thankful that the biblical
prophecies are far clearer and more appropriate to the redemptive plan than the
Islamic prophecy of the invention of dynamite.
b. Hindu Mahabharata
This Mahabharata is a mouthful… 1.8
million words long. It is the longest known epic poem and has been described as
the longest poem ever written. It is a Hindu religious text written in
Sanskrit. Now a work of literature of that size alone presents all kinds of
problems. One such problem is the very real claim that some have made that the
Mahabharata predicted the invention and use of nuclear weapons. Did it?
I did the research and here’s what I
found: quoting a 1.8 million word text requires some really good indications of
reference. One such website claiming that the Mahabharata depicts an atomic
bomb detonating 4000 years ago quotes from the text but gives no way to
reference the passage their quoting.
Imagine I quoted from Isaiah. Now
Isaiah is huge. It’s 66 chapters long. Imagine I quoted it but didn’t give any
scripture references. You don’t know where in those 66 chapters I quoted unless
you try to find it yourself or you use a good search engine. Now imagine
quoting a passage somewhere out of the 200,000 verses of the Mahabharata. How
could you possibly find it without helpful references?
What that leant to was people taking
bits of passages here and bits of passages there and melding them together to
appear as one single passage in their quote in order to make it appear that
what they’re trying to say is actually the case. One commentator referred to
this kind of a quote as mangled poetry. Be careful about what people are
quoting and how they’re quoting it. Or as Abraham Lincoln said “Don’t believe
everything you read on the internet”.
Now I think it would be unethical if I
didn’t give you a quote of the original text, as if I expected for you to take
my word for it. So here it is: the Mahabharata, Mausala Parva, section 1: “When
the next day came, Camva actually brought forth an iron bolt through which all
the individuals in the race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas became consumed
into ashes. Indeed, for the destruction of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas, Camva
brought forth, through that curse, a fierce iron bolt that looked like a
gigantic messenger of death. The fact was duly reported to the king. In great
distress of mind, the king (Ugrasena) caused that iron bolt to be reduced into
fine powder.” (quote found http://www.jasoncolavito.com/the-case-of-the-false-quotes.html; http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m16/m16001.htm; http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/mausala_ganguli.pdf)
Does that sound like an atomic bomb?
Note it was destroyed and reduced into fine powder and that it’s depicted as a
bolt or scepter.
In the case of the Mahabharata, its
“prophecy” is just a matter of misinterpretation and misquoting. If anyone says
something like “Oh, the Mahabharata predicts this” or even “Hey, the Bible says
this”, your response should always be “Show me the reference”.
c. Nostradamus
Finally, good ol’ Nostradamus, the favorite
of pop-culture prophecies, the poster child of email conspiracies. It’s been
claimed that Michel de Nostredame, the French seer and astrologist of the 16th
century, predicted several incredible things: the End of the World, the rise of
Hitler, the Atomic Bomb, the JFK assassination, hurricane Katrina, the death of
Princess Diana, the defeat of Napoleon, the election of Barak Obama as
president of the United States, and even the fall of the twin towers on
September 11th, 2001.
Quite a resume you got there… Michel.
But as it turns out with Nostradamus,
it’s the same thing we’ve already seen with vagueness of the Islamic prophecies
and the misquoting of the Mahabharata prophecy. Nostradmus is a bad case of pop
culture latching on to unproven ideas just because misinformation gets spread
around. You wonder why Nostradamus could seemingly predict everything from bad
weather to wars to deaths of famous people? It’s because his writings are so
poetic and ambiguous that it’s easy to ready any interpretation into them.
This is an example of the original
prophecies circulated in 2001 after the attacks on September 11th: "In the
City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos,
while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb, The third big war
will begin when the big city is burning.”
Guys, that could predict almost
anything. It’s so ambiguous as to be practically worthless as predictive
prophecy. What’s more, Nostradamus didn’t even write these words. Not even one
of them. They come from a research paper by Canadian student Neil Marshall in
1997 and the last line was added by an anonymous internet user. This passage
isn’t even written in the four-line rhyming format that Nostradamus wrote in,
called quatrains.
Sometimes, snopes is your best friend.
At this point, I hope you get the
point: the Bible doesn’t use vague language like this. And you should be glad
for it.
Realize that the book you hold in your
hands is of incredible value. It contains prophecies far above and beyond
anything else the world has come up with. This book does not deserve our
indifference or our lack of devotion. It deserves our intense study and our
cherishing hearts. You have access to words that the world has never seen
anything like, even just in terms of its prophecies.
This is a call for us to quit playing
around. This is a call for us to not become adults who spent years growing up
in the church but who can’t find their way through the Scriptures, who don’t
know where anything is or what anything is or even how to explain the simplest
message of it all, the one that matters: the gospel. Let’s not become a
generation of Bible-idiots. Let’s not be biblically illiterate.
Pick up your bible this week and start
studying it. Start getting to know it. Start with something you know absolutely
nothing about, like maybe Old Testament prophecies, where some intense
surprises perhaps await you if you’ll only look for them. Get some help. Get
some commentaries. Look up the notes. Contact me if you need help. But let’s
help each other. Let’s get in the Word and stay in the Word.
Let’s resolve to know this book, a
text unlike any other, divine-inspired. Let’s commit to knowing it as well as
we know our favorite tv shows or books or games or subjects. Let’s commit to
being able to quote these words as easily as we can quote from our favorite
movies and characters, thing which will ultimately mean nothing. Let’s commit,
with God’s help, to knowing His Word and changing the world with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment