Prophecies

After I wrote yesterday's blog post about Turkey and Ezekiel 38, I got to thinking about prophecy. Every Christian agrees that God foretells the future and that we ought to be interested in that. But how exactly do we interpret God's predictions?

We know that sometimes God speaks straightforwardly. For instance, Jesus told Peter and John to go to a certain town, where they would find a man with a pitcher of water who would lead them to a room where they could prepare the Passover. So they went "and they went and found it just as he had told them" (Luke 22:7-13).

On the other hand, sometimes God speaks obliquely. For instance, one day on a boat with his men, Jesus said, "Watch and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees." But some fishermen evidently had a tin ear for poetry. Jesus finally had to explain the metaphor: "'How is it that you fail to understand that I did not peak about bread? Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.' Then they understood that he did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees" (Matthew 16:6-12).

Peter alerts us that there are some things in Scripture just plain hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16), so that should be a heads-up for us about Old Testament prophecy. Also, the author of Hebrews says God's Old Testament revelation was dispensed "in many ways" (Hebrews 1:1). There were lots of "visions" and "dreams" (Numbers 12:6). So we might expect some cryptic quality and phantasmagorical elements in prophecy now and then, rather than a straight newspaper account of the future with the four W's and the "H."

You don't want to go too far with this, however. After Jericho was conquered, Joshua vowed, "Cursed before the Lord be the man who rises up and rebuilds this city, Jericho. At the cost of his firstborn shall he lay its foundation" (Joshua 6:26). Five hundred years later, sure enough, a man named Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho, and "he laid its foundation at the cost of Abiram his firstborn" (1 Kings 16:34). I wonder if he thought the prophecy was just a metaphor. Or maybe he just didn't believe in prophecy?

One time a prophet spoke to a stone altar that King Jeroboam had built and said that someday a king named Josiah would be born, who would sacrifice renegade priests on it (1 Kings 13:2). Was that symbolism? No. Three hundred years later a king named Josiah did a major housecleaning of the temple, "and he sent and took the bones out of the tombs and burned them on the altar and defiled it, according to the word of the Lord that the man of God proclaimed, who had predicted these things" (2 Kings 23:15-16).

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the witches conjure three spirits of prophecy for the increasingly paranoid usurper king: (1) "Beware Macduff"; (2) "none of woman born shall harm Macbeth"; and (3) "never vanquish'd be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him." Macbeth tries to reassure himself that the prophecies are far-fetched: (1) Macduff is in exile; (2) woods can't walk around; (3) there is no one who is not born of a woman.

But sure enough, Macduff is summoned; soldiers cut down tree limbs as camouflage; and Macduff was "from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd" (i.e., caesarean section).

The lesson I take away is that when encountering prophecies about lands and times and wars and beasts, we had better come armed with both an ear for symbols and a readiness to see fulfillment that is more literal than we might have expected.

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