This column has been exploring why God has given us prophecy, and why so much. [See Part 1 and Part 2] We have explored that question with a view to understanding what we are to do with the prophecies that are yet future—how we are to interpret and apply them. The most definitive way to answer these questions is to explore what God Himself says are the purposes and effects of prophetic revelation.
Part 1 examined NT passages that reveal some of the purposes of prophecy. Part 2 turned to the OT, particularly Isaiah and Ezekiel. In spite of multiple passages that shed light on the purposes of prophecy, however, I posited that there is one that tends to be downplayed (sometimes even denigrated), especially by those of a nonpremillennial persuasion. The most fundamental function of prophecy, I posited, is to provide understandable information and certain knowledge about future events. All the other purposes are hollow without this. All the other purposes are meaningful only if God communicates reliable, understandable, precise, verifiable, and essentially clear predictions about the future.
Certainly prophecy is intended to have a present impact on the believer’s faith and practice. No one should dispute that. But some posit that viewing eschatological prophecy as a detailed prediction of specific events short-circuits the ethical intention of such prophecy. I am positing that God tells us about the future because He actually wants us to know what is going to happen and expects us to believe that it is going to happen just as He says. As I mentioned in the previous column, this may seem obvious, but it’s worth stating unambiguously because the emphasis in many works on interpreting prophecy tends to undermine this role of predictive prophecy.
Many argue that prophecy doesn’t so much provide information about the future as it does highly symbolic, metaphorical pictures of the future. In the last column I cited the alarming assertion of Graeme Goldsworthy that “a method of interpretation that demands that the promises of the OT be literally fulfilled, so that there is exact correspondence between what is promised and what eventually comes to pass, does not fit the evidence of the Bible” (According to Plan, 65–66). Another hermeneutical text argues,
Prophecy has a notorious reputation for being difficult to interpret, and that reputation is justified because prophecy … tends to be expressed in highly metaphoric language. … But a great deal of the notoriety comes not from the difficulties of the symbolic language, but from misconceived notions about what kind of information prophecy is conveying. … Prophecy encourages us regarding the future not by giving us the news headlines in advance, but by pointing out our victorious God, who has already won the decisive heavenly battle (McCartney and Clayton, Let the Reader Understand: A Guide to Interpreting and Applying the Bible, 232–33).
One hermeneutics text is quite correct: “Fundamentally, prophecy is a biblical phenomenon by which God conveyed messages to his people through human speakers or writers. It assumes that God has something important he wants his people to understand—that he wishes to communicate not obfuscate . . .” (Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 371, emphasis added). Their agreement on this point is gratifying, even though some of their proposed prophetic fulfillments seem inconsistent with this assertion.
Matthew 24
In Jesus’ most detailed and extended prophetic discourse, He repeatedly states that one of the purposes of these details is to forewarn people how to react when prophesied events begin to unfold (see 24:15–20, 23–26).
Jesus then inserts a parable about the obvious, recognizable, unmistakable signs of spring. The analogy itself emphasizes that His purpose in giving this detailed predictive information is so that people will know what will happen, will be able to anticipate it, and will recognize when it happens (24:32–35)—even though the precise timing is withheld to constrain watchfulness (24:42; 25:13), readiness (24:44; 25:10), and faithfulness (24:46; 25:21, 23) in the meantime.
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