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Jesus is returning again "soon".....?
Posted : 26 Aug, 2010 09:51 AM
By Dr. Richard Pratt
> azine/site/iiim/searchtype/articles/allarticles/1>
> President of Third Millennium Ministries
> Adjunct Professor of Old Testament at
> Reformed Theological Seminary , Orlando, Florida
>
> If you are reading this article hoping to get all of your questions
> answered about when Jesus is coming back, you're in for a
> disappointment. What I'm hoping to do in this brief talk is to lay a
> foundation of some basic ideas about prophecy in the Bible that are
> really not very well understood. It's sad that that's the case,
> because the result is horrible. "Jesus Is Coming Back�Soon!" A few
> years ago I was doing a "Bible Prophecy Tour" in Australia, and we were
> going around these little towns to these little Presbyterian churches.
> If you think Presbyterian churches here are dead, you ought to go over
> there! Some are those churches are deep frozen. They put up banners in
> these little towns in Australia saying, "Bible Prophecy Conference
> � Dr. Richard Pratt from the United States." The whole town would
> come�everybody, no matter what denomination they were. There might
> be a couple hundred people during the first hour. The first thing I
> would always say would be this: "I will succeed today if I convince you
> Jesus is not coming back for another million years." Of course that got
> their attention.
> But as I started talking about prophecy, and we took a break, all of a
> sudden this group of two hundred got down to about, oh, fifty. And by
> the third hour, after the second break, it got down usually to about
> fifteen. That's about how many people were there in the Presbyterian
> church, you understand�fifteen. And it was only their members that
> stayed.
>
> Part of the reason for that is when people hear "prophecy," what they
> expect is somebody to get up and tell them who the Antichrist is and
> how many more weeks we have until Jesus is coming back. They were
> expecting me to tell them things like, "Every prophecy has now been
> fulfilled, so Jesus is ready to come." I mean, just watch those TV
> shows. The televangelists always tell you, "Jesus is coming back, and
> he's coming back very, very soon." And the moral of the story always
> is, "Send me your money." I always want to tell these guys on TV,
> "Look, if you believe Jesus is coming back soon, you send me your money
> and I'll invest it and I'll do something with it for my
> grandchildren. How about that?"
>
> So if you think I'm going to tell you that he's coming back next
> week, that kind of thing, you're going to be disappointed. Instead,
> what I'm going to try to do is to provide you with what we might
> call an alternative.
> Disappointed by Popular Prophecy One of the biggest problems we have in
> the church of Jesus Christ today is that we really don't have
> alternatives in the way we look at Bible prophecy. There's this
> popular view of how to look at the Bible, especially in the area of
> prophecy, which is just all over, everywhere you go. It's on TV,
> it's on Christian radio, it's in Christian book stores; you
> name it, it's there. This very popular approach talks about Jesus
> coming back next week, and all that sort of stuff. And there's
> practically nothing out there to give you an alternative.
> I remember when I was in high school trying to figure out my basic
> theology. I was working very hard to read in this subject and read in
> that subject and to understand this and understand that, and I was
> getting a lot of these basic things worked out. Finally I decided I
> needed to figure out what was true about prophecy. I went to the
> bookstore and said, "I need a book on prophecy." They said, "Well,
> there's only one book you need to read�The Late Great Planet
> Earth." I didn't know any better. I didn't know that there were
> other views. I didn't even realize that this was something that the
> church had only believed since Hal Lindsey lived on this earth. After
> all, it had sold six trillion copies by that time, so I figured it must
> be true.
>
> A lot of us felt tricked because of that. Some of us are old enough to
> have experienced this. You believed some of the things you saw on TV,
> and then suddenly you realized, "Well, it didn't happen like they
> said." But they came back the next week and said, "Well, it's going
> to happen this way." And so you believed it again. But again it
> didn't happen that way. Then they come back another time and said,
> "It's going to happen this way. We've really got it now." But
> it didn't happen, so you felt tricked. This is the way it often
> happens. People sometimes get abused by very sincere and well-meaning
> Christian leaders who promote these kinds of views of prophecy.
>
> If you have felt victimized, and a lot of you probably have or you
> wouldn't be reading something like this, there's a natural
> reaction. The natural reaction is to become apathetic, to say, "Well,
> who cares. Nobody can understand that stuff anyway. Let me just look at
> the parts of the Bible I really can understand," which usually equals
> Paul's epistles. So you just stick with what you can do. Well, God
> didn't give us the whole Bible so we'd stick with Paul's
> epistles. Now, don't get me wrong. I like Paul. But that's not
> the whole Bible. In fact, the biggest chunk of the Bible is prophecy.
> So it may very well be that we need to start figuring out how to
> understand it better.
> Prophecy Is Not a Fortune Cookie One of the things we have to do is to
> stop thinking about prophecies as if they are fortune cookies. When you
> go to the Chinese restaurant, you always open up that fortune cookie
> and it says something like: "Today's your lucky day," and it gives
> you the Lotto numbers. Sometimes that's the way we look at
> prophecy, again, usually because we don't have a better way to do
> it.
> We need to start thinking about Bible prophecy a whole lot more like we
> think of other parts of the Bible. Let me give you an example. When you
> read the book of Philippians or listen to somebody preach from the book
> of Philippians, they almost always start off with a background to the
> book. The preacher may say, "This week we're beginning a series on
> the book of Philippians. Now let me tell you what was happening in the
> apostle Paul's life at that time. He was in jail . . ." Then you
> start reading the book of Philippians from this perspective. You
> understand that this is Paul writing, and he's writing from within
> the jail, and he talks about the soldiers and all the things that are
> there, the gifts that he received, and things like that.
>
> That's the way that you read the parts of the Bible that you love
> the best. And it's the way that we need to begin to read prophecy.
> We should not read prophecy as if it's a Chinese fortune cookie,
> just picking a verse out and going, "Wow, that looks like something
> really important," and then believing whatever we want to believe. We
> need to start looking at it more from the perspective that we normally
> take when we read something out of the New Testament. We must ask
> questions like, "Who wrote this? Why was it written? For whom was it
> written?"
>
> I remember one time being in the Ukraine, talking about some other
> subject, and a fellow in the back of the room lifted his hand up and
> said, "Do you think that the meltdown at Chernobyl is a sign of the end
> of time, that Jesus is coming back very soon?" I thought for sure it
> had been mistranslated and I wasn't getting the point, so I looked
> over at the pastor and said, "Did he say what I think he said?" The
> pastor explained to me that Chernobyl means wormwood in the dialect
> there. In Jeremiah it says, "In the latter days there will be
> wormwood." So this fellow had lifted this verse out of the book of
> Jeremiah, Chernobyl had melted down, and he therefore saw it as a sign
> of the end of time.
>
> That's the way it always is. There was a big prophecy conference
> just before Y2K. All the experts in all the United States were there.
> And some guy pulls a verse out of Ezekiel where it says, "I will
> confound their numbers," and says, "You see! Y2K! It's a sign of the
> end of time."
> Five Periods of Prophecy: The only way to avoid that kind of buffoonery,
> clowning around with the Bible, misleading and abusing people and then
> discouraging people from looking at this part of the Bible, is to begin
> to do a little more like what you do with Paul's epistles.
> Now, you know one of the biggest problems with that? We can understand
> what a jail is, and we can understand Philippi. We kind of understand
> Paul. But when it comes to the prophets you're into the mire of all
> those long lists of kings, of this nation and that nation, and
> millennia of events, of this war and that war, this famine and that
> famine over there, and that earthquake over there. It's just one
> gigantic mess! That's why you've got all those time tables in
> your study Bibles, because they're trying to make sense out of it.
> But when you look at those time tables you go, "Well, that doesn't
> make any sense to me. There's just too much in there."
>
> What I want to do is just give you a simple five-step way of organizing
> the history of prophecy in the Old Testament. We're going to
> summarize which prophets go where and what they said, in really huge,
> broad strokes. But I'll tell you�if you can get these five
> things, you will be amazed at how much sense it will make out of the
> books of the Bible called the Prophets.
>
> 1) Early Monarchy
>
> The first period we need to think about when it comes to prophecy is
> the early monarchy, the time of David and Solomon. This is the time
> when the kingdom of Israel was united under the house of David. Things
> were pretty good for the people of God during time. It was with the
> coming of kingship in Israel, during the days of David and then Solomon,
> that prophecy really started coming in full swing. This is when
> prophets began to pop up all over the place.
>
> What sort of things did these prophets do, people like Nathan and Gad
> and a few others? Well, one thing the prophets of this day didn't
> do was to write any of the prophetic books that we have in the Bible
> today. We don't have any books written by anybody that lived in
> these days. But they still provided backgrounds for the part of the
> Bible that we call Prophecy.
>
> One background was that of royal ideals. Do you realize that in the
> Bible that as soon as you have the house of David established as the
> ruling family, that became an ideal for the rest of the Bible?
> That's why you call Jesus "King," because he's the Son of
> David. From the time that David's family was established, that
> family was to rule over Israel and rule over all people of God, no
> matter what nation they were in. This became an ideal that forms a
> background for every prophet in the Bible. When the prophets talk about
> the good times, they are talking about when the son of David is doing
> the right thing. The bad times are when the sons of David are doing bad
> things. So this ideal of the time of David and Solomon was enormously
> important to them.
>
> But you remember that Rehoboam split the kingdom into Israel in the
> north and Judah in the south, kind of like the Yankees and the
> Confederates. This is the second reality that prophets have to deal
> with�the people of God split in two. So some prophets are doing
> their thing up north. Other prophets are doing their thing down south.
> Sometimes the people up in the north will prophesy about what's
> going on down south, and sometimes the people down south will talk
> about what's going on up north.
>
> But you always have to remember that this is not the ideal. This is not
> the way God wanted his people to be�divided and torn asunder like
> that. The ideal was for them to be united and joined together under the
> One Son of David. So this early monarchy period really does form a
> background, a sort of baseline for what prophecy is, and if you can get
> that, you'll understand a whole lot more about what the prophets
> talked about.
>
> You see, the prophets are not concerned with Chernobyl. They're not
> concerned with Y2K. They're not designed to teach you to look for an
> antichrist in the White House, or that Mikhail Gorbachev's birthmark
> is the mark of the beast. This is what you see if you go to the Web or
> turn on Christian television. Just watch ten minutes on Christian
> television and you'll hear somebody say something wacko like that.
>
> Instead, this is what the prophets are concerned about: they're
> concerned about the people of Israel, the people of God, under the One
> Son of David as they ought to be.
>
> 2) The Assyrian Judgment
>
> That brings us to the second period of prophesy, the Assyrian judgment.
> Assyria was a big nation that occupied basically the land that we now
> call Turkey, and a little bit into Iraq. They were a huge country.
> There were lots of prophets that worked during this time: Jonah, Hosea,
> Amos, Micah, Nahum and Isaiah. They were all concerned about something
> really big. God had decided that the sins of Israel were so great that
> he was going to send a foreign power, the Assyrians, to destroy them.
>
> There were just three big events during this period, and you can easily
> learn them. The first one, in 734 BC, is called the Syrian-Israelite
> coalition. The nation of Syria got together with the Yankees in Israel
> (that's the northern kingdom) and they tried to force the southern
> kingdom of Judah to join with them and to rebel against the Assyrians.
>
> Now, this was a big problem, because it meant they had lost their faith
> in God. The northern kingdom, whom we call the Yankees, had to decide
> whether they were going to follow Yahweh or not. They decided not to
> follow the Lord, and as a result, God decided it was time for them to
> be destroyed. So in the year 722 God sent the Assyrians, and they
> destroyed the capital city of the north, called Samaria. (Heard of the
> good Samaritan? That comes from the word Samaria, the capital of the
> northern kingdom.) The Assyrians came and crushed them, just utterly
> crushed them, in 722 BC.
>
> Then there was one other time when the Assyrians came and attacked the
> people of God, this time not in the north, but in the south. They came
> all the way to Jerusalem during the days of a king by the name of
> Sennacherib, in 701 BC. The Assyrians destroyed practically everything
> in their path. They came right up to the gates of Jerusalem. King
> Hezekiah was in the city, and Isaiah the prophet was in there with him.
> Hezekiah went to Isaiah and said, "Help me! What do I need to do?"
> Isaiah said, "What you need to do is trust the Lord and start praying
> like crazy." And Hezekiah did just that. He prayed and the Lord
> delivered Jerusalem and drove the Assyrian army away. End of the
> Assyrian judgment.
>
> The prophets Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Hosea, Amos and Isaiah all deal with
> this. This is what they talk about. They talk about the fact that the
> Israelites should not resists the Assyrians but they should trust
> Yahweh. They talk about the fact that God is going to judge the kingdom
> of the north because they were wicked, because they oppressed the poor,
> because they were immoral, and because they had turned away from God.
> They predict that Samaria is going to fall, and it does. The prophets
> also predict that the Assyrians are going to come against Jerusalem and,
> as Isaiah says, "almost destroy it; but Jerusalem will be delivered."
> And it happens.
>
> So that's the basic event that's behind the ministries of the
> prophets in this period. These books are not talking about things that
> are happening in America today. They're not talking about the
> communists. They're not talking about Chinese armies marching across
> the Tigris-Euphrates valley. That's not what they're talking
> about. They're talking about things that happened back in the 700s
> BC. Now, they do give hope to people for the future, and things like
> that. But they're not talking about you and me directly. It's
> very important always to remember that, because otherwise you end up
> twisting or perverting their words to suit whatever program you think
> is the right program to follow.
>
> What were some of the main themes these prophets spoke of? Well, they
> said the northern nation of Israel was going to fall to Assyria, that
> they were going to be destroyed and go off into exile. And that
> happened in 722. But there was a second thing that they said. They said
> that eventually Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrians, was going to
> fall. In other words, "You touch my people, I smack you down." Those
> prophets also said things like this: that Judah should watch what
> happens in the north and learn a big lesson. Can you imagine what that
> lesson might be? That's right�repent of their own sins and start
> trusting Yahweh, because if they don't, what's going to happen
> to them? Same thing. Of course they didn't. So finally, Isaiah
> predicted that Judah would one day fall to the Babylonians.
>
> Remember, Hezekiah was delivered from the Assyrians in the year 701, as
> we noted a few minutes ago. But practically the next day Hezekiah
> turned away from trusting God and tried to cut a deal with the
> Babylonians to protect him against any future attacks. You can find this
> in Isaiah 39. As a result of that, Isaiah looked at him and said, "Now
> look. Let me tell you what's going to happen, Hezekiah. God is going
> to send the Babylonians and take everything you have away." So Isaiah
> sort of closes the period of the Assyrian judgment by saying that Judah
> is going to get it, but get it from the Babylonians, because they
> refused to continue to trust God even after he had delivered them from
> the Assyrians.
>
> Then there's one final, very important theme of the prophets during
> this period. Even though the north is going to fall to the Assyrians
> and even though the south is going to fall to the Babylonians,
> there's still hope . . . that one day they will return, that God
> will restore his people. As bad as it's going to get, God will not
> desert his people utterly. He's going to bring them back. He's
> going to restore them after this time. In fact, in the restoration they
> will be even greater than they were at the beginning. There is the
> promise, and we'll look at it a little bit later, that things are
> going to be unbelievable for the people of God once they come back from
> the Exile.
>
> So back to the idea of knowing that Paul is writing from the jail . . .
> If you're reading the book of Isaiah, you need to think, "OK,
> I'm in the period of the Assyrians; judgment and blessing is going
> to come to the people of God in a particular way." Or, "Hey, I'm in
> the period of the Assyrians when I read the book of Micah. He's
> talking about that. He's not talking about Jesus coming, and
> he's not talking about things happening in America, and he's
> not talking about South Africa or anything like that. He's talking
> about the days of the Assyrian judgment." If you can understand that
> and begin to read prophecy that way, you'll be able to avoid being
> victimized by all of these people on TV. That way you can keep your
> money.
>
> 3) The Babylonian Judgment
>
> The next big period is the Babylonian judgment. Remember Isaiah said
> the Babylonians were going to come and attack Jerusalem and destroy it?
> Remember, that's the capital of the south. Now there were many
> prophets that talked about this: Jeremiah, Zephaniah, Joel, Obadiah,
> Habakkuk, Ezekiel and Daniel. That's what these guys were concerned
> with. You see, the Assyrian trouble had gone away by this time. The
> Babylonians had been lifted up and they had conquered the Assyrians, and
> now they were coming after the people of God.
>
> There are three big events during this time, and it's really the
> same thing happening three different times. What happens is the
> Babylonians attack Jerusalem. First they do it in 605 BC, and they take
> a bunch of people away. They attack again in 597 and take a bunch more
> people away. They attack a third time in 586, absolutely destroy the
> city and take practically everybody out. That's really all that
> happens during that time.
>
> It was unthinkable that God would let Jerusalem be destroyed,
> absolutely unthinkable to a normal person walking down the street,
> living in Israel at the time. But the prophets kept saying, "The
> unthinkable is going to happen, because you keep turning from your God.
> He's going to send the Babylonians and they're going to destroy
> us." So he sends the Babylonians in 605, and they take a couple
> thousand people away to Babylon�some of the rich folks like Daniel
> and his buddies.
>
> What do you think the people in Jerusalem thought at that point? "Well,
> that wasn't so bad. We didn't like those rich people anyway."
> They didn't feel so bad in 605, so they kept sinning. Then comes
> 597; the Babylonians come in and take Ezekiel and a bunch more people
> out. What do you think the people left there were thinking? "Well good.
>
> That just means more room for us. Property values are going down.
> That's great. We can buy low." They didn't care. "We still have
> the temple." You know that passage in Jeremiah 7 where Jeremiah says,
> "You say, `the temple', `the temple', `the
> temple'," and Jeremiah looks at them and says, "Don't you think
> for a second that that's going to protect you from anything. The
> only thing that could possibly protect you is if you repent." But they
> don't.
>
> So in 586 the whole show's over. The Babylonians come in, they
> destroy the city and they destroy the temple, and they send almost
> everybody either into exile or into slavery or into death. It was a
> horrible time, just unthinkable. What did the prophets of that time say?
> They said that Babylon would utterly destroy the people of God. That
> was one of the main things they said during this time. The other thing
> they said was that the exile was actually going to last a long time.
> We'll talk about that a little bit later. But they also said that
> one day God would make a restoration of his people. Remember, the
> prophets always had this happy ending.
>
> We've seen the restoration theme twice now�one time during the
> Assyrian period, and now during the Babylonian period. That's very
> important to us as Christians. Do you have any idea why? Because
> that's what Jesus is. We're going to come to that in a little
> while. But the reality is this is what they said during the Babylonian
> period: "God is going to destroy us. Watch out. Here it comes. But also
> one day he will restore his people."
>
> 4) The Restoration Period
>
> The next period of time, from 539 to 400 BC, is what we could call the
> Old Testament restoration period. A lot of people don't know this,
> but a handful of Israelites, maybe fifty thousand of them or so,
> according to archaeologists, actually came back to the land. The
> Babylonians didn't reign forever. There was another kingdom that
> came and whooped up on them. Do you know who they were? The Persians.
> There was a king whose name was Cyrus. He came and destroyed Babylon,
> took it over. And when he did, what he decided to do, by God's
> grace, was to allow the Israelites to go back. So he encouraged them.
> He said, "I want you to go back and I want you to build your temple and
> I want you to do all the right things. It'll be great. It'll be
> fantastic."
>
> And so they did. They came back under the leadership of a governor, a
> son of David. His name was Zerubbabel. And everybody's thinking to
> themselves, "Man, this is great. Look what's happening here.
> We're coming back from the land. We've got Zerubbabel; he's
> the son of David. We're going to go back there, we're going to
> build the temple. Man, it looks like everything God said from the
> prophets is going to happen right now, right before our eyes. Because
> look�he said he was going to bring us back; he said it was going to
> be great. Look! Look what's happening. It's happening right
> before our eyes!"
>
> But it kind of wound down pretty fast. In 539 to 538 they did return.
> Then Haggai the prophet steps onto the scene and he says, "You live in
> houses of cedar, but the house of God lies in ruins." That's what
> was going on. They had come back and they were building their own
> houses, but they weren't building the temple like they were supposed
> to. It took them five long years to rebuild the temple. And when they
> got finished with it, they looked at it and went, "Wow, that's not
> so nice." In fact the elders started weeping, they were so
> disappointed.
>
> Then, by the time you get to the year 450, just one hundred years after
> they'd come back, they had begun to intermarry with foreign women.
> They began to mix their religion with other religions, and so you ended
> up with widespread apostasy in Israel. And that's where you get
> Ezra and Nehemiah doing all their reforms and building the city and
> getting people to straighten up. Then they turn around and they have to
> do it again; then they have to do it again, and they have to do it yet
> again. Then was an absolute collapse.
>
> You know what it's like when you have a weak battery in your car?
> The car turns over and goes "rrourrrr, rourrr, rourr, rrrrr, rrr, rr,
> r, r...." Right? You ever done that? I've done it a lot. That's
> what happened here. They came back, "Rrourrr, Rrourrr!" Things are
> going pretty good. They were rebuilding the temple, they had
> Zerubbabel. "Rrourr!" But they came intermingling and apostasy... "rrr,
> rr, r..." It's over. The people of God went into a period of
> darkness for some 450 years.
>
> So what do the prophets of this time say�Haggai, Zechariah,
> Malachi? They say things like this during the early days: "We've got
> great potential. This could be the time. If we'll do the right
> thing, if we'll just repent and follow what God says, this could be
> the time when Israel and the people of God are restored and great
> things will happen�times of great blessing." But, unfortunately,
> they didn't do it. The restoration community failed terribly. They
> went out and mixed their religion with other religions, and as a result
> the prophets said, "God will restore his people, but it's going to
> be a long time from now."
>
> You know that passage you always hear in Handel's Messiah�"And
> he shall purify the sons of Levi"? It's from Malachi. So what is
> that about? What Malachi is saying is this: things are so rotten in
> this post-exhilic restored community that Messiah is going to have to
> come and even purify the sons of Levi, the priests. And so they waited
> for that day for some 450 years, for Messiah to come and set things
> straight.
>
> 5) Intertestamental Period
>
> This 450-year period of darkness between the Old and New Testaments is
> what we call the "Intertestamental Period," where there is no prophecy,
> where there is no revelation, where all they can do is wait for this to
> be over.
>
> During this time the Israelites had all kinds of things happen to them.
> The Greeks ruled over them, then they had the Maccabean revolt against
> the Greeks. Then the Romans came and crushed them. As a result, the
> Jews were divided into different denominations. You had the people who
> were Zealots, who wanted to kill everybody and bring in the kingdom.
> You had the Pharisees, who wanted to burden everybody with the laws and
> traditions and bring in the kingdom. They thought, in effect, "If
> we're just righteous enough we can bring in the kingdom." You had
> the Sadducees who denied the resurrection and sort of said, "The
> kingdom doesn't really matter all that much; we're all just
> going to float up to heaven anyway."
>
> And then you had the people like John the Baptist, who said, "Forget
> all that stuff. I'm outta here. I'm out to the desert. I'm
> going to wait for Messiah to come." So by the time John the Baptist is
> around, John the Baptist is one of many different groups that were
> running around in the desert area out on the other side of the Jordan.
> They were sort of hiding out, because sometimes they were greatly
> persecuted. You've heard of the Dead Sea scrolls and the Qumran
> community. That was one of them. You've heard of the Essenes.
> That's another one of them. They're all disenfranchised groups
> running around saying, "When's Messiah coming?"
>
> John the Baptist was one of these. But he said, "He's coming very,
> very soon. Repent, because the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And
> it's not going to come over there in the city with the Pharisees and
> the Sadducees and the Zealots. It's going to come in the most
> unbelievable way you can imagine. Just watch. I don't know how, but
> it's going to happen." Then Jesus appears and John says, "Behold
> the Lamb of God."
>
> Then all of a sudden people start talking about all these prophecies,
> about Israel being restored and Judah being restored. Lots of
> people's eyes begin to open up and they say, "Ah, here it is.
> It's going to be restored in him!"
> In Summary: So, whenever you hear people quoting from Ezekiel and
> telling you these are Apache helicopters, you need to ask yourself a
> question: Now wait a minute. When did Ezekiel minister? Ezekiel
> ministered during the Babylonian period, during the time of the
> Babylonian judgment. He talks about all kinds of things, like what to
> do when you get back to the land, and things like that. But he
> doesn't talk about Apache helicopters!
> Or you may hear people say that when Nahum talks about fire coming from
> their chariots he's really talking about tail lights on cars, and
> that this is a sign of the end of time, that you have red tail lights on
> cars. The next time you hear something like that you can say: Now wait a
> minute. Nahum. Where did he minister? What period was that? The
> Assyrian period. Nahum is not talking about your Volkswagen. Nahum is
> talking about the Assyrians. He's talking about Israel and Judah.
>
> Even if you can't get into the details and work it all out, you can
> have a basic orientation knowing those sorts of things. If you can just
> say, "I may not know exactly what it's talking about, but I know
> it's not talking about tail lights. I know it's not talking
> about Apache helicopters. I know it's talking about real people
> living a long time ago in Israel and Judah during the Assyrian judgment
> and during the Babylonian judgment, and during that brief restoration
> period." If you can keep even that most basic historical orientation,
> you'll go a long ways.
>
> Let me tell you a little story that will help illustrate this. Suppose
> George Washington and Adolf Hitler are both in a room. I walk up to
> George Washington and say to George Washington, "I just want to tell
> you how much I appreciate you, because I'm an American and
> you're the father of my country and the father of democracy.
> You've meant so much to me." But Hitler has been listening, and he
> says to me, "I sure am glad somebody finally understands that I'm
> the father of democracy, and that I have fixed America and made
> everything great for you."
>
> What's wrong with this picture? It's pretty simple. I was
> talking to George Washington, not Adolf Hitler. Hitler made a big
> mistake in thinking that I was talking to him when in fact he was
> overhearing a conversation about another. He was not hearing a
> conversation directed to him. And because he didn't remember that,
> he ended up misunderstanding severely.
>
> That's what we do when we think that prophets are talking about
> America and modern history and cars and nuclear bombs and meltdowns at
> Chernobyl and things like that. We're overhearing, but we forget
> we're overhearing. We act as if they are talking directly to us. We
> need to remember we're overhearing them talk during the Assyrian
> period and the Babylonian period and the post-exhilic or the
> restoration period. That's what their conversation is about.
>
> That's what these Bible prophecy experts do when they read in the
> newspaper that the European Union is happening and they say, "Ah,
> can't you see it? It's right there in Zephaniah chapter 3 verse
> 2!" They are failing to see that it's not written directly about
> us.
>
> Now, let me ask you something. Does this mean that what I said to
> George Washington is irrelevant to Adolf Hitler? I mean, do my words
> have nothing to say to him at all? No, of course not. What should he
> have learned? That George Washington was good. What else should he have
> learned about himself? That he is scum. That's what he should have
> learned. But he didn't learn the right lesson because he forgot he
> was overhearing and thought he was just hearing.
>
> What they said back in those days does have relevance for us. But
> it's only when we remember that they're not written directly to
> us. If you can get that picture, you can begin to read the Bible and
> understand what those prophets were doing, rather than thinking that
> you've got to be looking behind every nook and cranny for another
> sign that Jesus is coming back in a week. And you can stop giving your
> money to those types of ministries and feel OK about it!
>
>
>
>
> This article is provided as a ministry of Third Millennium Ministries
> (IIIM). If you have a question about this
> article, please email
> ament%20Prophecies,%20Pratt> our Theological Editor. If you would like
> to discuss this article in our online community, please visit our
> Reformed Perspectives Magazine Forum
> .
>
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