Skip to main content

The challenge of prophecy



Amos 9:15

I will plant them on their land,
    and they shall never again be uprooted
    out of the land that I have given them,”
says the Lord your God.

Thought for the day – The challenge of prophecy

One of the challenges of reading scripture some two and a half thousand years after it's been written is history. And by that I mean the fact that so much has happened between when the prophecy was uttered and us reading it today. So an example of it is our verse today. Amos says that God would plant the people of Israel on their land and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that God has given them. And yet we know that the Northern Kingdom was completely destroyed and that even the tribes of Judah and Benjamin were sent into exile. Though Benjamin and Judah did come back to Jerusalem, even then however, Jerusalem was completely destroyed and the Jews completely dispersed in 70 AD, when the Romans sacked Jerusalem.

So, the question is, how can we read prophecy from the distance in time that we are today and still see its value in the world we live in today? Is God speaking metaphorically here? Or does He actually intend to put the people of Israel in a land of their own that can never be taken away from them? 

It could be argued that actually, the creation of the nation of Israel in 1948, is the fulfilment of the prophecy of God returning his people back to their land.  It's a very literal interpretation, but it's an interpretation. So how do we read prophecy through the lens of history? 

The short version is that prophecy makes the most sense when you start with the prophet’s own moment, the Assyrian threat, the Babylonian exile, the return, and ask what those first hearers would have understood.

Most prophets were speaking into a crisis, so their words were often a mix of warning, call to repentance, and hope, rather than a crystal ball for centuries ahead. You’d look at the political backdrop, say Isaiah facing Assyria or Jeremiah facing Babylon, then at the covenant language they lean on from Deuteronomy, where blessing and curse frame everything. From there, you can ask how later writers, the Gospels especially, saw a deeper fulfilment, which is where the lens of promise, fulfilment and ongoing hope comes in.

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

 

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What does it mean to put Jesus first?

What does it mean to put Jesus first? John 12:1-8   Philippians 3:4b-13 What does it mean to put Jesus first? I ask this because as always I try to find a link between the two lectionary readings and as I was thinking about the readings the thing that I recognized across both these passages was the thought that both Mary and Paul are putting Jesus first. In John, we have this wonderful account of Mary anointing Jesus. It’s a passage we think we know reasonably well. It’s not the only account of Jesus being anointed, and most Biblical scholars agree that this account is the same as the accounts found in Luke and Matthew. Details vary but essentially it is the same account. In the account we see Jesus reclining at a table and then Mary prostrates herself at Jesus’ feet and empty’s a whole jar of nard on Jesus. And then wipes Jesus feet with her hair. Two things strike me here. Firstly Nard was not cheap. John notes that is was the equivalent of a year’s worth of wag...
7 comments
Read more
 Holiness What does holiness look like to you? Or when you hear the word holy what comes to mind. The reason I’m asking is because for a while now I have been thinking about holiness. What does it mean to be holy and whether or not we can truly be holy? We are commanded to be holy both in the Old Testament and by Jesus who said be holy as your Father in heaven is holy (Matthew 5:48).  John Wesley taught that genuine faith produces inward and outward holiness. He consistently argued that salvation must produce holiness of heart and life, but he never viewed the process as something that would be completed. He taught that despite the inner assurance and regeneration of character that results from knowing that you have been saved, it is never too long before we discover that there is still a root of sin within. However, there is never an occasion or state of true Christian discipleship that does not lead to a deepening of our love for God and for our neighbour and we become mo...
Post a Comment
Read more
Ecclesiastes 3:1 There is an occasion for everything, and a time for every activity under heaven   Thought for the day The blogger Jill Printzenhoff writes about a time how she went fishing and caught nothing and yet the fisherman next to her managed to pull out seven. They were using different bait and she describes it as not her day. She finishes her blog post with these words: ‘You keep striving, you keep working, and you keep on keeping on. Because some day when you cast your line . . . you will be at the right spot at the right time . . . and that day will be your day . . . the day you catch that all elusive fish!’ I believe that there is a time for everything under heaven and earth and sometimes, well actually, all the time we need to be patient and wait because the reality of the situation is we are working to God’s time. The writer of Ecclesiastes also says this about God’s timing: ‘He has made everything appropriate[b] in its time. He has also put eternity in...
Post a Comment
Read more