HGP-05 Historical Analysis of Prophecy

What are the consequences of ignoring the historical situation of biblical prophecy?

Dr. Richard L. Pratt, Jr.

There’s a very important sense in which the word of God, given through his prophets in the Old Testament, is timeless. And by that we mean that it was true when it was first given, it continues to be true, and it always will be true, because God does not make mistakes. His prophets don’t make mistakes. They do not lie; they do not misrepresent him. That’s what we mean when we say that the Bible is the word of God, and it’s timeless. But we don’t mean by that is that the Bible was not written for historical circumstances. In reality, the Bible was written very much to apply the basic beliefs of Israel to Israel at particular times. Israel believed fundamentally that God is the king and he’s building his kingdom on the earth, and that he is going to administer this kingdom by means of his covenants. But Bible books, including the Prophets, take that basic belief about God's kingdom and that basic belief about God’s covenants, and they apply those truths to the situations that the prophets were in. Even when they talk about distant future events, they’re still talking about those events for the people to whom they’re speaking in a particular situation. And so, to understand the timeless significance of biblical prophecies — what they mean for us today and what they will always mean for God’s people — we have to go back to, as much as we can, go back to the days when the prophets first uttered those words, because they were not talking nonsense to people. They were talking about things that, at least, made at least some sense to the people to whom they were speaking. Even when Daniel says, “I can’t understand this…” At one time he just throws his hands up and says, “I can’t understand it!” Well, it was still true for him and still relevant for him because it was talking about things that were still going to give hope to Israel in the future and those sorts of things. He knew that something good was going to come from all of this. It was just, “I can’t get the details of this. This is beyond me right now.” And that’s the way it is with prophecy very often. It’s timeless in its significance. It’s always the eternal word of God. But at the same time, even when the original audience could not quite get the details of what was being said, it still impacted them. And for us to understand how it should impact us, we need to go back and understand how it was first designed to impact them.