Now, when you build a house it’s good to start with the foundations. So it is with prophecy; laying the foundation correctly goes a long way towards ending up with a stable and coherent result. With
this in mind let’s take a look at one of the key foundational prophecies contained in the bible, the Genesis account of God’s promises to Abraham.
Now the Lord had said to Abram, “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you.
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I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a
blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
(Genesis 12:1-3)
God calls a man, Abraham. He blesses him and promises to make him a great nation. From this we
know the pathway that God’s blessing flowed down at that time. When it was spoken it was
prediction, but for us it’s now a validation that God’s hand was in a special way behind the nation that eventuated. We also discover in the passage that God set up an enduring pattern, a principal
concerning Israel – “those who bless you I will bless, those who curse you I will curse”. One of the beauties of understanding prophecy is the opportunity to align with God’s will. Israel exists in the world today, so should we bless it or curse it? Hopefully Christians will bless it with the same blessing that it originally blessed us with, the knowledge of Messiah. That God’s blessing to the gentiles
would come through the Messiah of Israel, the descendant of Abraham, was also pointed towards in
the very verses we’re looking at here when God said to Abraham, “And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”. So, far from being surprised when they realized that God had opened the
way of life to the Gentiles the apostles should almost have expected it, both from this and many
other Old Testament passages that one way or another made the same prediction.
HAS GOD FINISHED WITH ISRAEL?
Unfortunately you don’t go far into prophecy without stumbling on controversy. In this case the key issue is that some suggest God has now cut off his blessings from Israel, from Abraham’s seed, and
given them to the “spiritual children of Abraham”, the church. They claim that this has come about
due to Israel’s national rejection of their Messiah. Proponents of what is often called “Replacement Theology” may justify this idea by pointing to Romans 11:17 which says that some of the natural
branches were broken off from the root and fatness of the olive tree that the gentiles might be
grafted in. They may also point out that Galatians 3:7 says that the true children of Abraham are
those who have faith, and other verses that appear to support their position. Certainly a rational
argument can be built to support this point of view, yet it is plainly not biblical when taking into account the fullness of God’s word.
For instance, in Romans 11 Paul says:
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For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.
And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: "the Deliverer will come out of Zion, and He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob;
For this is My covenant with them, when I take away their sins."
(Romans 11:25-26)
This passage, following the section about the branches being broken off, would have been the
perfect opportunity for Paul to explain Replacement Theology, but instead he does the opposite. He
tells us that the blindness of Israel nationally will only continue until the fullness of the gentiles have been gathered, and that Israel will then be grafted back in. In explaining this he refers back to Isaiah.
“The Redeemer will come to Zion, and to those who turn from transgression in Jacob, ”says the Lord.
“As for Me,” says the Lord, “this is My covenant with them: My Spirit who is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth, shall not depart from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your
descendants, nor from the mouth of your descendants’ descendants,” says the Lord, “from this time and forevermore.”
(Isaiah 59:20-21)
Paul interprets these verses as being yet future to his time, not part of the blessings to the church or something that happened at the time of Christ’s first advent, but something that will occur in the
future concerning the redeemer coming to the literal children of Israel.
In addition to failing to believe this plain declaration on the matter in Romans, supporters of
Replacement Theology end up having to teach that all the Old Testament promises made specifically
to Israel now have to be re-interpreted as “spiritual” promises towards the church. This means that portions of the Old Testament that once had a clear literal meaning to the Israelites, and formed
much of the basis of their national identity and hope, are assigned a completely different meaning.
John Calvin sells this approach to “spiritualizing” the book of Isaiah this way:
Now the Prophets hold out those things which relate to the present life, and borrow metaphors from them; but it is in order that they may teach us to rise higher and to embrace eternal and blessed life.
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We must not fix our whole attention on these transitory blessings, but must make use of them as ladders, that, being raised to heaven, we may enjoy eternal and immortal blessings.
(John Calvin1)
This sounds great, but in essence what he is saying is that we can’t take the prophets words literally.
But if we can’t take their words to mean what even the prophets themselves appear to have
believed them to mean, what value are their words to us at all? Doesn’t it just leave the field wide open to interpret them in whatever way suits us? The early reformers may have done a great thing
in breaking away from the darkness of Catholicism, but we have to realize that they could only see
so far. They were so embedded in a Roman Catholic mindset that there were limits to how far they
could shift their thinking in that first big step of the reformation.
The key point in covering this issue is to clarify that promises to Israel will never in this study be redefined as now being towards the church. God made both unconditional and conditional promises
to Israel at different times in the past. The unconditional promises must be fulfilled, for God cannot lie. The conditional promises have been, and are being, fulfilled or not fulfilled according to Israel’s keeping or breaking of their conditions. But even when it comes to the conditional promises,
whether fulfilled or unfulfilled towards Israel, they are still not transferable to the church via clever twists of theology.
WHY STUDY PROPHECY?
Even in just introducing this study of prophecy we have already touched on controversy and the
abuse of the subject itself, therefore it’s no wonder some people just want to avoid the topic like the plague. And yet it is probably more relevant and timely today than at any time since Christ’s
ascension, for truly one of the remarkable things about the time we are living in is the growing social consciousness of our nearness to end times. And although this consciousness is expressed via some
rather diverse perspectives, it still seems poignant that the sum total of many voices is that some kind of end times is near. In amongst the diverse mix are those who refer to the Mayan prophetic
calendar, Nostradamus followers, Christians, Muslims, New Age teachers and even total atheists
who worry about horrific world scenarios. Speaking from just about every shade in the spectrum of
beliefs, it seems that the voices of multitudes are combining to warn that mankind stands on the
brink. Plenty of world issues could be highlighted to suggest this, but there’s something more to it P a g e 11
than that. It appears that somewhere in the collective total of the facts and information swirling
around us many have simply developed a gut feeling that we really are on the verge of a great time
of testing.
So given all the opinions and superstition that abound in the world, it’s important that Christians really know how to rightly divide the word of truth, how to give a clear account of Gods plan
amongst all the confusion, and how to discern true prophetic fulfillments from false. Will there be false fulfillments? It would seem so. For example, II Thessalonians 2:9 tells us that the Antichrist will come with “all signs and lying wonders”. This is not conclusive on its own but we’ll see as we go on that there are strong indicators that Antichrist will probably be hailed by many as the Christ and
touted as fulfilling (incorrectly interpreted) biblical prophecies2 concerning Christ and his kingdom.
This abominable deception cannot arise out of nowhere. Rather the foundations of deception have
to be laid first, and indeed they are already being laid. It’s easy to keep on just living life without lifting our heads to see the great deception that’s developing in the world around us, or the darkness starting to overshadow the land. But if ever there was a day for Christians to be alert, students of prophecy and of God’s word as a whole, it is surely today. That’s the motivation behind preparing
this study; to help those who desire understanding to get a clear grasp of the most immediately
relevant and essential themes of bible prophecy.
While reasonably straight forward, the material that follows is quite condensed so in many places it is best read slowly, with reflection, and ideally in combination with reading the bible chapters and verses being referenced. All bible quotations are from the NKJV3 (due to the richness and power of
that translations wording), however some readers may well prefer following them in an NIV4 or
other simplified version in order to assist understanding.
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