Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

Chair, Division of Biblical Studies & Theology,

Bob Jones University

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When the Impossible Becomes Likely: The Resurrection of Christ, Part 2

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Part 1

In my last post I observed that because the claim that Christ rose from the dead is extraordinary, it calls for an extraordinary level of evidence. I noted that the Bible contains both eyewitness and forensic evidence. In this post we begin to work with the eyewitness evidence.

People don’t always tell the truth. Sometimes they lie, and sometimes they’re just mistaken. (Just think of all your Facebook friends who regularly post things you know to be flatly untrue—and they really believe the nonsense. And think of how many of them are professing Christians.) Because the legal system knows of this problem, it has instituted requirements for witnesses, to weed out the crooks and the well-intentioned bozos:

  • Witnesses must be competent.

That is, they must have actually seen something. “My brother told me that he saw … “ will get a witness thrown out on the basis of a sustained objection to hearsay. We have no time for people just passing along stories they’ve heard. What have you seen?

The biblical record includes witnesses like that—people who saw and heard the resurrected Christ. Eyewitnesses like Mary, who initially thought that Jesus was the gardener but realized during the ensuing conversation that he was the one she had known so well (Jn 20.11-18). And his eleven disciples, who had lived with him for three years and knew him intimately, and who actually sat and ate with him at least twice after the resurrection (Lk 24.33-43; Jn 21.1-14), and likely a lot more than that (Ac 1.1-3). And James (1Co 15.7), his next-younger brother (Mt 13.55), who had not believed in him during his earthly ministry (Jn 7.5).

These are competent eyewitnesses. They’ve seen, and they know what they’ve seen.

Are there other explanations for what they’ve seen? Anything other than a resurrection?

Well, it couldn’t be a case of mistaken identity; these witness knew Jesus well and interacted with him extensively during the 40 days after the resurrection.

And despite lots of frantic theories, there’s no evidence that Jesus had a twin brother—especially since his birth is described in great detail (Mt 1-2; Lk 1-2) without any mention of a twin. Now you’re just getting desperate.

Further, these eyewitnesses rule out the most obvious counter-explanation—that the resurrection is just a myth, a natural consequence of stories accreting unlikely details over time, like the fish that gets bigger every time the fisherman describes him.

How do these witnesses rule out the myth theory?

Well, they stood together, made the claim, and identified themselves publically as eyewitnesses less than 2 months after the event (Ac 2.32), in the very city where it allegedly happened, and no one—including a lot of influential and empowered people who wanted desperately to put the kibosh on the whole thing (Ac 4.6-7, 15-18)—was able to refute their story. That’s not how myths develop; they don’t spring up immediately, when opposing eyewitnesses would be available to serve as first-century mythbusters. The silence is deafening.

Now, if you’re thinking objectively, you’ve probably thought of a weakness with what I’ve done here.

How do we know about these eyewitnesses? From the Bible. And how do we know the account is true? How do we really know there were any witnesses at all?

Good question. I’m glad you’re thinking in an engaged way. (Teachers love it when students do that.)

That’s a big-boy question, and it requires a big-boy answer, not one you can present in a blog post or two. In short, I find the Scripture to be reliable on the basis of a great number of evidences and in the absence of any credible exclusionary evidence. I’ve laid out my thinking in that regard in a previous series of posts, but even those posts barely scratch the surface. I can recommend all kinds of books—big, thick, sometimes but not always dry and dusty books. Let me know if you want a list.

Next time, we’ll look at the second qualification for an eyewitness. And maybe a third, depending on how verbose I get.

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When the Impossible Becomes Likely: The Resurrection of Christ, Part 1

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Squarely at the center of Christianity is the resurrection of Christ (1Co 15.3-4). As a rule, Christians have gotten so used to the idea that they no longer realize how crazy that sounds.

So try a little thought experiment.

Suppose you hear that someone you know has died. And then, a few days or weeks later, you see him walking around.

What do you think?

Well, there are several possibilities that will come to mind.

  • If you see him just briefly at a distance, you’ll say to yourself, “Boy, that guy sure looked like Joe!” And you might see if you can get a second look at him. But then you’ll move on, marveling that different people can look so similar.
  • If you see him more thoroughly—say he walks up to you and says, “Hello, old friend!”—you’ll conclude that the report you got was mistaken. The guy who told me he died must have been joking, or honestly misinformed. Or maybe I dreamed it. Or whatever. At any rate, he didn’t die; he’s still alive.
  • There’s a third, less likely, possibility. Once an acquaintance of mine died. Something that a lot of his friends didn’t know was that he happened to be an identical twin. Since I did know that, I didn’t have the reaction many of his friends did on seeing his brother at the funeral.

But I’ll tell you what you won’t think. You won’t think your friend rose from the dead, because that just doesn’t happen, and you know that perfectly well. There has to be another explanation.

Resurrections just don’t happen. Resurrection is impossible.

So then. About this alleged resurrection of Christ. Christians need to fully apprehend what an extraordinary—even preposterous—claim it is. We can’t expect people to just accept the allegation, and in fact we shouldn’t accept the allegation either without extraordinary evidences. Plural.

Resurrections just don’t happen.

After a lifetime of studying the claim and ruminating over the evidence, I’ve come to a conclusion:

The least likely possibility—the impossible one—is in fact the most likely possibility.

Now, that claim is just as preposterous as the first one, isn’t it?

What I’d like to do over the next several posts is examine the evidence and see whether there’s any basis at all for my conclusion.

I should note that in 1998 Lee Strobel edited an anthology called The Case for Christ, containing chapters by our generation’s leading apologists on Jesus’ claims to Messiahship, including the resurrection. I came to confident belief in the resurrection before Strobel’s book arrived on the scene and was delighted to see that his thinking on the evidence paralleled mine. What follows here is a concise summary of my thinking; if you want something quite a bit deeper and a lot more thorough, read Strobel’s excellent book.

We should begin with some observations about the nature of evidence. When detectives investigate a crime today, they generally gather two kinds of evidence: eyewitness testimony, and forensic evidence, such as materials left at the scene: shell casings, blood, fingerprints, and so forth.

The biblical record contains both types of evidence. The subsequent question is two-fold:

  • Is the evidence reliable?
  • Is the evidence exclusionary? That is, does it rule out other explanations?

These are important questions, and given the preposterous of the claim—he rose from the dead!—we ought to evaluate the evidence carefully and answer the questions with reasonable objectivity. That’s what I hope to do in the next few posts.

Something to think about for next time:

Eyewitness evidence is notoriously unreliable. Especially when it sees dead men walking around. Nobody in his right mind believes that Elvis bought a sandwich at a diner in Tulsa in 2006. So does the biblical evidence reach the level of authority needed to support a preposterous claim?

See you next time.

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 6

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In my last post we worked through the Apostle Peter’s sermon at Pentecost (Acts 2), looking for doctrinal content. Here’s what we came up with, in systematic theological terms:

Bibliology

  • The Hebrew scriptures are God’s Word (Ac 2.17) and therefore reliable (Ac 2.16).

Theology Proper

  • God directs history (Ac 2.23).
  • God does miracles; history includes some number of supernatural events (Ac 2.22).

Christology

  • Jesus did miracles (Ac 2.22).
  • Jesus died by crucifixion and rose again (Ac 2.23-24, 32).
  • Jesus continues his divine work from heaven (Ac 2.33-34).
  • Jesus is God (Ac 2.36).
  • Jesus is Christ, the fulfillment of the Hebrew messianic prophecies (Ac 2.36).

Pneumatology

  • There is a Holy Spirit (Ac 2.17).

Anthropology

  • People are sinful (Ac 2.40).

Soteriology

  • Salvation is available to all peoples (Ac 2.18, 21, 39).
  • Salvation is available freely (Ac 2.21) through repentance (Ac 2.38).

Eschatology

  • There is a coming “Day of Yahweh” (Ac 2.20).

When we put all this into our chart, we end up with something like this. (I’ve truncated our data slightly for simplicity’s sake.)

Where do we go from here? Well, we repeat this same process on the other apostolic sermons in Acts, filling in the other columns on our chart. A quick result might look something like this, though a more careful study—which you’ll do, right?—would yield more doctrines in the first column.

And then you see where the overlaps are—which doctrines are most emphasized in this database of sermons. For illustration purposes I’ve simply counted the number of sermons in which each doctrine appears and then sorted the list on that column, with the most common doctrines at the top. You can see that “quick and dirty” result here.

What are the biggest ideas?

  • The deity of Christ
  • Forgiveness of sins
  • The death and resurrection of Christ / witnesses
  • The reliability of Scripture
  • Repentance

It’s no surprise that our list includes “the gospel” as defined by Paul in 1Co 15.3-4.

Now, we’re not done yet. As I noted in a previous post in this series, we need to evaluate the other datasets that my friend Tom Wheeler identified in his dissertation, and then we need to compare all the lists we end up with to see if there are patterns there—which there are—as justification for producing a “meta-list,” which should serve as a pretty good indicator of What We’re Going to Fight About.

And then we need to decide where to draw the line. How far down the list do we decide this is a doctrine that isn’t “emphasized”? How far down the list do we go before we decide that we’re not going to fight about that one? I’d suggest that that’s a literary-analysis question: where do you draw the line at emphasis?

Tom’s dissertation has done a good job of that already. But you can do that work yourself, you know. You don’t have to be a scholar like Tom; with the Word and the illuminating work of the indwelling Holy Spirit, you have all the tools you need to do this study for yourself. Maybe you’ll notice something he didn’t. And even if you don’t, you’ll benefit immensely from the study, and you’ll approach doctrinal controversies in this polarized and freaked-out world with a calmness and a confidence that will communicate grace, mercy, and peace to all those around you.

That’s worth the effort, right?

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The Names of Christmas, Part 3

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So both of the Christmas names—Jesus and Immanuel—highlight the fact of the Incarnation, that God became one of us. As I put it last time, the eternal God the Son added to his (divine) nature, or set of characteristics, a second, human nature, a different set of characteristics.

That’s a unique event. No other person, not even the Father or the Spirit, has ever had two natures.

We have trouble with unique things, because we like to learn by comparing the new thing to something we already know. And when there’s nothing to compare the new thing to, we end up scratching our heads and asking questions that we have insufficient data to answer.

How does a divine person add a human nature? How does any person add any second nature?

The early church spent 400 years trying to figure that one out, and pretty much every theory they came up with along the way was a heresy. Finally, in AD 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, they managed to formulate a statement of what happened—a statement that has stood the test of the centuries since—but they gave up forever the possibility of actually explaining it.

Really—how does a person with two natures live out his life? How does he think? How can he be both mortal and immortal? How can he be both omnipresent and corporeal? How can he be omniscient and yet say, matter-of-factly, “I don’t know when I’m coming back” (Mk 13.32)?

I’d like to make up a story that I’m pretty sure never happened, just to make the point.

—–

An angel shows up in the executive wing of heaven and approaches the receptionist.

“I’d like to see the Son, please,” he says.

The receptionist replies, “I’m sorry, but you can’t.”

Now, that answer has never before been given to that request, so the angel is puzzled.

“I can’t?! What kind of an answer is that?! Why can’t I?”

“Because he’s not here. He’s out of the office.”

The angel is nonplussed, whatever that means.

“What do you mean, he’s ‘not here’?! He’s omnipresent. How can he not be here? That doesn’t even make any sense!”

“Well, it’s a little difficult to explain, but I assure you that he’s not here.”

The angel, perplexed, gives in.

“OK, I’ll play your little game. He’s ‘not here.’ Well, then, ‘where’ is he? I’ll go ‘there’ and see him.”

The receptionist takes a deep breath.

“Well, I can tell you where he is, and you can go there, but even if you do, you won’t be able to see him.”

“Why not?”

Another deep breath.

“Because he can’t talk.”

“He can’t talk?! Are you kidding me?! How can he not talk?!”

The receptionist clears her throat.

“Because he’s a fetus. He’s not going to be able to talk for a couple of years yet.”

—–

As I say, I’m pretty sure this never happened, first, because our imagined angel seems a little impatient for somebody who’s not a sinner, and more importantly, I don’t think any angels were surprised by the incarnation. Oh—and I doubt that the executive wing of heaven has a receptionist, although I can’t be completely sure of that.

But let’s take some time to think about this.

Paul tells us that among other things, the Son is the agent of providence—by him, all things are held together (Col 1.17). As far as I know, there’s no 25th Amendment in the Constitution of Heaven, whereby a member of the Godhead passes off his duties to another member in anticipation of his temporary incapacitation. So is the Son running the universe from Mary’s womb? as a fetus? as an embryo?

Is it true that “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes”? Does he learn to walk the first time he tries, or does he “fall down and go boom”? Does Mary ever have to correct his grammar? Does he always get A’s in school? Does Joseph ever have to tell him, “Now, Joshua, if you keep holding the hammer that way, you’re going to hit your thumb!”?

My friend, you think you know this person, but there is more to him than you can ever know. He is unfathomable, unimaginable, indecipherable.

And he did this for you. When you were his enemy and determined to stay that way.

Immanuel. God with us.

Merry Christmas.

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The Names of Christmas, Part 2

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Part 1

Last time we noted what the name Jesus means—and that enabled us to understand what the angel is saying to Joseph in Matthew 1—this baby is Yahweh himself, the one who saves his people from their sins.

God has become one of us.

Now Matthew’s commentary on the angel’s words follows unavoidably:

22 Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 23 Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

Matthew is writing to Jews, presenting Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ. One of the most obvious ways he does this is by citing prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, and showing specifically how Jesus fulfills those prophecies. Note how often he says, “All this was done, that it might be fulfilled,” or something similar—

  • Here, of the incarnation
  • 2.15, of his time in Egypt
  • 2.17, of the slaughter of the innocents
  • 2.23, of his upbringing in Nazareth
  • 4.14, of his preaching in Decapolis
  • 8.17, of his healing ministry
  • 12.17, of the Messianic secret
  • 13.13, of the resistance by the religious leaders
  • 13.35, of his parables
  • 21.4, of the triumphal entry
  • 26.54, 56, of his arrest, trial, and execution
  • 27.9, of his betrayal
  • 27.35, of the soldiers’ casting of lots

The first prophecy he chooses to cite reveals the second name of Christmas.

Emmanuel. God with us.

I suspect that neither Isaiah nor his hearers understood the prophecy. They probably thought, God is with us, as he has been with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and with David and Solomon, and with our people throughout our history.

Yes, it includes that idea, but the prophecy embraces a much more intimate “with” than that.

He is going to join us, to become one of us. He’s going to be not just present, but identified with us.

In theological terms, the person of the Son, eternally existent with a divine nature, is going to add to his person a second nature, a human one. He’s going to get tired, and get hurt, and die.

And he’s going to keep that human nature forever.

It amazes me that when God created the world, he knew that giving humans the ability to have a healthy relationship involved giving them the ability to choose—and that meant the ability to choose wrong. And that meant the possibility—nay, the certainty—of sin. And God knew that he would never allow his image to be permanently disfigured in such a way—that he would respond to our rebellion justly, with a sentence of death, and mercifully, with the opportunity for repentance and forgiveness. He would do whatever was necessary to be just and to justify—to rescue—his image. And he knew that justice would require an infinite sacrifice, which we would be unable to pay, and which he would be unable to pay either, because the penalty is death, and he cannot die.

So from the very beginning he knew that by creating humans, beings in his image, on whom he could bestow the joy of his friendship, he was committing himself to become one of them.

Forever.

What a commitment that was!

What a God he is!

Next time, a meditation on what happens when God becomes man.

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The Names of Christmas, Part 1

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PNo, I don’t mean the names of the day. I mean the names that arise out of what we celebrate at Christmas—the names of the Incarnate One.

What we call the Christmas Story introduces us to two names that are new, and meaningfully so. The first one is now so familiar to us that we’ve completely forgotten its meaning—if we ever knew it all. We meet it in Matthew’s account of the birth of the Son of God, in chapter 1—

18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. 19 Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. 20 But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. 21 And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.

The first name that comes out of the Christmas Story is “Jesus.” We all know it well today; it’s the personal name of the Son, which he took on when he became human. But most of us completely miss the whole significance of the way it was introduced in Scripture.

To start with, the name has come to us through several languages, and as anyone named Juan or Jean or Johann or Ivan knows, names change when they cross languages. Jesus is the English form of the Greek Iesous, which in turn translates the Hebrew Yeshua, or its longer form Yehoshua, or, as we would say it, Joshua. Yes, Jesus’ name was just Joshua—which explains a bit of translational confusion in the KJV of Hebrews 4.8, where they give the impression that the author is speaking of Jesus giving rest, when he’s actually speaking of the OT Joshua taking Israel into the Promised Land. (See also Ac 7.45.)

Whew.

Where was I?

Have you ever wondered why the angel said to Joseph, “You must call his name Joshua, for he will save his people from their sins”? Have you ever noticed that subordinate conjunction in there, the one that identifies a causal link between the name and Jesus’ saving work?

To us English-speaking readers, that doesn’t make sense—or, more likely, we just sail on past it without even noticing that it doesn’t make sense, because the words are so familiar to us.

But that causal link is in there for a reason. It’s making an important point, one, I could argue, that is the most important point ever made by anyone.

Joseph would have gotten the point—it would have been as plain as day to him, and he would have understood its significance immediately. I suspect that’s why he unquestioningly obeyed the angel’s instructions. He adopted the child, risking—and probably ruining—his reputation in the process. If your fiancée is pregnant, and you marry her and adopt the child, everybody’s going to nod his head and smirk and wink knowingly. Uh-huh. We all know what that means, now, don’t we? And 30 years later they were still smirking when they tried to undercut Jesus’ authority by sneering, “We were not born of fornication!” (Jn 8.41).

Why did Joseph obey, unhesitatingly, when he knew what the cost of that obedience would be to his own reputation, and perhaps to his livelihood as a contractor?

Because he understood the meaning of the angel’s words. He understood the “for,” the causal link.

Because he knew what the name meant.

“Joshua,” you see, means “Yahweh saves.”

The angel said, “You must name him ‘Yahweh saves,’ ”—so far, so good—“because he will save his people from their sins!”

Do you see it?

“He”—the infant—no, the fetus—“he” is Yahweh!

The everlasting God, who makes covenants with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob—and keeps them—who sits high on the throne in Isaiah’s vision, whose train fills the temple, but who reveals himself to Israel by his first name—this God is now a fetus in the womb of a Jewish teenager.

This is much, much bigger than Joseph, or Mary, or shepherds, or wise men, or all of us put together. Nothing like this has ever happened before, or likely will ever happen again.

God has become one of us.

Next time, the second Christmas name.

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 4

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I’ve asserted my thesis–Biblical  prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards—and I’ve given a couple of biblical passages that appear to confirm it, as well as an example to give us a more concrete understanding of the principle. Now for the hard question in any assertion—

So what?

I know people who have spent their whole lives trying to understand biblical prophecy. I know others who are troubled, or even disgusted, by the arguments and disagreements that spring from such efforts.

Why can’t we all just get along?

I think the matter we’re discussing here helps us put the modern situation into perspective.

  • The Bible contains a lot of prophecies that haven’t been fulfilled yet.
  • In many cases, God has designed these prophecies to be obscure until the time of fulfillment.
  • Just as Isaiah’s hearers, in trying to imagine a scenario in which Isaiah 53.9 could be fulfilled, would have been very unlikely to imagine what actually happened, so we should expect that our interpretations of the obscure prophecies will be off the mark in ways both minor and significant.
  • Thus it is likely that believers who love God and his Word and study it deeply will come to different conclusions about what precisely the eschatological material predicts.
  • The current disagreement is not a problem or evidence of some spiritual failure in the church; it’s exactly what we should expect.

So we have different views at the macroscopic level—

  • Premillennialists say that we should take prophetic passages just as literally as we take historical passages, because
    • Changing hermeneutical horses in the middle of the stream is inconsistent, and
    • Prophecies that have already been fulfilled have been fulfilled literally.
  • Postmillennialists say that if we really want to do that, we need to take literally Jesus’ teaching that the kingdom would come not suddenly, but slowly, over a long period of time (Mt 13.31-33).
  • And amillennialists say that if we want to take it literally, we’re going to have a problem with 7 heads and 10 horns. If there are clear contextual clues that we shouldn’t take it literally, then we shouldn’t take it literally. And isn’t the new covenant supposed to get away from the physical, literal, external stuff anyway, and move to the inner person of the heart (Jer 31.31-33)? And isn’t Jesus’ kingdom eternal, and not limited to a mere 1000 years (Isa 9.7)?

And even among premillennialists there are differences of interpretation—

  • Pretribulationists say that if we can be surprised by the Rapture (Mt 25.1-13), then it must be the very next thing to happen on the prophetic timeline.
  • Midtribulationists say that the Rapture is described as the two witnesses being caught up to heaven (Rev 11.12), at the seventh trumpet judgment (Rev 11.15), the “last trump” (1Co 15.52), at the midway point of the 7-year tribulation.
  • Posttribulationists say that both believers and unbelievers will be resurrected together at a single return of Christ at the end of the Tribulation (Dan 12.1-3).

Every one of these interpreters has a point. But they can’t all be right.

And maybe, based on what we’ve been discussing, just maybe none of them is completely right.

That means that we have to give one another some room to study, and think, and puzzle, and scratch our heads, and wonder. We need to hear one another’s arguments without making our primary goal to win the argument for our side. We need to approach this puzzle with some sense of historical and hermeneutical understanding, one that holds our own views loosely and humbly, one that waits for the Great Clarity that will come when it all comes to pass.

Humility. Tentativeness. Openness, within the bounds of clear biblical teaching.

Brotherly kindness. Cooperative investigation.

Now, I should say that I’m a pretribulational premillennialist. And I’m pretty sure I’m right. :-)

We ought to study, and think, and try to come to some sort of reasonable conclusion that accounts smoothly for all the biblical data. That’s what theology does, as a matter of stewardship of the great divine gift of the Word. We can’t just sit back lazily and be “panmillennialists—it’ll all pan out in the end.”

But we need to recognize our limits as well, and we need to recognize what those limits say about what kinds of doctrines are worth fighting over, and what kinds aren’t.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll write about that one of these days.

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 3

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I’ve asserted my thesis–Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards—and I’ve given a couple of biblical passages that appear to confirm it. Now it’s time to work with an example, making the idea a little more concrete.

One of the most well-known prophetic passages in the entire Bible, at least among Christians, is Isaiah 53. It’s the fourth and last in a series of “Servant Songs” in Isaiah, and the most well known, primarily, I suppose, because Georg Friedrich Handel included much of it in his oratorio Messiah.

  • He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
  • Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows;
  • With his stripes we are healed;
  • All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all;
  • He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter;
  • It pleased the LORD to bruise him.

We’ve heard the lines often, and they’ve become part of our consciousness, part of our culture, especially at Christmas.

Because of that familiarity, we’re unlikely to hear it the way Isaiah’s hearers—and Isaiah himself—did. The words were not familiar to them; they had to hear them, and try to understand them, for the first time.

And right in the middle of this song the Spirit has Isaiah write something that would have been quite puzzling to him and his Israelite audience:

  • He made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death.

Put yourself in Isaiah’s sandals.

Whaaaaat?!

That statement doesn’t make any sense at all.

The wicked and the rich don’t die similarly, and they’re not treated the same at the time. The wicked—criminals—are executed, probably by stoning, and their bodies are thrown out with the trash into the Valley of Hinnom, where the vultures pick at their rotting corpses until only the bones remain (Prov 30.17). A very undignified treatment.

The rich, on the other hand, are celebrated and mourned in their death, and their corpses are placed reverently in the family tomb, often a cave, sometimes carved laboriously out of solid rock.

How can both of these things be true for the Servant of Yahweh? How can he die in both disgrace and honor? How can he be numbered with transgressors and yet be buried with the rich?

As I say, our familiarity with these words—and with the prophecy’s fulfillment—means that the words don’t even give us pause. We nod our heads appreciatively, envisioning the fulfillment with perfect clarity—

  • Executed as a criminal, between two other criminals;
  • Has a secret disciple, a member of the Sanhedrin, well respected and very wealthy, who uses his influence to acquire the body after execution and places it in his own personal tomb.

Well, as a friend of mine used to say, “Hindsight’s 50/50.” :-) It’s easy to understand the question if you already know the answer, and it’s easy to “solve” a problem if you already know what happens.

But Isaiah and his hearers didn’t have any of that. They scratched their heads, grimaced, and wondered.

What could this possibly mean?

It’s obscure for more than 700 years. And during those years, generation after generation wonders.

And then, in real time and in the sight of all, the prophecy is fulfilled. The promise comes to pass.

And in an instant, the wonder of puzzlement gives way to the wonder of delight, and the fog lifts and understanding comes.

So that’s what it means! Wow!

The prophecy is obscure until the time of fulfillment—but then it’s as clear as day.

This isn’t some meaningless musing of a Nostradamus, whose prophecies are so vague that they could be fulfilled by any number of unspectacular events. No, this is a specific but incomprehensible prophecy, one that is immediately recognizable at its unique and precise fulfillment.

Discovery is a really great teaching technique. You remember what you discover, especially when the discovery hits you hard, right between the eyes. Especially when you solve a puzzle that’s been stumping the experts for centuries.

Maybe that’s why God did it this way.

Next time, I’ll draw some conclusions and applications from all this.

Part 4

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 2

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Part 1

In my previous post I’ve stated my thesis:

Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards.

Let me explain my basis for concluding that.

To begin with, this principle is directly stated in both Testaments.

In the Old Testament, we find a description of Daniel receiving a prophecy:

1 At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. 2 And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. 3 And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever (Dan 12.1-3).

Daniel is then told to “shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end” (Dan 12.4). So God’s intention, in this case, is that the prophecy not be generally distributed. So far, so good.

Then Daniel sees a vision of two men, one of whom asks the other, “How long shall it be till the end of these wonders?” (Dan 12.6b). To which the other responds

that it would be for a time, times, and half a time, and that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end all these things would be finished (Dan 12.7b).

Perhaps your immediate response is, “Huh?” “Time, times, and a half a time?” What kind of an answer is that? What does it mean?

Well, you’re in good company, because Daniel himself thought the same thing (Dan 12.8a), and he asked for an explanation (Dan 12.8b). And he was told, “Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end” (Dan 12.9).

In other words, “Never mind; I’m not going to tell you.”

And Daniel is the prophet!

And why is the meaning withheld from the very one who’s supposed to write about it?

Because it’s not for now; it’s for later.

None of your business.

Well, that’s intriguing. God has no intention that anyone, including even the prophet, should understand the prophecy at the time it was given. No one will understand it until it’s fulfilled. Then they’ll understand.

And that’s what God intended all along.

Well, that’s Old Testament. Got anything from the New Testament?

Well, as it happens, I do. Thanks for asking.

In his first epistle, Peter describes the glories of our salvation and the plan of God that brought it about. Along the way he notes that the Old Testament prophets weren’t able to understand those things the way we have been able to (1P 1.10). Specifically, he says, they were puzzled by the apparent conflict between the reigning King, the eternal Son of David (2Sam 7), and the suffering Servant, who was executed without a defense (Isa 53). How could both of those be true of the same person? (1P 1.11).

And Peter notes that God revealed to them “that they were serving not themselves but [us],” who would come later and see those prophecies fulfilled (1P 1.12).

So in these cases, God clearly intended the predictions to be obscure, puzzling.

I should say that I don’t think this was always the case. When Jeremiah prophesied that Judah would be in captivity in Babylon for 70 years (Jer 25.11) and would then return (Jer 29.10), he understood what he was saying, and he intended his hearers to understand as well. He even bought a piece of land and buried the deed (Jer 32.9-15) to show them the kind of confidence that they should have in the Lord’s keeping of this promise.

But it was not at all uncommon for God to give a prophecy that seemed incomprehensible at the time, and he did so intentionally.

Next time we’ll look at an example of such a puzzling prophecy, one that has since been fulfilled. By studying that example we’ll be able to see more concretely how confusing such a prophecy would be initially, but how perfectly clear it would at the time of fulfillment. And that insight may help us understand why God is speaking so obscurely in the first place.

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 1

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A lot of Christians are confused, and some are even troubled, by biblical prophecy. It seems really hard to understand—what’s with those wheels that Ezekiel saw? and how do you get seven heads and ten horns on a beast? Other Christians are troubled by the fact that nobody can seem to agree on how things are supposed to turn out. Some people have been predicting the Rapture for decades now—and they’ve been wrong every time. And others, who look like perfectly good Christians, chuckle, “Rapture, huh? You don’t really believe that, do you?”

There’s a reason for all this. And when you understand it—the reason, not the prophecies—you’ll realize that there’s really nothing to be upset about.

Let me see if I can clarify some things.

I should begin by defining what I’m talking about. When I say “prophecy,” I’m talking about biblical predictions, places where the Bible says that something’s going to happen in the future. Technically, everything the Bible says is “prophecy,” in the sense that it’s a message from God to humans, delivered through mouthpieces, prophets. But here I’m using the word more narrowly.

The Bible does make a lot of predictions. The first one is in Gen 3.15, where God predicts that “the seed of the woman” will crush the serpent’s head. The last one is Jesus’ statement, “Surely I come quickly,” in Rev 22.20. And there are a lot of them in between.

We can sort them into 2 groups—those that have been fulfilled, and those that haven’t. A great many of those that have been fulfilled are about just 2 events—the exiles of Israel (especially the exile of Judah to Babylon and back) and the first coming of Christ. It can be instructive to study how those prophecies were stated and then how they were fulfilled; I think that study serves as a kind of lab for how we should expect other prophecies to be fulfilled (more on that later).

Most of the ones that haven’t been fulfilled are about the end times—what we call eschatology. And there is where most of the disagreement is among biblical scholars and among everyday Christians.

So why all the disagreement?

I would suggest that it springs primarily from the way God has chosen to give his prophecies.

In short, they’re really hard to understand.

Note that I’ve said that this is “the way God has chosen” to speak to us about these things. The fact that the predictions are obscure is not some kind of defect in God’s ability to communicate, some failure on his part. And I don’t think it’s a problem with our ability to understand, either.

Why do I say that? Because there are all kinds of statements in the Scripture that we understand perfectly well. God can speak clearly when he wants to, and he is completely justified in holding us accountable for those things. He’s told us who we are, where we came from, who he is, and how we can have a relationship with him. These things are clear, and life and death hang on our responding rightly to what he has clearly told us.

But when we cross over into predictive prophecy, it seems as though everything just goes a little crazy. Suddenly we’re knitting our eyebrows, furrowing our foreheads, shaking our heads. Wheel in a wheel in a wheel, indeed.

This stuff is hard. Charles Hodge, the great Princeton theologian of the 19th century, said frankly that nobody was qualified to interpret biblical prophecy unless he’d spent an entire lifetime doing so—and since he, Hodge, hadn’t, he wasn’t going to make any authoritative pronouncements.

So here’s my thesis.

Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards.

God has decided, for reasons of his own, to speak this way. I’ll speculate later on a possible reason for that, but for now I’d like to spend a few posts demonstrating

  • that my thesis is true,
  • that it explains the current diversity of views about the end times, and
  • that it gives us some guidance on how we ought to study and apply these matters.

(If you’re expecting me to finish the series by telling you when Jesus is coming back, you’re going to be disappointed.)

See you next time.

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