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“THUS SAITH THE LORD”

PROPHECY IN PREACHING

DON STYLES

“BEHOLD, THE former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them” (Isa. 42:9). This foretelling is not in the form of conjecture. Scripture does not provide educated guesses of what is coming as would a skilled observer of political or economic trends. Prophecy is a revelation in advance of God’s future actions. He will “do good, or do evil” (Isa. 41:23).

The Almighty reveals His future actions for a variety of reasons, some of which impact directly on the proclamation of the gospel. The most important aspect in this regard is that, knowing what God intends to do, one can act now in faith and obedience, that in the future one can experience eternal life, and not perish in the judgement to come.

PREACHING BY THE APOSTLES

“(God) commandeth all men every where to repent: because He hath appointed a day, in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom He hath ordained” (Acts 17:30,31). Here is prophecy in preaching.

The use of prophecy

The approach to the Athenians is clear: God has revealed that the world will not continue in its present arrangements. At some point in the future the man ordained by God will rule the entire habitable earth. When that time arrives God will no longer overlook the utter disregard of His will. Having the advantage of this gracious word of prophecy, the appeal is to act now, in order to be blessed when that day comes. Revelation regarding the future is thus used to urge present repentance.

Years earlier, in Solomon’s porch in Jerusalem, Peter made a similar use of prophecy: “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19). Prophecy was an integral part of the message. God had “spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began” (v. 21) of the time when Messiah would return from heaven to restore all things to their proper relationship to God. “And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people” (v. 23). Now was their day of opportunity; let men be converted to the gospel, recognising what prophecy revealed of the future.

The past assures the future

Recent events provided the assurance that God would fulfil His revelations regarding the future: “those things, which God before had shewed by the mouth of all His prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled” (v. 18). It was a matter of prophecy that the Christ would be rejected of the people, that he would be buried, would be raised before seeing corruption and would ascend to heaven (Acts 2:23-36; 13:27-33). Furthermore, the signs and wonders he had performed and the bestowal of Spirit-gifts upon the believers were matters of prior revelation (Acts 2:15-22). All these things had been fulfilled before their eyes. The word that had been fulfilled provided assurance that the integrity of God would not fail. He had kept His Word; He would continue to keep His Word; let men therefore repent.

Here is a pattern for our own use of prophecy in preaching. Let fulfilled prophecies argue that God acts as He has previously revealed. Let explanation be clearly given of “righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come” (Acts 24:25). Direct the listener to conclude that right attitudes and right practices should be followed now, that we might eventually be blessed and not destroyed.

PREACHING BY THE PROPHETS

The Word of God through Isaiah uses prophecy in the same manner as the Spirit in the apostles. The objective in view was the same: the repentance and conversion of the hearers. “Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings ... learn to do well; seek judgment ...” (Isa. 1:16,17).

The future demands conversion

The incentive for right conduct was the same as that advanced through the apostles: a day of discrimination is coming between those who serve God and those who do not. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (v. 18) when the time of restitution of all things would occur. A day is coming of which the Lord said: “I will turn My hand upon thee, and purely purge away thy dross, and take away all thy tin: and I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning: afterward thou shalt be called, The city of righteousness, the faithful city. Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness. And the destruction of the transgressors and of the sinners shall be together, and they that forsake the LORD shall be consumed” (vv. 25-28).

By the mouth of all the holy prophets God made known the future to His people. And the preacher used prophecy as an integral part of the call to moral and spiritual transformation.

The past assures the future

For reassurance that God intended to fulfil His Word regarding the future, those who heard Isaiah had only to look to their recent history: “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers” (Isa. 1:7). These agonies had not followed their iniquities by chance; they had come in direct fulfilment of Deuteronomy 28: “if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God ... The LORD shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies ... Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes ... thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face ... The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed alway” (vv. 15,25,31,33).

Fulfilled prophecy was the background which gave credence to the prophecies regarding the future. Both aspects of prophecy were therefore vital to the call for repentance.

The same pattern in Amos

Israel had been hit by general and by freakish droughts; blasting, mildew and worms had afflicted their crops; Egyptian pestilence had smitten their people; some cities had been utterly overthrown (Amos 4:6-11). Each of these calamities was a prophecy fulfilled, for God had revealed in advance how He would respond to their sins (Deut. 28:22-24,27,39). While earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and tidal waves were alternative instruments of Divine retribution, they were not what He had revealed through Moses would be the means of His punishments. God had revealed He would use drought, plague and foreign enemies, and this is what He did. He had given prophecies and had fulfilled them.

Thus, when additional prophecies are given through Amos, fulfilled prophecy provides the evidence that the new pronouncements will surely come to pass. “An adversary there shall be even round about the land; and he shall bring down thy strength from thee, and thy palaces shall be spoiled” (3:11). But there could be hope if only they would repent: “Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the LORD, the God of hosts, shall be with you” (5:14).

The incentive to repentance lay in the certainty that God would fulfil His revelation of the future. The conviction that He would do so came from fulfilled prophecy. As is repeatedly the case, prophecy was an integral part of the preaching of the Word.

Guidelines

As the Spirit used prophecy in preaching through prophets and apostles, so we should follow a similar pattern in our own proclamation of the Truth. Prophecy is not to be an isolated area of study ignored by some and favoured by others. Neither should it be separated from the appeal to live transformed lives. It is to be a vital part of the gospel message.

Prophecies regarding the future—the coming of Christ for individual and national judgement, the Kingdom of God ruled by the faithful of this era—provide incentive for right conduct now. Knowing that the heart of man is habitually evil, the Lord does not appeal to altruistic impulses in our hearts, but to our desire to share in blessing and to avoid punishment. Our knowledge of the good and the evil that we may experience comes from prophecy. Thus prophecy provides a driving force to repentance and conversion. Any attempt, therefore, to preach conversion should be related to prophecies of the coming blessings and judgements.

Our conviction that prophecies of the future will in fact occur comes from the evidence of fulfilled prophecy. Hence presentations of fulfilled prophecy should lead to a powerful appeal for the hearers to submit to the sure Word of God.

Prophecy, then, should be an integral part of the appeal to conversion.

GOD IS

There are other areas of preaching where prophecy plays an important role: “Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold it together” (Isa. 41:23).

Prophecy is not conjecture about uncontrollable events; Bible prophecy is a revelation in advance of what God will do. When the events come to pass, they serve to confirm the existence and attributes of the Deity.

His witnesses

The Lord Himself points to the Jewish people as His witness in this regard: “Ye are My witnesses, saith the LORD, and My servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am He: before Me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after Me” (Isa. 43:10). Accordingly, a rightly developed presentation of prophecy regarding the Jews and their subsequent history should be powerful proof that God is.

As many a believer will confirm, this is truly the case. There is no quibble that the prophecies were made before the fact, as they are still being fulfilled today. No ethnic group could deliberately fulfil the prophecies that call for the survival of a scattered, despised, persecuted people for countless generations. No logic would require that a fertile land would lie desolate while in the hands of any other nation. What oracle would risk its reputation on the forecast that the Jews would remain a distinctive people through all the years of dispersion and would eventually claim Palestine as their home instead of some other place? The combination of the veracity of all these elements cries out that God indeed “is”, and has done all these things.

Nebuchadnezzar

Other men have been smitten with insanity and have recovered without seeing the experience as evidence for the existence and power of God. But Nebuchadnezzar’s response was elicited by the prophecy that had gone before: “they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field ... and seven times shall pass over thee, till thou know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will” (Dan. 4:25).

When these things came to pass the Gentile monarch became convinced that the most High lives for ever, and that His “dominion is an everlasting dominion ... and He doeth according to His will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth” (vv. 34,35). Fulfilled prophecy was effective in convincing the man.

In addition to the resurrection of Christ, the evidence of Creation, the accuracy of the Bible and its cohesive message, fulfilled prophecy provides sure evidence of the fact that God is. In our preaching our community has rightly given fulfilled prophecy prominence in this regard.

THIS WORD IS FROM GOD

When there arose in Israel one claiming to be a spokesman for God, the people had a right to test the prophet: “How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken?” (Deut. 18:21). Two criteria were given to validate the claim: the person’s message must be consistent with previous revelation (Deut. 13:2-4), and his revelation of future Divine actions must be accurate. “When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him” (Deut. 18:22).

Short-term prophecies

For the second criterion to be useful, short- term prophecies were required in order that the hearers might apply the test. If all events revealed lay far in the future, the criterion would serve no purpose. Consistently, the prophets met this need.

Elijah declared a drought that started immediately and only ended with his prayer (1 Kgs. 17:1; 18:41-45). Isaiah revealed the remarkable failure of Sennacherib’s intent against Jerusalem (2 Kgs. 19:32-34). Jeremiah announced to Hananiah that “this year thou shalt die ... So Hananiah the prophet died the same year” (Jer. 28:16,17). Jeremiah himself applied the test, for “The word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Behold, Hanameel ... shall come unto thee, saying ... So Hanameel mine uncle’s son came to me in the court of the prison according to the word of the LORD, and said ... Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD” (Jer. 32:6-8). Ezekiel spoke of Zedekiah that he would go to Babylon: “yet shall he not see it, though he shall die there” (Ezek. 12:13). All the people knew the certainty of this word, for the Babylonians “put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him with fetters of brass, and carried him to Babylon” (2 Kgs. 25:7). The list goes on to include John the Baptist, who pronounced that one mightier than he would come; and one came of whom “there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art My beloved Son” (Mk. 1:7,11). The angel told Cornelius that he would find Peter in Joppa lodging with Simon the tanner, and on the morrow the word was proven true.

In every one of these cases the fact that what had been revealed surely came to pass provided assurance that the entire message was of God. Therefore, fulfilled prophecy is rightly used when we proclaim, “Fulfilled Prophecy Proves the Bible is the Word of God”. Our preaching is wholly dependent upon the authority of Scripture. To provide evidence of its authenticity, it deliberately contains prophecies of events large and small that have already occurred. They are there for us to use in our preaching of the Word.

TO ATTRACT ATTENTION

Throughout our history as a community, prophecy lectures have been used to attract attention to our presentation of the Truth. Typical of the approach was a series organised by a brother in Charlottesville, Virginia. Brother John Thomas was to present seven lectures under the following advertisement: “The design, as well as the direct tendency of these lectures is to awaken a deep interest in the extraordinary revelations of the Bible, when interpreted with reference to the prophetic future and the signs of the times, as exhibited in the remarkable events now transpiring in the ancient theatre of the Western Roman Empire ...”. The effort was successful, as Brother Thomas spoke to a standing-room-only audience, and some were turned away for lack of space.

To this day a similar technique is used by many ecclesias. Fulfilled and fulfilling prophecy regarding events of contemporary interest are used to attract attention in order to preach the gospel. Was prophecy used this way by prophets and apostles? Did the Spirit use it to attract attention to the vital message of repentance and conversion to right worship?

Biblical precedent

The answer is clearly, Yes. At Pentecost the immediate attention of the multitude was attracted by the sound and sight of the bestowal of the Holy Spirit, and by the fact that the gospel was preached in a multitude of foreign languages (Acts 2:5,6). But further attention was attracted by the fact that these events, and those of the past fifty days, were the fulfilment of prophecy (vv. 16,25,34,35). When the apostles preached to those who believed in the Scriptures, fulfilled prophecy was the key mechanism to attract attention to their message (Acts 13:27,29,33; note “fulfilled”).

When attention is given to the gospel through the prophets, the events cited by Isaiah and Amos would have had no relevancy if they were not the fulfilment of prophecy. There is nothing exceptional about a drought in Palestine or the conquest by foreign oppressors, other than the fact that it was prophesied as the consequence of disobedience. God was using fulfilled prophecy to attract the attention of His people to His existence and to His anger with the iniquity of their ways.

Current issues

Whether referring to recent disasters in the nation or to the recent crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of the Lord, current happenings were the subject of prophecies cited by prophets and apostles. Then, as now, people were keenly interested in the present.

Our problem in this regard is accuracy. We can point to the drying up of Turkish control of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state in the land with confidence that God has done this because He said He would. However, while we know Israel will control Lebanon “unto Zarephath” (Obad. v. 20), we do not know when that will occur. Israel may invade that area, as she has, and retreat from it, as she did, before establishing the control revealed through Obadiah.

Enough is clear about the events of our time, however, to enable fulfilled prophecy to be used as a compelling means of attracting attention to the gospel of the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ.

PROPHECY IN PREACHING

Through prophets and apostles the Spirit uses prophecy as an integral part of the preaching of the Word. Fulfilled prophecy is used to give assurance that prophecies not yet fulfilled will surely come to pass; to prove the existence of the Almighty; to confirm the authority of the total message; and to attract attention to the appeal for right worship.

Prophecy regarding the future includes a continual unfolding of events, so that the benefits of fulfilled prophecy are constantly reinforced. More importantly, God has revealed the coming time of restoration that we might now practise righteousness and temperance, in order that we might have eternal life in that day and not be engulfed by the individual and national judgements that are to come.

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