Prophecy in Our Time

There are a lot of people in the Christian world who are trying to tell the future through prophecy. Yeshua said, “You can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it you do not discern this time?” (Luke 12:56)

Yeshua is not rebuking the people for not being able to come up with an end times prophecy timeline. Instead, He rebuked them for not recognizing the prophecies happening right in front of them. 

It can be easy to look at prophecy as something that’s going to happen at some time in the future. But I believe the purpose of prophecy is to strengthen our faith when we see it happening right in front us. By trying to predict the future through prophecy we end up weakening not only our faith but also our children’s faith, especially when the predictions are wrong time after time. 

Through biblical prophecy we can get an understanding of God’s plan of redemption for the world through his people and land. One day the Messiah will come to sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem and rule over the whole world. All of the details in between are really impossible to predict. We see a precedent for this in biblical prophecy that describes Yeshua’s first coming. How could anyone have predicted that he would be born in Bethlehem, called out of Egypt, and be called a Nazarene. 

 I also don’t think that biblical prophecy is written in chronological order – even within the same chapters sometimes. We see this in the way that it is written and how it is interpreted by the disciples. For example, the prophecy of the Messiah being born in Bethlehem in Micah 5:2 starts off in verse one saying, “They will strike the judge of Israel with a rod on the cheek,” which seems to be talking about Yeshua’s trial. The last half of the chapter is talking about judgment on Israel’s enemies. So the timeline in the books of the prophets does not seem to be chronological. 

 I believe that all biblical prophecy is about Israel. Even the prophecies about the nations – good and bad – all relate back to Israel. We miss so much in our English translations of the Bible. I recently was reading through the book of Revelation again and started noticing how many times it says “the earth.” “The earth” in Hebrew is “HaAretz” which more accurately translates from a Jewish perspective as “the Land.” HaAretz is another name for the land of Israel. Reading Revelation with that in mind can really give us a different perspective on what’s happening around us. 

There is a Jewish thought that negative prophecies don’t have to be fulfilled. This idea is taken from the book of Jonah where it says, “Forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed!” The people of Nineveh repented and the negative prophecy didn’t happen. If all prophecies must be fulfilled then Jonah was a false prophet. The Jewish perspective is that negative prophecies are there as a warning, and if we do not repent and follow God with our whole heart, these consequences will take place. 

I heard a story of several rabbis that were on the Temple Mount mourning, shortly after its destruction. When a fox ran across the Temple ruins one of the rabbis began to laugh. The rest couldn’t understand why he would be laughing. The rabbi said that the prophets predicted that the house of God would become a home for foxes, and he was seeing it fulfilled right in front of his eyes. From this he also knew that the prophecies of redemption would also come to pass. From this story we can see that even negative prophecies can strengthen our faith in hard times and give us hope for the future. 

There are tangible biblical prophecies happening in Israel right now. Yeshua said to his disciples, “Blessed are the eyes which see the things you see; for I tell you that many prophets and kings have desired to see what you see, and have not seen it, and to hear what you hear, and have not heard it.”

‭I believe this statement is as true today as it was then. If the Kingdom of God was at hand in those times then surely it is even more so now.