How hard can it be to read and understand personal correspondence?

It is not unusual to hear comments about the contextualized character of these books—the implication being that they may have been relevant at one time in a particular historical context, but not now.

For example, most Christians today do not believe that it is necessary for women to cover their heads in worship, as 1 Corinthians 11:5 seems to say. (The reason normally given is that Paul was probably addressing a cultural practice that is foreign to us.)

But this kind of difficulty is typical; generally speaking, a knowledge of the historical situation helps us to refine our understanding of the commands of Scripture, but it does not remove their validity for us.

Prophecy is a much larger biblical genre than most people think.

• Prophecy is a much larger biblical genre than most people think.

• All too many connect the word prophecy with the idea of futurology.

• But the bulk of prophecy in both the earlier prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings), the latter prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and the twelve minor prophets), and the New Testament prophets actually involved God’s messengers speaking the word of God to a contemporary culture that needed to be challenged to cease its resistance to the word of God.

• As such, these prophets were “forth-tellers.”

The aspect of prophecy that is more difficult to interpret is that portion that deals with foretelling.

• The aspect of prophecy that is more difficult to interpret is that portion that deals with foretelling.

• The number of predictions about the future in the Bible is so large in both Testaments that it carries with it a silent rebuke for any of us who have been hesitant to enter into their study.

• J. Barton Payne say there are 8,352 verses with predictive material in them out of 31,124 verses in the whole Bible—27% of the Bible that deals with predictions about the future. Payne calculated that the OT contained 6,641 verses on the future (out of 23,210 total, or 28.6 percent), while the NT has 1,711 (out of 7,914 verses, or 21.6 percent).

Altogether, these 8,352 verses discuss 737 separate prophetic topics.

• Altogether, these 8,352 verses discuss 737 separate prophetic topics.

• The only books without any predictive material are Ruth and Song of Songs in the Old Testament and Philemon and 3 John in the New Testament.

• The other sixty-two books of the Bible are all represented in one or more of the 737 prophetic topics gathered by Payne.

• The Old Testament books with the highest percentage of future prophecies are Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, with 65, 60, and 59 percent of their total verses respectively.

In the New Testament, the top three are Revelation, Matthew, and Luke, with 63, 26, and 23 percent of their total corpus respectively.

• In the New Testament, the top three are Revelation, Matthew, and Luke, with 63, 26, and 23 percent of their total corpus respectively.

• It thus is clear that prophecy about the future cannot be passed off lightly if we are to do justice to the Bible as God wished to compose it.

• Any declaration of the whole counsel of God needs to interact with these prophetic themes on a fairly wide scale, given the fact that approximately one-fourth of the verses in the Bible are concerned with this topic.

The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• Biblical prophecy has its own unique set of distinctive features and characteristics that at once set it off from every other imitation.

• At the turn of this century, Robert B. Girdlestone enumerated the following six characteristics:

• 1. Biblical prophecy plainly foretells things to come without clothing them in ambiguities similar to the oracles of the pagan nations.

• 2. Biblical prophecy is designed and intended to be a prediction rather than a retrospective declaration, an unwitting prophecy, or a “lucky guess” that just happened to come to pass.

The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• 3. It is written, published or proclaimed prior to the event it refers to and is a happening that could not have been foreseen by ordinary human sagacity.

• 4. It is subsequently fulfilled in accordance with the words of the original prediction.

• 5. Prophecy does not work out its own fulfillment, but it stands as a witness until the event has taken place.

• 6. A biblical prophecy is not an isolated prediction, but it can be correlated with other prophecies and as such is one of a long series of predictions.

The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• The Characteristics of Biblical Prophecy

• Not all prophecies, of course, fit every one of the six characteristics given here. But where these exceptions exist, they still exhibit the general thrust and spirit of all six descriptions.

• Intelligibility. Prophecy has an enigmatic aspect to it, even as God acknowledged in his word to Moses in Numbers 12:6-8.

• Here Moses is said to have two distinct advantages over other prophets who followed him.

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