Real Prophets #12

Born to Win Podcast - with Ronald L. Dart

Jesus Christ was no fortune-teller. He didn't go around giving people the answers to future Trivial Pursuit questions. Like all real prophets, he gave knowledge of the future for two reasons. One: so you could do something about it. If you know something is coming, you can dodge, you can change your life. Two: so you can understand what is happening to you when it happens. Life would have meaning.

But Jesus emphasized one side of the prophet's work above the other. The primary object, really, of the prophet's message is our salvation. In old times, it might have been to save yourself from being bottled up in a besieged city; that's the idea behind Jesus' warnings in Matthew 24. Or it may have been to save your life, save you some pain, save you some suffering. That's generally the point of the prophet's message—tell you what's going to happen so you can change it—or, put another way, repent so you can live.

Now, I am going to tell you something that's a little hard to understand. And it's hard to understand, to some degree, by the way the Bible is written. Prophecy is not so much what God is going to do to us because of our sins (which it the way a lot of prophecy reads) but about what our sins are going to do to us.