As with most everything else in Scripture, Christians disagree about prophecy, which often convinces others that Bible prophecy is a waste of time. After all, if Christians fight over every prophetic jot and *, how valid could it be? Unfortunately, many believers also begin to think that some books of the Bible, such as Revelation, are simply incomprehensible. Instead of reading them, they avoid them, sometimes with the encouragement of a well-meaning pastor who thinks that studying prophecy causes more problems than it solves.
It was not always so. For the first eighteen centuries of Christian history, most Christians were very comfortable with biblical prophecy, and there was a surprising level of agreement on what the key messages of the prophecies were. This is how God intended for it to be: “Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:10, NKJV).
This week, we will explore some principles that yield a consistent and reliable understanding of prophecy.
Thought questions: How can the study of prophecy greatly increase your faith? What prophecies—some written thousands of years ago about events that would happen hundreds, if not thousands of years later—have helped increase your trust in the Bible and, more important, in the God who inspired it? How, for example, does Daniel 2 give us powerful, and logical, reasons to trust not only that God exists but that He knows the future?