Pastoral Musings

In speaking with one about what would persuade him of the existence of God, this was said:

The right kind of prophecy would be persuasive, but I need to add a criterion to this. There are a great many prophecies in the Old Testament relating to the life of Jesus. I’ve read quite a lot of them, and I find them about as convincing as the predictions of astrology.

One of the problems common to both biblical prophecy and astology is that they will usually make very vauge and noncomittal predictions about human behavior. In the case of Jesus, a very good argument can be made that eventually, by the laws of chance, someone would have come along that fit the initial birth prophecies of the old testament. From there, it’s not too big a jump to see how such a person could then, with foresight, intentionally fulfill the prophecies with the purpose of cementing their claim, and in this way the prophecies would become self-fulfilling.

So vauge, open-ended and easily stretched prophecies are, as far as I can see, in the same category of plausibility as the horoscopes in the weekly Times. I add to this the point that the entire idea of divine prophecy is that God is meant to be giving us an authoratative reason to believe – but if that were the case, why are the prophecies so flimsy? One would expect the authorative proof of a divine creator to be… well… authoratative.

Is Biblical Prophecy Vague and Non-committal?

Bible prophecy is far from vague and non-committal.  It is very precise.

Consider the following:

Gen 3:15 cp Gal 4:4,5  This states that there will come a deliverer who is the seed of a woman.  A very precise prophecy, because seed normally refers to the descendant of a man.  This is a reference to the fact that the Christ would be born of a virgin.  Sure enough, He was.
Isa 7:14 cp Matt 1:22,23 cp Lk 1:26-37  Again, a plain statement of a virgin conceiving and bearing a child.  Though a partial fulfillment seems to have taken place in the time of Isaiah, it wasn’t a complete fulfillment due to the fact that the virgin who bore a child to Isaiah was no longer a virgin after she conceived.  Mary, the mother of Jesus, was still a virgin after conception.
Isa 53:1-12 Acts 8:26-40  A very explicit prophecy of the death of Christ for our sins.  Even many of the Jews who rejected Jesus as the Messiah realized that there would be a Messiah who suffered.
Ex 12:46; Ps 34:20 cp John 19:36  Plain enough; not a bone of Jesus would be broken.
Ps 16:10 cp Acts 2:24-32  This may not seem plain to us, but it was certainly plain to the people of Peter’s day.  The soul of David remained in the other world, and his body remained in the grave.  Not so with Jesus: He arose from the dead.

There is also the “problem” of the prophecy of the crucifixion of Jesus in Ps 22.  The “problem” is this: crucifixion was not in use at the time of the Psalmist’s writing, yet he spoke of it in great detail.  In fact, he predicted that the soldiers would gamble for Jesus’ clothing.

These are just a few of the prophecies that relate to Jesus and the circumstances of His life, death, and resurrection.  There are other prophecies about other events that have been fulfilled as well.

Oh, I know we can fuss about whether or not they really happened.  We can fuss about whether Jesus truly existed or not.  We can argue that the New Testament accounts are slanted, or even fictional.  Let us leave that off for today and simply discuss the matter of whether prophecy is vague or not.

What is vague, non-committal, and imprecise about the above prophecies?

Just musing…