The short answer to how Jewish people have traditionally used the words of the prophets – messages that were obviously referring to events that happened long ago, is that we examine the circumstances that prompted the prophets’ warnings, and then we watch out for them in our own time. We don’t use them as predictions of disasters that are going to happen in our own time.
This would now be a good opportunity to tell you about the nature of prophecy in the Israelite religion, and how it is used in Jewish society.
If you were to ask most modern Christians and non-religious people (and in ancient times, all pagans), “What is prophecy?” their answer would be something like, “It’s about telling the future – telling us about the things that are going to happen”. So in essence, most people understand prophecy as ‘telling the future’. However, where biblical prophecy in a Yahwist context is concerned, they would be completely wrong.
Prophecy is notabout telling the future; it’s primarily about delivering a message verbatim from God. A prophet is not, ‘someone who tells us about the future’; in a Yahwist Israelite context, a prophet is ‘a human mouthpiece for God, who delivers God’s Message in the exact words that were spoken to them by God’.
There are three types of circumstances where God intervenes to choose a prophet to deliver a message:
1. When the ritual ideals of the Israelite religion are being violated and in danger of becoming pagan (such as idol worship, sacrifice of children, drinking human blood, eating human flesh etc)
2. When the moral and social ideals of the Israelite religion are being violated, threatening the collapse of society (oppression of the poor, greed of the rich, using violence in religion, corrupting spiritual or moral truth, etc)
3. When religion itself is being corrupted into something evil (thus misrepresenting God’s holiness, and so using religion for wicked and evil purposes).
The format of a prophet’s message is this: “If you don’t stop doing what you are doing – if you don’t repent and turn back to God’s ways, then disaster will strike our society and our country.” This, in essence, is what a prophecy is – a warning that if things don’t change, things are going to get really, really bad, and these are the terrible things that are going to happen.
When an Israelite reads a prophecy, they focus on, “a warning that if things don’t change”, i.e. that a change is needed. When a Christian or a non-Jew reads a prophecy, they focus on, “these are the terrible things that are going to happen” – i.e. these are the things that are predicted to take place. Christian preachers abuse prophecy to frighten people, and tell them the only way to ‘be saved’ is to follow them.
The counterpoint to all this is, “If you DO repent, then these terrible things will not happen.” Jonah was sent to the Ninevites, and the things that he warned were going to happen, did not happen.
Just as there are circumstances when a prophecy is given by God, there are also two types of prophecy:
1. A warning to change, otherwise bad things will happen – these are specifically for things that are soon to happen (otherwise, what’s the point of delivering a prophecy to a wicked people of things that would happen a thousand years in their future? How would that have persuaded them to change)?
2. A consolation of good things that will one day happen (this has no time limit, but they are given by God as an encouragement, so that people will be consoled that one day, things will be better).
Christians use the books of the prophets as if they were an almanack foretelling specific disasters that are going to happen in our own time – this is also an abuse of prophecy. A better way to use prophecy, as I said right at the beginning of this post, is to look at the wrongdoings that prompted ancient prophets to speak out – to ask ourselves: are the sins and misdeeds that the prophets spoke against, also happening now? If they are, then our society faces a similar fate.
So what are the things that the Prophet Yeshua criticised? Oppression and ill-treatment of the poor, the greed and materialism of the rich, their ignoring of certain religious ideals designed to help others, and their lack of concern for the society in which they live; misuse and abuse of religion (especially by priests and ministers of religion), violence in religion, religious hypocrisy (saying one thing and doing the opposite), using religion to do wicked things, religious arrogance (looking down on others who are different, or who don’t match you in piety); lack of compassion from religious people towards those who are struggling, or are sick, or in trouble; corruption and abuse of civil authority, misusing and corrupting justice. We know where all these things led to – the destruction of the society in which Yeshua lived.
Next, we ask ourselves, ‘are any of these things happening in our society today?’ If the answer is yes, then instead of saying, “The end of the world is nigh, repent and turn to your Saviour Jesus Christ’, without saying anything about what has gone wrong, the better thing to do is to pick out the specific areas where society is going wrong, and encourage people to change. Yahveh wants us to have a stable society that is just, peaceful and forward-looking, and which has a place for all its members. If we begin to think that it is acceptable to let people fall by the wayside, and treat certain people like disposable commodities, then our society will fail – and fail big time.
The bottom line to all this, is that we have to relearn how to view prophecy. It’s not about foretelling the future, it’s about picking up on where society and religion are badly going wrong, so that people can put them right; that’s the right way to use the contents of biblical prophecy.