Week #1: What Is Prophecy?
Blog Series Intention Recap
Why Prophecy Matters: Promise, Fulfillment, Hope
Bible prophecy often gets treated like a puzzle for decoding the news. This four-week Theology Thursday series steps back to ask why prophecy matters at all. We'll look at what prophecy is, how Psalm 22 pointed to the cross centuries ahead of time, what Christians mean by prophecy today, and how to read the promises God hasn't fulfilled yet.
Along the way, we'll keep seeing that the God who spoke through the prophets keeps His word, and that He kept it most clearly in Yeshua (Jesus).
Because God has faithfully fulfilled His Word in the past, we can trust what He has promised about the future.
This page is a post in the series “Why Prophecy Matters: Promise. Fulfillment. Hope.” Click here to see the rest of the posts.
Let’s jump into Week #1:
"What Is Prophecy?"...
Say the words "Bible prophecy" and many people picture charts, headlines, and someone online matching verses to last week's news. Some Christians love that kind of thing. Others avoid prophecy altogether because of it. Both reactions usually rest on the same assumption: that prophecy is mainly about predicting the future.
Scripture gives us a much larger picture. So before we ask why prophecy matters, we need to ask what it actually is.
Why it Matters:
Biblical prophecy is God's message spoken through a human messenger. It often includes prediction, but it is much more than prediction.
Much biblical prophecy addressed the prophet's own generation. Some of it reached far beyond that generation.
God gave Israel a simple test for prophets: what a true prophet says in God's name comes to pass, and a true prophet never leads people away from the Lord.
God points to His own record of declaring and accomplishing the future as evidence that He alone is God.
The Old Testament's promises about the Messiah were fulfilled in specific, concrete ways in Yeshua.
Fulfilled prophecy gives us solid reason to trust Scripture, including the promises still waiting to be fulfilled.
Go Deeper:
If prophecy is only prediction, the Bible starts to look like a book of riddles, and the goal becomes cracking the code. When we see prophecy the way Scripture presents it, the goal changes. Prophecy is one of the main ways God shows that He can be trusted. He announces what He will do, and then He does it, often centuries later and in ways no one could have arranged.
Every promise God has already fulfilled gives us reason to trust the promises still awaiting fulfillment. The apostle Peter, who saw Yeshua's glory on the mountain with his own eyes, still pointed his readers to the written prophetic word as the lamp to steer by.
Prophecy Begins with God Speaking
The most common Hebrew word for prophet, navi, describes someone who speaks on another's behalf. We see this clearly when God sends Moses to Pharaoh and appoints Moses' brother to speak for him:
"And the LORD said to Moses, 'See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet.'" (Exodus 7:1, ESV)
Aaron would carry Moses' words. In the same way, a prophet of the Lord carries God's words. God describes the role this way: "I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him" (Deuteronomy 18:18, ESV).
Peter makes the same point about the whole prophetic portion of Scripture:
"For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." (2 Peter 1:21, ESV)
That means prophecy starts with revelation. A prophet didn't study trends and make an educated guess. God spoke, and the prophet delivered the message.
Much of what the prophets said was aimed at their own people in their own day. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and the others confronted idolatry, exposed injustice, and called Israel back to the covenant. The prophets spoke about judgment and restoration, Israel and the nations, Messiah and His kingdom.
Bible teachers sometimes call the present-day side of their message "forthtelling," speaking God's word into the present. Prediction, or "foretelling," was woven into that message. Some predictions came true within the prophet's lifetime, like warnings of coming exile. Others reached hundreds of years ahead. Many are still waiting.
A Test Only God Could Pass
Once God promised to keep speaking through prophets, Israel had an obvious question: how do we tell a true prophet from a false one? Moses anticipated it:
"when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him." (Deuteronomy 18:22, ESV)
When a prophet claimed to predict something in the LORD's name, the standard was complete accuracy. Deuteronomy also makes clear that a true prophet could never lead Israel away from the God who had already revealed Himself (Deuteronomy 13:1–5).
God then points to His own record of declaring and accomplishing the future as evidence that He alone is God. In Isaiah, He challenges the idols of the nations to do what only the true God can do: "Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods" (Isaiah 41:23, ESV). They can't. Then God describes Himself:
"Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,'" (Isaiah 46:9–10, ESV)
He declares what will happen, and then He accomplishes it. Isaiah even named Cyrus as the ruler who would see Jerusalem and the temple rebuilt (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1), well over a century before Cyrus issued his decree. Long before that, by the time Israel had entered the Promised Land, Joshua could already look back and say:
"Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass." (Joshua 21:45, ESV)
The Prophet Like Moses
In the same chapter that gives the test for prophets, Moses makes a promise:
"The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers" (Deuteronomy 18:15, ESV)
Israel waited a long time for that Prophet. Many prophets came after Moses, but the last chapter of Deuteronomy says plainly that none of them measured up: "And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face" (Deuteronomy 34:10, ESV). Centuries later, people were still asking about it. When John the Baptist began preaching, the religious leaders asked him directly, "Are you the Prophet?" (John 1:21, ESV). He said no.
After Yeshua's resurrection, Peter stood in the temple and answered the question:
"Moses said, 'The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you.'" (Acts 3:22, ESV)
The passage that defines what a prophet is also points to the greatest Prophet of all. Prophecy was always heading toward a Person.
Promises with Names and Places
The prophecies about the Messiah are not vague, and many are concrete enough to check.
Where He would be born. Seven centuries before Yeshua, Micah named a small town:
"But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days." (Micah 5:2, ESV)
When the wise men arrived in Jerusalem asking about the newborn King, Herod's scholars didn't need to research the question. They answered immediately: "In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet" (Matthew 2:5, ESV). No one gets to choose where he is born.
How He would be born. Isaiah promised a sign: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (Isaiah 7:14, ESV). Matthew tells us that Yeshua's birth to Mary happened "to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet" (Matthew 1:22, ESV).
How He would come to Jerusalem. Zechariah told the city what to watch for:
"Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey." (Zechariah 9:9, ESV)
Kings arrived on warhorses. Yeshua rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, and the crowds greeted Him as the Son of David (Matthew 21:4–9).
Why He would suffer. Isaiah 53 describes a Servant who is rejected, wounded, and killed for the sins of others:
"But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed." (Isaiah 53:5, ESV)
In Acts 8, an Ethiopian official was reading this very chapter in his chariot and asked Philip the obvious question: "About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?" (Acts 8:34, ESV). Philip had the answer: "beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus" (Acts 8:35, ESV).
There are many more, and one of the most striking, Psalm 22, deserves a post of its own. Again and again, the New Testament presents real events in Yeshua's life as fulfillments of what God had spoken through Israel's prophets. Bethlehem was a real town, the donkey was a real donkey, and the wounds were real wounds.
Yeshua Read the Scriptures This Way
On the day of His resurrection, Yeshua walked with two disappointed disciples who couldn't make sense of the cross. He didn't start by showing them His hands. He started with the Bible:
"And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." (Luke 24:27, ESV)
Peter learned that lesson well. Preaching in Jerusalem, he said, "But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled" (Acts 3:18, ESV). For Yeshua and Peter, the connection was clear: the prophets had been pointing toward the Messiah all along.
How Does This Help Me Understand “What is Prophecy”?
Biblical prophecy is God's revelation, spoken through messengers He chose, calling people back to Himself and announcing what He will do. Sometimes it confronted the prophet's own generation. Sometimes it looked centuries ahead. And running through that prophetic message is its great center: the Messiah.
So how can fulfilled prophecy strengthen our confidence in Scripture? It gives us a track record. Israel had God's record to look back on. Names, places, promises, and fulfillments gave them concrete reasons to trust His Word. We have that same record, and it runs all the way to Yeshua.
That's why the big idea of this series matters: Because God has faithfully fulfilled His Word in the past, we can trust what He has promised about the future. Peter called the prophetic word "a lamp shining in a dark place" (2 Peter 1:19, ESV).
Trusting the God Who Keeps His Word
Read the Old Testament expecting to meet the Messiah. Yeshua taught His disciples to read Moses and the Prophets with Him at the center. When you read Isaiah, Micah, or Zechariah, ask what the passage shows you about the One who was coming.
Let God's record steady your faith. Doubts come to all of us, sometimes about Scripture and sometimes about whether God will come through in our own lives. The fulfilled promises of the Bible are there to be remembered. The God who brought His Son to Bethlehem, as He said He would, is the same God you are trusting today.
Keep prophecy in its proper place. Prophecy was given to make us confident in God, not to turn us into headline interpreters. When our study of prophecy makes us arrogant, obsessed with dates, or chronically fearful instead of more confident in God, something has gone wrong. When it leaves you trusting God more, it's doing what He intended.
Trust the promises still waiting. Some of what God has spoken hasn't happened yet. The Messiah will return, and God will finish everything He has promised. Joshua could say that not one of God's good words had failed. We can read the rest of the story with the same confidence, because the One making the promises has never missed.
Pay attention to what God promised Israel. The prophets did not speak about Israel merely to give us illustrations for the Christian life. God made real promises to a real people, and some of those promises still await fulfillment. As this series continues, watch what God's faithfulness to Israel teaches us about His character. God's faithfulness to His promises to Israel gives us every reason to trust that He will keep His word to us.
God doesn't just know the future. He tells us about it, and then He keeps His word.
