The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 3 – 1
When most people speak of prophecy, they are thinking of things in Revelation: the plagues, the woes, the battles. Those things are exciting, and intriguing. I know many people who spend their entire life just studying Revelation – and never really understand it. Because that’s the problem – they were studying Revelation without understanding the rest of the Bible first. The end-time prophecies are things God is going to do to punish mankind. If you don’t know why God is doing that, or what God is like, or how He punishes people, you cannot possibly understand the symbols of Revelation.
In short, without understanding the golden rule, and without being able to merge, divide, and harmonize the word of God, it is impossible to understand prophecy – or for that matter, the Bible in general. We’ve been using the merge-divide-harmonize approach in all these lessons, but nowhere is it more important than in prophecy. I will tell you the secret to prophecy right up front – the one secret that men have been seeking for thousands of years. Are you ready? All prophecies tell the same story.
Disappointed? Don’t be. Think about it this way; how well do you know the story of your dad’s life? Fairly well, I imagine. How did you learn it? Did you sit down and hear the entire life’s story from end to end, in chronological order, all at once? Of course not. So how DID you learn it? One story at a time! His life story was told in episodes built around events he thought were funny, exciting, or educational. The stories were told in random order as they came up. And as you heard these stories told and retold, different words were used each time – new details were added, other details were left out! And when your mom, uncle, and grandma told their versions of these stories, each one was from a new perspective and added new details to the picture growing in your mind!
But the problem was, the stories either overlapped – or else had huge gaps in time that were passed over with the words “and then after that, I…”. The only way to know how long those gaps were, and
what happened in them, is by comparing all the stories you’ve heard and piecing them together! NOT ONE of these stories was complete! And even though they were all completely true not one was enough! In order to have a complete picture of your dad’s life, you automatically merged and harmonized all of these overlapping, incomplete, subjective stories into one big picture! Why is it so hard to do that for God?
THE BIG PICTURE
There are thousands of different prophecies in the Bible, some only one sentence long, some spreading across whole chapters. Each one of these is telling the story of your Dad’s life, and His plan for your future! And to UNDERSTAND it, you must listen to each of these stories and add them all up! In Genesis 41:17-24, Pharaoh had two very different dreams. How should we explain these symbols? Should we close our Bible, and dig into Hebrew languages – find the numerical value of the Hebrew letters, multiply them by the seven kine, and divide by twelve to reveal a mystical number that is the date of Christ’s return? That’s precisely how most people approach prophecy!
But we can’t do that! You don’t stop listening in the middle of your dad’s story and guess at the ending to finish it yourself! You FINISH READING! This alone explains most prophecies, as you’ll see before this lesson is over. So finish listening in Genesis 41:25-37. The key to understanding ALL prophecy is right there in Genesis 41:25-26. These VERY different dreams ARE TELLING THE SAME STORY! Joseph tells Pharaoh that these dreams were MEANT to be merged together and understood as a SINGLE DREAM!
The oxen and the wheat represented the same time, but told in different symbols! The different symbols emphasized a different aspect of the events – in this case, the plenty and famine of wheat and also of livestock – but both told the same story! So to understand the Bible, you only need to add up every single prophecy and reduce them down to a simpler and simpler narrative, and you’ll know the entire past and future of our species!
MANY SYMBOLS FOR ONE THING
If you want to understand the Bible, remember one thing: the BIBLE interprets the Bible! The interpretation of the prophecy is ALWAYS written in the Bible, for EVERY prophecy. You will NEVER have to guess or leave the Bible to understand the interpretation! (2 Peter 1:20). The Bible’s symbols are SIMPLE, intuitive, and require no more than the ability to listen – and in a few cases, a basic knowledge of history – to understand them. A great example is Revelation 1:12-16. What are these stars and candlesticks? Must we guess? No! Read the context in Revelation 1:20.
This tells us very clearly that the seven stars represent seven ANGELS. And now throughout the Bible, we know EVERY time “star” is used as a symbol, it ALWAYS means an angel! (Isaiah 14:13, Job 38:7, etc.). And this is how the Bible interprets the Bible! But the Bible has other symbols that also mean “angel”. For example, read Revelation 4:5. Compare this to Numbers 8:2. We won’t get bogged down in the symbolism, just notice the candelabra in the physical temple is also portrayed in the spiritual temple in heaven, where God tells John the seven lamps or flames on the candlestick are “the seven spirits of God”.
Remember, they didn’t have electricity then – all “lamps” were candles or oil-fired flames. In the temple, this was a single golden “candlestick” with seven branches, each with an olive-oil-burning flame (not a candle) burning on top of it. Now keep merging this concept with Ezekiel 1:13. Here we see these “living creatures” appeared to Ezekiel like “coals of fire”, or “lamps”, with a “bright fire”. And they moved like “lightning”. Keep merging in Hebrews 1:7. So these “living creatures”, these “seven spirits of God”, are ANGELS – no guessing required, simple addition of these scriptures yields the unarguable answer!
But keep reading in Revelation 5:6, where another vision shows a similar image. The Lamb is, of course, Jesus. And He is pictured with “seven eyes”, which represent the seven spirits of God “sent forth into all the Earth”. Merge that with Zechariah 3:9; clearly, the stone is also Jesus (1 Corinthians 10:4). Therefore all these visions are one and the same! Just like Pharaoh’s dreams were! That is the key to prophecy! These “eyes of God” are sent into the Earth; what do they do? Psalms 34:15, Proverbs 15:3. When you read those verses you naturally assume two eyes are meant – but the Bible says God has SEVEN eyes watching the Earth! Merge with 2 Chronicles 16:9 and Zechariah 4:10.
Finally, merge them all with Daniel 4:13-17. Notice that here, instead of “flame”, “lamp”, “lightning”, “fire”, “star”, or “eye”, the term “watchers” is used for “the holy ones” – the holy angels of God! Because what does an “eye” do? It WATCHES! See how intuitive God’s symbols are? But why does God have all these different symbols for angels? Luke 11:34. See how easily the Bible explains its own symbols! You just have to ask the obvious questions! God says “the light of the body is the eye”. And the one thing that each of those symbols has in common, from “eye” to “lightning”… is light! Every single one of those symbols is a source of LIGHT!
And what does light do? Psalms 119:105, 130. And what are angels supposed to do? Hebrews 1:14. The Greek word Aggelos from which we get “angel” literally means “messenger”! And a messenger from God should bring only light! It is the light of God’s church! And now go back to Revelation 1:20; each of these candlesticks represented A CHURCH. And on top of that church – invisibly leading it – is an angel. And the messages in Revelation 2-3 are addressed to those angels – to the seven stars on TOP of the candlestick! After all, what do the flickering flames on a candle look like… if not stars?
God used all of these different symbols because each, in a way, pictured an angel; God uses angels to watch mankind, hence they are an “eye”. They are messengers of God, light-bringers to the world – thus, picturing them as a star, flame, hot coal, etc., makes sense. But the root meaning, from which all these symbols are derived, is light. Of course, light itself is another symbol which points to an even deeper truth. But that’s another lesson.
RIGHTLY DIVIDE
To understand the word of God you must merge and harmonize it. But it’s just as important to be able to take larger commandments and divide them, larger principles and break them up into smaller ones, larger prophecies and divide them into separate parts. Just because your dad told you about the time he met your mom and the day you were born at the same time, doesn’t mean they HAPPENED at the same time! You are expected to know that between those two events there must be AT LEAST 9 months (hopefully more)!
Read 2 Timothy 2:15. Notice what Paul says you have to do – “rightly divide the word of truth”. In the same verse, he also implies this will take study and hard work – it won’t necessarily happen the first time you read a Bible! An excellent example of this is Isaiah 61:1-9. The Jews were very familiar with this passage, and correctly understood it to apply to the Messiah – to Jesus. But they did not rightly divide it! Now read Luke 4:16-21. Notice it is the same passage – but only PART of the same passage!
Jesus stopped reading mid-verse in Isaiah 61:2. And then He said THIS scripture – the part of it He had read – was fulfilled THAT SAME DAY. And ONLY that part was fulfilled that day! Why didn’t He continue reading? Because the rest of that verse says, “and the day of vengeance of our God” – that day wasn’t to come for another 2,000 years!
Jesus “rightly divided” that word into the section that applied THEN, and the section that was yet to be fulfilled in the future. There was no apparent break in the original prophecy, yet between two words there was a gap of 2,000 years, and that gap can only be discovered by using other scriptures to “rightly divide it”! The Jews didn’t do this, so they were expecting the Messiah to “at this time restore again the Kingdom to Israel” (Acts 1:6). Reading Isaiah 61, that’s certainly a forgivable mistake. The division in the prophecy occurs mid-sentence. The only way to divide it is to use a “scriptural wedge” to pry it apart – find a scripture that MUST fit between those two words, and then you know they MUST be divided!
Another excellent example is in Genesis 1:1-2. Casually reading, one assumes God “created” the Earth in an unfinished state, and then went on to “create” it in the rest of Genesis 1. Thus we would conclude when God originally created the Earth it was “without form and void”, translated from the Hebrew words tohu and bohu. But did God create the Earth in a state of tohu and bohu? Isaiah 45:18. This says He created it NOT in tohu (translated into English as “in vain” in most translations of this verse). So how do we explain that? By rightly dividing Genesis 1:1-2!
In Hebrew, the words for past, present, and future aren’t always clear; the word “was” also translates just as well as “had become”. Rotherham translated these verses “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now, the earth, HAD BECOME waste and wild [tohu and bohu], and, darkness, was on the face of the roaring deep”. Notice the difference that makes! In the beginning – the REAL beginning – God created the heavens and the Earth. THEN, at some later time, after the Earth HAD BECOME waste and wild, the events of Genesis 1:2 through Genesis 3 take place!
Thus, just as in Isaiah 61:2, there is a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. It might have been a few minutes, it might have been a few eons. It simply doesn’t say… there. So we must find references to these events scattered throughout the Bible, merge and harmonize them, and then we’ll see how long the gap was, and why Earth “had become” waste and wild. But that’s another lesson!
Another example is Revelation 7:1-12. Most people who read this assume it is one continuous vision, with the first resurrection saints being saved in verses 1-8, and then the rest of mankind being saved at the same time in Revelation 7:9-12. Other verses that imply the same thing are John 5:28-29, and Matthew 25:31-46. These all seem to indicate a single, continuous judgment event where both the saved and unsaved are dealt with at the same time. But these are not the only verses on the subject! We must CORRECTLY DIVIDE these verses by finding others that prove there MUST be a gap between these two groups being saved. In this case, a great scriptural wedge for this passage is Revelation 20:4-6.
This verse clearly says that after the righteous are saved, the rest of the dead do not live again until 1,000 years have passed! And since all the verses are true, the ONLY way they can be harmonized is to pry them apart and insert the thousand-year gap from Revelation 20 into these verses, mid-sentence – just as Jesus Himself did in Luke 4:16-21! So John 5:28-29, when harmonized with Revelation 20:5, would read: John 5:28-29 (Weymouth) …For a time is coming when all who are in the graves will hear His voice and will come forth – they who have done what is right to the resurrection of Life, and 1,000 years later they whose actions have been evil to the resurrection of judgement.
We could further merge this prophecy with Revelation 20, to rename these resurrections to the names used there – “they who have done what is right to the [first resurrection], and 1,000 years later they whose actions have been evil to the [second resurrection].” Likewise, in Revelation 7:9 would say “and 1,000 years AFTER this happened I beheld…”. Obviously, I don’t propose you go crossing out verses in your Bible – I simply propose that you understand them as a package that was intended to fit together!
As I said at the beginning, the key is knowing that all prophecies are part of the exact same story, being told and retold again and again, using different words and symbols each time. So a huge key to understanding prophecy is simply knowing that “resurrection of life” means the exact same thing as “the first resurrection”, “being born of the spirit (not begotten, but born)”, “the last trump”, and so on. All these, and many other names refer to the exact same event! And so when you merge all these separate prophecies together, you’ll realize they are all telling new details from slightly different perspectives or with slightly different points, and as you add them all up you can finally approach a complete understanding of the plan of God!
IN THE DAY THAT YOU SIN
What are the wages of sin? Romans 6:23. What did God tell Adam and Eve? Genesis 2:17. So there we have two laws, which when merged say “in the day that you sin, you shall die”. This is a law, and God is extremely precise about laws. Sin requires death in the same day. A person who sins earns “wages”, and the payment God owes for sin is death. How long does God say we have to pay our own employees? Leviticus 19:13. We deserve our wages in the same day we earn them! To do anything less would be unrighteous of God, by His own law!
And yet, Adam and Eve did indeed eat the forbidden fruit and did not die that day – nor for over 900 years after! Was God so overwhelmed by pity that He simply ignored the law? Most Christians are comfortable with that. I am not. A God who can change His mind about your punishment for no reason but pity, can just as easily change His mind about your salvation for no reason but irritation. Is God like that? Malachi 3:6. So if God did not kill them as the law seemed to require, then we do not fully understand the law.
Searching for an explanation to a contradiction like this is how we understand new things. The answer is found in 2 Peter 3:8. From God’s perspective – and therefore in God’s symbolism – one day can mean one literal day OR it can mean 1,000 years! I will wear out this verse before this course is over, so you might as well memorize it now. This means that when God says “day”, God can mean either kind of day! Thus, when God warned Adam and Eve of the penalty for sin, they no doubt assumed – as did we – that if they made it through sunset, they were safe. And they were – safe for the literal day. But no one has ever lived longer than 1,000 years! Every person has died in the same millennium in which they sinned!
Many came close – Methuselah setting the record at 969, Adam coming in at 930 – but everyone who ever sinned has died in the same thousand-year day that they broke the law! Why? Job 14:5-6. Your days (literal days) are determined, and there are bounds that no man can pass! How long is that limit to our lifespan? Every man has no more than “his day” – 1,000 years! In that day, you must die for your sins! God cannot postpone it any longer! One of the biggest keys to understanding the Bible is this principle – that God’s symbols often mean multiple things at the same time. If something doesn’t make sense after reading the context and merging and harmonizing, you are probably looking at the wrong level – thinking of the physical and not the spiritual, thinking of the literal day when He meant some other kind of day!
But God cannot lie, not even a little bit – so in some sense, both are always true. Adam and Eve did not literally die in the literal day they ate the fruit. But by eating the fruit, they were cut off from God, written out of His inheritance, and thus they died a kind of spiritual death! God, in effect, said “you’re dead to me”. How often did Paul die for his sins? 1 Corinthians 15:31. How often were lambs offered for the sins of Israel? Hebrews 7:27. Every time any of us sin, we must die a spiritual death in that literal day; which is why every time we sin, Jesus’ sacrifice must be applied to us in that literal day, to substitute His own spiritual death for ours!
But that spiritual death doesn’t literally kill us in the literal day; yet we always die within the metaphorical 1,000 year day. Thus, every word God says is true on every conceivable level, and the scripture cannot be broken (John 10:35b). Never forget that. Every conceivable level.
DUALITY
God rarely, if ever, does a single thing for a single reason. God is working on many different levels; different covenants, different groups of people, different levels of existence, and so on. And the awe inspiring cleverness of God’s plan and of the Bible itself is that God’s statements ALWAYS apply to ALL LEVELS at once – at least in some sense. God has established a clear principle in the Bible that in prophecy, “a day” can mean more than simply a literal 24 hour day (Numbers 14:34, Ezekiel 4:6, 2 Peter 3:8). So when God said something will happen “three days hence” it always does!
But usually something happens – a “type” of the real fulfillment – in three literal days. Something else – another type – happens in three years, a day-for-a-year. And finally, the REAL fulfillment, happens in three thousand years, day-for-a-millennium. For example, in Daniel 9:27, it said the Messiah would be cut off “in the midst of the week”. We used that in Lesson 1-1 to show that Jesus died at the end of the day Wednesday, the middle day of the week.
But in the strict context of that prophecy, a day-for-a-year was meant. Lesson 1-1 also explained that from the time the commandment was sent to rebuild the city of Jerusalem (which happened in Ezra 7, in 457 BC), there would be 69 weeks (483 days/years, which ended in 27 AD); and in the midst of the 70th week (4th year, 31 AD) Jesus would be killed. But there is another layer of fulfillment we haven’t touched on yet, which is that this phase of God’s plan lasts for 7,000 years – one week of millennia. Paul mentions this thousand-year rest day in Hebrews 4:4-10. And in the fourth day of that week, just under 4,000 years from the creation of Adam, Jesus was killed.
So when God said the phrase “in the midst of the week” in Daniel 9:27, He meant it in every possible sense of the word “week”. This is one of the greatest keys to prophecy – that God’s words are ALWAYS true, on every conceivable level (Psalms 119:96). As a final example – and by no means the last application of this particular statement – how long is man’s ideal lifespan? Psalms 90:10. Now let’s imagine that 70 years is a “week of decades”. How old was Jesus when He died? Luke 3:23. This was at the beginning of His 4-year ministry, so about 34 years old when He died.
So literally, Jesus died in the middle decade of His allotted 70 year week! This is four separate applications that we know of for a single prophecy! This is the truly amazing nature of the Bible – that simple statements like Daniel 9:27 can be true on so many levels. No group of half-naked tribesmen could have crafted such an elegant piece of work! As another related example, read John 2:19-21. Jesus was in the temple at the time, so naturally they assumed He meant the literal temple, but He didn’t. Or did He? It says He “spoke of the temple of His body”, which laid in the grave for three literal days. So the temple (His body) was destroyed, and raised up the third day. That’s a type of the real fulfillment.
Another meaning of that statement is thousand-year days. From the time Jesus died to His return 2,000 years later there are two thousand-year days. Followed by a thousand-year millennium, and then the second resurrection. That is when God builds His REAL temple, His spiritual temple! When He offers salvation to all mankind! And that happens exactly three days from the time Jesus died – the third day! But that interpretation has another meaning as well; for what is the body of Christ? 1 Corinthians 12:27, Colossians 1:24. So the church is His body. And if the Pharisees killed someone in the church – Steven, say (Acts 7:54-60) – when will he be raised up? After 2,000 years – on the third millennial day!
Jesus’ death caused all need for sacrifice to cease in the temple (Daniel 9:27 again), for at that point we became the temple of God and the old one became meaningless. So in a sense the temple was “destroyed” when Jesus died – to be rebuilt “the third day” – the third thousand-year day! Remember, “the third day” can be any time from 48 hours to 72 hours, or anytime between 2,000 and 3,000 years! The firstfruits would be resurrected after precisely 2,000 years – which is a part of the third day! But the second-fruits are resurrected after precisely 3,000 years which is also technically the third day! All these meanings are true, and throughout the Bible an unimaginable depth of understanding is buried in apparently casual statements like this! You just have to ask the obvious questions!
MEANING BEHIND MEANINGS
I want to make sure you understand something that no one seems to get about prophecy. These are not arbitrary symbols. Most people think that God just picked “stars” to hide His meaning, rather like the army picks names like “Operation Winter Sun”. Nothing God does is arbitrary. If God chose a symbol, it means far more than just a name. It speaks to a deeper, fundamental truth – in every case. For example, why did God choose to represent a day and a year as mutual symbols? What do they both have in common? Genesis 8:22. Again, we don’t have to guess! Ask the obvious question – “what do they have in common?”, and the answer is easy: days have a period of light and a period of darkness; years also have a period of more sun and a period of more darkness!
When you just stop to think about it, this becomes obvious – because that’s exactly how God initially defined a “day”! (Genesis 1:5). Thus there is an actual MEANING behind all God’s symbols, which portrays ever-deeper spiritual truths. Much more of that in time. Suffice it to say that all things with a cycle of light and darkness, heat and cold, truth and lies, good and evil, can be seen as related symbols – and that will help to unlock far more of the Bible than can be imagined.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
To return to the metaphor of reconstructing your dad’s life story, the only way we can correctly seam together all these disjointed and overlapping stories is by finding common, defining events that turn up in many different stories. I call these “bridges”. When your dad said “I was working at McDonald’s, then I had my motorcycle accident” and another day said “after I had my accident, I went to Italy”, you would know that your dad went to Italy after his motorcycle accident. Even thought he didn’t specify motorcycle accident in the second story, his use of the singular “my accident” (instead of “my first accident”, or some such) strongly implies he had only had one accident.
If another day he said “I brought a Big Mac home from work then studied for my SATs”, you would know that he worked at McDonald’s while he was in high school – even though he didn’t specifically say either of those things! I’m not telling you anything you wouldn’t already do for your physical father. Why do you treat God so differently? There are many defining moments in God’s story – the resurrection of the saints, the exodus, the flood, the first and second coming of Christ, and so on. By finding these events, and comparing the stories before and after them, we can properly place everything in a correct timeline!
As a very simple example from the first lesson, the women bought spices after a Sabbath AND before a Sabbath. This forces a wedge between what might otherwise be viewed as a single Sabbath, and splits it into two! Looked at a different way, the buying of spices is a “bridge” between two scriptures, and comparing what happens before and after that event corrects the timeline!
A larger-scale example is Isaiah 34:4, Isaiah 13:9, Joel 2:10, 31; Joel 3:15; Amos 5:18-20; Ezekiel 32:7-8; Zephaniah 1:15; Matthew 24:29; Revelation 6:12-14. If you read every one of those verses, you’ll see they’re almost identical. There are many others that say the same thing as well, scattered throughout all the books of the Bible. These are not different prophecies! These are the same story, told and retold and retold again! Just like Joseph’s vision! So treat the sun going dark like you did the buying of the spices – first, read all the context of all these verses.
Then write down, in order, all of the major events that happen in each of these passages, each on a separate strip of paper. Then align the timelines along the bridge event (the sun going dark), and delete the redundant events told in more than one story. That will allow you to collapse all these stories into a single, linear tale – it will also show you that there is no reason to spend your life trying to figure out prophecy. It’s not that hard – it’s just one story, told in a thousand different ways.
As usual, this lesson is summed up in a single passage: Isaiah 28:9-10. This is how God teaches knowledge – “here a little, there a little”. God could certainly have condensed the Bible, simplified it so the message couldn’t possibly be misunderstood! But as you learned in the lesson on grace, God spoke in parables so that the world would not understand. He spoke in riddles to hide the meaning so that He could reveal knowledge in His own time. These prophecies were supposed to be sealed until the end, until God was ready to reveal them!
So He hid them in plain sight, scattered in fragments all over the Bible, and has kept theologians chasing wild theories all over the Bible for thousands of years! But all anyone had to do was listen to Him, and understand His words “line upon line, precept upon precept” and assemble these fragments of prophecy, reconciling and rearranging them to see the simple answers. Again, this is not some new thing I’m teaching you to do. I’m just showing you how to treat God’s story the way you already treat everyone else’s stories – and the way you’d want everyone else to treat yours. As I said at the beginning, without the golden rule you cannot understand prophecy.
For more lessons enrol in the Comprehensive Bible Study Course by Nathanial Burson The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.