I've Been Thinking About This…

Somewhere back around 1500BC, Moses was in the desert being amazed at a bush that wouldn’t stop burning. This Holy fire was his first sign of God’s presence. When God told Moses His name – or we could call it one of His chief characteristics, since God has so many names – Moses gained new insight. The name which we translate Jehovah combines all three tenses of the verb ‘to be’ – past present and future. “I was, I am, I will be.” ¹ The meaning behind it? God is saying that all of Moses’ past, all his present and all his future are in God’s present. Nobody is hidden from God because of darkness (Psalm 139:11); nobody is hidden from God because they’re yet to be born (Psalm 139:13); nobody is hidden from God because they’re too far away for Him to detect (Psalm 139:9); now we are told that they aren’t hidden from Him by being too far away in time, either. Time is not a barrier to Him; He doesn’t even move back and forth through it as He chooses – it is all spread out before Him.

Apart from its obvious impact to the Calvinism/Arminianism debate, this has some staggering implications, and perhaps foremost is a re-shaping of our understanding about prophecy. Consider the Old Testament prophets predicting the Messiah and the events surrounding His birth and death. There are those who have spent many hours trying to calculate the probability of those prophecies coming true – coming up with numbers such as:

• 1 in 537,000,000 for the final sufferings of Christ during the 24 hours leading up to his crucifixion ²;
• 1 in 10¹¹⁰ for 300 predictions of the Messiah in the Old Testament ³;
• 1 in 10¹⁷ in reference to 8 Messianic prophecies, and 1 in 10¹⁵⁷ in reference to 48 prophecies ⁴

… which may be a noble endeavor, but I think it completely misses the point.

We’re stuck in a one-way stream; we can’t go backwards in time; we can’t even slow it down at all. This idea of Time being a one-way flow of events is so completely ingrained in our understanding of how things work that we perceive such prophecy as being about the future. We say to ourselves, “Somehow, God has made an incredibly bold statement about an unbelievably unlikely event, before going on to fulfill that statement. What an incredible risk He took in saying that! It just shows how much He is in control of the universe.”

When we think along those lines, we impose our human limitations on God. Because it isn’t about the future – not to the Giver of the Word – it’s all in the present to Him. The point here isn’t that God should be given the glory for (1) taking a huge risk, (2) making a series of near-impossible statements, and then (3) manipulating events to make those prophecies come true. It is rather that He has made sure that the description passed along to us is so utterly impossible that we must believe that – since only Jesus can and has fulfilled them – He must be the Messiah that was prophesied!

If you believe what God told Moses about Himself in Exodus 3, then you have to accept that He is not constrained by time, and thus that He had all the details about the Messiah in front of Him as He spoke through each prophet in the Old Testament. That was the point of the prophecies – not so much to reflect on the Father’s manipulation of events, but to ensure the recognition and acceptance of the Son. Messianic prophecies are a passport – God’s proof of who Jesus really is – His ‘identity papers’, embedded unchangeably in Time.

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