End Times Berean Watchman Report - Interpreting Prophecy - Part 3

I hope you’re ready for this third installment of lessons for interpreting prophecy that come straight from examples in the New Testament. These have been extracted from the first chapter of my soon to be released book, No More Delay.

Another example of how prophecy should be understood comes from Luke 4:16-21. In the account, Jesus went into the synagogue on the Sabbath, and he read a passage from the scroll of Isaiah. They didn’t use the chapter and verse references we have now, but he read from what we now call chapter 61.

Jesus just stopped in the middle of a sentence or expression. He didn’t even finish the rest of what should have been read from the appointed portion of Scripture for that day. He just cut off in the middle of verse 2, leaving out “and the day of vengeance of our God,” which was a prophecy for his second coming, not the first. This establishes a principle for applying prophecy that teaches that even if statements are right next to each other, then they don’t have to be chronologically close together in time, or indeed even directly connected. This means that the prophecy ends not at the end of a passage or sentence, but wherever the fulfillment happens to end.

Admittedly, this sets up a precedent that can be confusing; but once the principle is recognized, it can be used to calibrate our understanding of how we should view prophecy. If we fail to understand and apply this principle, then it can lead to applying unnecessary constraints on our interpretation of prophecy that will then invariably cause us to get it wrong.

The proof text for this idea comes from Matthew 27. The story is the account of Judas betraying Jesus for thirty pieces of silver; but he then later feels remorse and attempts to return the thirty silver pieces to the chief priests. They don’t accept the money, so Judas throws it at their feet and then goes out and hangs himself. After Judas’ death, the silver is used to buy the potter’s field, as a burial place for foreigners.

This prophecy is only attributed to Jeremiah, and yet it includes a major portion from Zechariah as well. In these passages, the idea of buying a field with silver in obedience to the command of the Lord is the overarching narrative. Here are the passages in question:

In the above references we have the Lord’s command to buy the field, and we have the price for the land of seventeen shekels. At first glance, seventeen shekels doesn’t sound like thirty pieces of silver, but here’s where a little history and some math come in. For the temple, the half-shekel was the official silver coin for temple usage. In ancient Israel, there were multiple shekel weights and even different standards for measurement that were sometimes utilized, so it is not possible to be completely certain about the precise weights of shekels or pieces of silver. There are, however, sources we can refer to make a good estimate [1]. In Jeremiah’s day, the shekel is believed to have been in the range of 12.9 grams; but by the first century they were using Tyrian shekels that weighed about 14.3 grams. Half-shekels were used for the temple tax, so a standard “piece of silver” would have been half of Jeremiah’s shekel [2]. Using those numbers, the seventeen shekels of Jeremiah were equivalent to thirty pieces of silver (i.e., thirty Tyrian half-shekels) in the first century [3]. The Jeremiah passages don’t give us the reference to the potter’s field, though. That additional information comes from Zechariah. Therefore, we get the primary instruction from Jeremiah, but there are addi-tional details in the account from Zechariah. This example teaches us that revelations from different prophets can be combined into one prophetic narrative—like connecting puzzle pieces together.

Economist Martin Armstrong weighs in on the economic and political trends that could be pushing us towards WW III and perhaps even civil war here at home in the 2024-2027 window.

Next week, we’ll look at how one prophecy can be imbedded into another, like an apple of gold in a setting of silver (Proverbs 25:11)…