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The challenge of interpreting the prophets of the Old Testament is not new. The church father Jerome said, “As for Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, who can fully understand them or adequately explain them?” Even though the Scriptures are perspicuous—that is, their central message of salvation in Christ is clear enough that a child may understand it—not all parts are equally clear (see 2 Peter 3:16). In Numbers 12:6–8, the Lord singles out prophecy as a particularly challenging genre because the prophets speak in “vision[s],” “dream[s],” and “riddles.” This is contrasted with Moses (i.e., Genesis–Deuteronomy), whose words are “clear.” Yet these books of the Bible are also given to us as part of the “all Scripture” that is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).
modeled on moses
The prophet’s office is modeled on Moses himself. The nations around Israel depended on divination and other similarly manipulative practices to uncover the mind of the gods, who had no real interest in humanity (Deut. 18:9–14). The Lord delighted in communicating with His people, however, so He would direct them through His chosen mediators, just as He had spoken through Moses at Mount Sinai (vv. 15–18). He would put His own words into their mouths so that whatever a true prophet said would be God’s words (v. 18).
In the Sinai covenant, God laid down His law for His people in a covenant that concluded with blessings and curses (see Lev. 26; Deut. 28). If the Israelites obeyed the wise instruction (Hebrew torah) of the Lord, He would ensure that life went well for them. If they rebelled and were unfaithful to Him, however, then the curses of the covenant would come upon them. These blessings involved agricultural fruitfulness and military success, while the curses spoke of agricultural disaster and military defeats, culminating in the loss of the land that the Lord had promised them. These blessings were always more than simply temporal, however; they pointed God’s people forward to the heavenly inheritance stored up for them in Him.
As covenant mediators speaking for God, the prophets were tasked with confronting Israel and Judah over their repeated failures to keep the Sinai covenant, urging them to repent and turn to the Lord. These rebukes were not merely timeless appeals to humanity to pursue universal values of justice and righteousness; rather, the prophets were acting as prosecuting attorneys, charging the people of Israel with specific breaches of the covenant code. These were not merely sins against their neighbor but spiritual adultery against the Lord, their divine Husband (see Ezek. 16; Hos. 1–3).
In spite of Israel’s constant history of sin, the Lord did not immediately pour out covenant curses on His rebellious people; rather, He repeatedly sent His prophets to plead with them to turn from their evil ways, repent, and return to Him (see Isa. 1:18–20; Mal. 3:7). Time and time again, the prophets expressed God’s compassion toward His people but also warned them of the inevitable consequences of continued disobedience. As 2 Chronicles 36:15–16 says:
The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place. But they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord rose against his people, until there was no remedy.
This prophetic role as covenant prosecutors accounts for the extensive judgment passages in the prophets’ writings. The prophets were not merely social critics: they were rebuking the people for failing to keep the terms of the Sinai covenant and warning them of the inevitable wrath to come. In the earlier prophets, the appeals to repent and return to the Lord are more prominent, while it seems that the threatened judgment could yet be averted. The book of Jonah tells how even a pagan city that heeds God’s word through a prophet and repents may be spared. Yet as the cataclysm of the exile approached, prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel warned of a destruction that was by then inevitable, providing the people with clear reasons that the Lord had abandoned Israel and the temple in Jerusalem where He had set His name—that is, because of the people’s repeated idolatry and oppression of the poor and the weak.
the lord is coming to heal and to save
Yet the prophets’ words from God were never merely words of judgment against His unfaithful people or even appeals for them to repent and return to Him. The prophets also had a message of hope beyond judgment: For the sake of His own glory, the Lord would restore His people and return them to the land that He had promised to give their forefathers (Ezek. 36:22–24). He would take away their heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh (vv. 25–28). He would purify His people as a refiner purifies the contents of his furnace, removing the dross and retaining the silver (Mal. 3:2–4). A remnant would return home and enjoy His blessing once more.
This positive future was as inevitable as the destruction that would come upon Israel for its sins, because it was the Lord’s purpose to have a holy people for Himself, and His purposes can never be thwarted. It would be a salvation entirely of God’s grace and not by works. Unlike the Sinai covenant, whose typological blessings were based on the principle “Do this and you shall live” (see Deut. 4:1), the new covenant that the Lord would make with His people would demonstrate His compassion and mercy in giving sinners new life in Him. Through the trial of the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile, the just would live by faith (Hab. 2:4), trusting God to supply them with a new righteousness through imputation (Zech. 3:1–10). The Lord Himself would come to be their Shepherd (Isa. 40:10–11; Ezek. 34:23–24). A new branch would spring up from the old line of David, to be the righteous son of David for whom they were longing (Isa. 11:1–6; Jer. 23:5; Zech. 3:8). A servant would come to fulfill Israel’s failed calling as a light to the gentiles (Isa. 49:6), and He would bear the sins of His people through His own sufferings (Isa. 52:13–53:12).
These passages underline the fact that the central message of the prophets is not merely rebuking sinners and offering the hope of rewards in return for obedience; the central message is the sufferings of Christ and the glories that will follow (Luke 24:44–47). He is the new Israel, the faithful Servant of the Lord who keeps the obligations of the Sinai covenant perfectly, meriting the promise of life that is attached to it (Gal. 4:4–5). He is the One whose death will remove the iniquity of the land in a single day (Zech. 3:9). All who are joined to Him by faith become part of that redeemed people, the new Israel who are Abraham’s children because they share the faith of their father (Rom. 4:9–12). With the coming of Christ, now the good news goes out not merely to Jerusalem and Judea (Isa. 40) but onward to the nations and to the ends of the earth (see Isa. 45:22; Mal. 1:5).
interpreting the prophets
In the light of this overview of the prophetic task, how should we interpret these writings in our very different time of redemptive history, after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus? To begin with, we should remember that though the words of the prophets were addressed to different people living in a different time, they still speak to us today. The prophets’ condemnation of their contemporaries should often convict us of our own sins. Though the Sinai covenant no longer binds us, having been fulfilled by Christ, Old Testament law remains a perpetual expression of God’s wise and holy character. Even as Christians, we continue to struggle with heart idolatry in ways that are often analogous to the ways that Old Testament Israel struggled, and we, too, are called to live lives of daily repentance.
Just as Old Testament Israel was called by the prophets to repent and to look to the Lord by faith, trusting in the typological atonement of the sacrificial system, so, too, we can run to Christ as the fulfillment of those now-defunct sacrifices. His righteous life is credited to us in place of our own failures, while His atoning death on the cross washes away all our sins. Just as the Old Testament anticipated the glories that will follow (see Luke 24), we, too, can be inspired by the prophetic vision of a glorious future in which each man “will invite his neighbor to come under his vine and under his fig tree” (Zech. 3:10). Nor was this vision restricted to the physical descendants of Abraham. The prophets looked forward to a day when ten men from every tongue would join themselves to the Jews, saying, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you” (Zech. 8:23). Even Sodom and Samaria, the twin icons of sexual and religious infidelity, would be joined together with Jerusalem in the new people of God, united with them by the same grace that Israel itself needed (Ezek. 16:53–63).
Israel also found itself living in a “now” and “not yet” situation, especially in the postexilic period. There was much for the people to be grateful for in the unfailing faithfulness of the Lord that brought them back to the promised land (Mal. 3:6). Yet at the same time, the Israelites lived in a disappointing and frustrating world, one in which they required the hope given by the prophets to encourage them in the meantime (Hag. 2:3–9). So, too, we Christians live between the first and second comings of our Lord. Some of the things for which the prophets longed have been fulfilled (e.g., Mic. 5:2; Mal. 4:5), yet we still await the fullness of the day of the Lord for which they longed, when God’s final separation of the wheat and the chaff will take place (Mal. 4:1–3).
If we expect the Old Testament prophets to give us a precise road map of events leading up to the return of Christ, however, we will be disappointed—or we will try to force Old Testament prophecies to speak to issues that they never intended to address. Remember, the prophets sometimes spoke in dreams, visions, and riddles (see Num. 12:6–8), as is clear when we survey the prophecies of Christ’s first coming. Some of these prophecies were clearly understood beforehand, such as Micah 5:2’s pronouncement of the Messiah’s birth in Bethlehem. Yet many of the prophecies were obscure until after their fulfillment. Imagine attending a “prophecy conference” in the year 100 BC and listening to the suggestion that Isaiah 7:14 predicted that the Messiah would be born of a virgin and that Psalm 16:10–11 anticipated that the Messiah would die and rise again. The discussion after those talks would have been intense. Likewise, in Isaiah 40 the wilderness is part of the message of the coming forerunner, while in John the Baptist’s fulfillment it becomes the location of the messenger’s preaching (compare Mark 1:3 with Isa. 40:3). We should be cautious and humble in our expectations of prophecies yet to be fulfilled at the return of Christ. Some things about that return are clear, while other prophecies may not be fully understood until we look backward at them from heaven.
In the meantime, as we await Christ’s return from heaven and the fullness of what the Lord revealed to His Old Testament prophets, the prophets teach us how we should wait. Malachi reminds us to remember Moses and Elijah (Mal. 4:4–5). These representatives of the Law and the Prophets charge us to pursue lives of faith and faithfulness, to repent of our sins, to fear and serve the Lord, and to trust in the once-for-all atonement of Christ while we await the glories that they foresaw, when Christ will welcome us into His presence forever.