Prophesy and Its Fulfillment

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides thee, who works for those who wait for him."

-- Isaiah 64:4

So we have a God “who works for those who wait for him.” What does that mean? Furthermore such a God is without precedent; no one have ever heard of such a God, nor seen Him. What does that mean? Have there never before been gods who worked for those who waited for them? Let’s reflect on these claims. 

With Advent we enter the time of prophecy. John the Baptist, whom the Bible regards as the last of the prophets of Israel, is the pivotal figure of Advent. In him traditional prophecy ceases because Jesus fulfils it.  Isaiah is the traditional prophet most quoted at Christmas. He is the author of the title, “Prince of Peace,” his is the description of Jesus as a great light to those who sat in darkness, and he it is who sings, “For to us a child is born, to us a son in given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder” (Isaiah 9:2-7; cf. 11:1-9). What difference does it make to our Christian understanding of these classic lines that they were originally sung or spoken at the coronation of King Hezekiah of Judah in the late 8th century B.C? No difference, because Isaiah himself had already detached them for that context and reframed them as descriptions of an ideal    future king. All the Christians did then was to identify Jesus as that ideal king. The fact that there is such a great difference between the social status of Jesus, on the one hand, and King Hezekiah on the other, makes no difference to us Christians, but all the difference in the world to the normal understanding of the fulfillment of prophecy.

I heard yesterday of an old Austrian auto mechanic living in the desert near Palm Springs who has four amphibious landing craft such as the Marines use, lashed together and waiting for the earthquake that will turn the Coachella Valley where he lives, into a lake. This admirable prudence is inspired by a prophecy of Nostradamus, a Renaissance charlatan much exploited these days by superstitious people. (I well remember the only occasion when I bought a copy of the “National Enquirer.” During the first Clinton election campaign I saw the headline, “Aliens Advise Clinton on International Politics,” or something like that, and since IR was my professional interest at the time, I felt I had to cover all bases.  Apparently some people believe what they read in the National Enquirer; they are evidently the “enquiring minds that want to know” and I daresay of the class that takes Nostradamus seriously. There will always be superstitious people, enslaved to nothings).

Seriously, though, the normal understanding of prophecy sees it as something like sooth-saying or clairvoyance, forecasting the future, with a one to one correlation between the prophecy and the fulfillment. To be sure prophecies have come in the form of riddles, as the message one Greek king got from Delphi, that if he waged the war a great king would be defeated. It was left to him to decide who that great king might be; it turned out to be he. Nevertheless, riddles or not, good prophecies are expected to report the future reliably so that we can plan to profit from it.  (Known in some quarters as insider trading).

Let us take our cue from the difference between the social status of King Hezekiah and baby Jesus. Isaiah re-frames a coronation song within the longing for an ideal king, keeping the usual trappings of royalty, but we Christians take the next step and relocate the ideal king outside the normal trappings of royalty, identifying Jesus, a child of the people as the ideal king who fulfils our longing. What has happened here? Clearly, we have redefined the nature of Kingship.

Redefinition then is the way we interpret all prophecy, and the standard of redefinition is the Incarnation of God in Jesus. Nothing is any longer what it seems: kings are poor and wretches are rich, good people are humbled and scalawags are celebrated. Why? Because the truth is in Jesus Christ, and all the prophecies are fulfilled in him. Some people argue that the prophecies prove that Jesus is the one. We reverse the direction of interpretation starting from Jesus and say that Jesus proves the prophecies to be prophetic. The prophecy does not prove the truth of the Incarnation the Incarnation proves the truth of the prophecy. We read the Bible, the world, and one another through the eyes of Jesus, not the other way around. We fit the world into Christ not Christ into the world. This, of course, means that there are prophecies that turn out to be untrue, because they cannot be fitted to Jesus.

When we turn to our texts for today we see the truth of this claim. The Isaiah passage, which comes from a later disciple of the Isaiah of the prophecies we have discussed so far, says that God deals with those who wait for Him. Waiting for God means not only patiently expecting Him to do something we expect, but more accurately, being willing to accept whatever God chooses to do, that is, to let the outcome determine our expectation rather than our expectation to determine the outcome. Look at the passage: “O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at thy presence--- to make thy name known to thy adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at thy presence (64:1).” That describes the conventional expectation of the divine judgment as more or less a military campaign that routs God’s enemies and forces them to pay homage to His name. Those who do not wait properly but merely mark time until God launches this attack have already missed God’s coup de grace, the brilliant strategy of coming in under the radar, and winning all without firing a shot. Jesus is the one we have been waiting for, and those whose preconceived ideas insist on war as in battle and bombs, have been bypassed. They are like those Japanese soldiers who were found still to be defending Pacific islands thirty years after the end of a war that passed them by while they we waiting for the scenario to unfold according to their expectations. Waiting for God means being content to let God unfold the future, without necessarily informing us.

Isaiah says of our God, “Thou meetest him that joyfully works righteousness, those that remember thee in thy ways (64:5).” The right way to wait is to be working righteousness joyfully, and remembering God in God’s own ways, the ways that God makes possible for us. This is a picture of serene faith, content to be about God’s work and to let God take care of the future in His own way, and own good time. So then what is the point of prophecy after all? I think it is this; when we find what we experience also to be described in the prophecies we are confirmed in our reliance on this experience.  For example, the earliest Christians were perplexed at the suffering of Jesus, until He appeared to them in the resurrection. Imagine the added assurance then when they read of the Suffering Servant of God in Isaiah’s middle period of prophecy (40-53). They already knew the truth of Jesus’ suffering and the triumph of his resurrection; and from the vantage point of this experience they could see the salience of the Suffering Servant passages in Isaiah’s prophecy, and thus were confirmed in the faith that in Jesus the one true god of Israel is at work. So reading prophecy backwards, in the light of Christ, enables us to link the New Testament to the Old, and see that the God incarnate in Mary is the God of Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets.

This mode of reading, through the lens of Christ, enables us to see the truth in prophecy but it also enables us to see the untruth. For that reason much of the OT must simply be ignored, because to take our present passage as an example, it belongs to the school of thought that sees God as the war maker who commands attention to his Name by slaughter, threats and manipulation. That is the tribal idol of the ancient Hebrews, Jesus, on the other hand, is the one, true God incarnate in our flesh, love not war, silence not noise, humility not arrogance. So let us wait for God in the way that God wants us to wait. Humbly, silently, and above all, with open minds and eager hearts.

Amen.