Your Sons & Daughters Shall Prophesy - Prophetic Gifts Today In The New Testament Church

A Profile of the Ancient Hebrew Prophet

apostles, as they preached the gospel, argued the authority and deity of Christ based on the prophets. Clarence E. Macartney capsulates the essence of foretelling: "The argu ment from prophecy is that if we have a series of predictions foretelling clearly and closely future events which no native shrewdness and no clever guess could have arrived at and the fulfillment of which could not have been contrived by an impostor, then the fulfillment of such predictions necessitates a supernatural power at work. In other words, the fulfillment of prophecy proves that Christianity is a divine revelation." 23 Slightly more than one-fourth of the Bible text has to do with the future. This surprising information comes from a most amazing book, Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy: The Complete Guide to Scriptural Predictions and Their Fulfillment. The author, J. Barton Payne, has done massive research on Bible prophecies, extracting 1,817 entries covering all predictions in the Bible. His statistical evaluations of the prophecies are particularly enlightening. The predictive matter in the Bible, he says, amounts to 27 percent (that is, 8,352 verses out of its total of 31,124), with the Old Testament at 28.5 percent and the New Testament at 21.5 percent. 24 God told Ezekiel that the people were whispering about him behind his back, making fun of his foretelling. They were saying, "Come on, let's have some fun! Let's go hear the prophet tell us what the LORD is saying!" (Ezekiel 33:30, NLT). God responded with this classic state ment: "But when all these terrible things happen to them-as they cer tainly will-then they will know that a prophet has been among them" (verse 33). Here are eight examples of predictive prophecy: • Ezekiel describing the exodus of Zedekiah (Ezekiel 12:8-13). • Ezekiel declaring the exact day the siege began (Ezekiel 24:2). • Jeremiah pronouncing the death of Hananiah (Jeremiah 28:16-17). • Amos proclaiming the fall oflsrael (Amos 5:27). • Micaiah announcing the death of Ahab (1 Kings 22). • Isaiah confirming the deliverance of Jerusalem from Sennacherib (Isaiah 37:26-37). • Jeremiah heralding the seventy-year captivity and return (Jeremiah 25:11-12). • Micah predicting the birthplace of the Messiah (Micah 5:2). 25 There is a continuity between the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament prophets and today's prophetic Church. The two Testaments ■ 48