How to dishonor God's Word

It may be easier than you think.

Photo by Alex Moliski on Unsplash

I almost don’t blame people for avoiding the prophetic Scriptures as if they were so many potholes. After all, the study of end-times prophecy or eschatology (the branch of theology dealing with “last things”) seems to degenerate into arguments pretty quickly. However, wherever we turn in the Bible, we’re never too far away from a reference to the return of Christ, or something else that reveals God’s determination to intervene in history — and intervene with finality! I would submit to you that despite all the controversies, if we are not interested in studying prophecy we are actually dishonoring God and His Word.

Here are four brief reasons why you should study prophecy.

1. First, the fact that God has included so much prophecy in His Word makes it important, whether people think it is or not. If the Holy Spirit saw fit to include these matters in the Scriptures, we are showing Him disrespect by treating them as unimportant or, as some even do, simply ignoring them completely.

2. Jesus, being a good shepherd, lovingly gave us specific warnings in His Word concerning the times and seasons surrounding His return and what follows thereafter. The fact that no one knows when Jesus is coming is only one small fact among hundreds the Bible contains concerning the end of the age; why, then, should people be content merely to understand that He’s coming at a time unknown?

Surely it is unwise and cavalier of us to view the details we do have as irrelevant to Christian life and growth. What of all the other things that Jesus DID say to us? Why would Jesus tells us things like, "See, I have told you beforehand", "What I say to you, I say to all – watch!", "Be careful that your life is not consumed, etc."? Why tell us the Parable of the Ten Virgins? Why tell us that He who “endures to the end” will be saved? Jesus lovingly and faithfully gave us warnings for the health of our soul. I would go so far as to say that it’s insulting to Him to overlook these warnings, simply because we cannot know the precise time of His coming, or because the subject matter is necessarily controversial.

3. The fact that we don't know the precise time of His coming doesn't mean we cannot know the general time of His coming. This is the purpose of His discourse concerning the end of the age, one version of which we find in Matthew 24. The Lord positions His coming after certain events – most notably the abomination of desolation, which we understand comes three and a half years before His return to the Earth. Don’t understand what I meant by that? Maybe you should!

Don’t agree with? Many don’t, but can you support your objections to my position?

Perhaps we are unsure of ourselves in these areas because we just don’t devote the same time, study, and thought to what God has revealed concerning the end of the age as we do to other matters. Ask your AI and it will tell you that perhaps 3-4%, maybe one out of every 25 verses, relates to the end times. Can we afford to have such “holes” in our biblical knowledge, and can we afford to miss the encouragement and the provocation to good works that these verses are meant to give us?

4. Finally, read all of the Word and don’t expect to find prophetic teaching just in one or two well-known spots. Believe it or not, the Book of Revelation doesn’t really give us as much detail as you might think, and that’s because it doesn't need to. The Jewish people already had a good understanding of Messiah’s coming and the end of the age because these things were explored at depth in the writings of the Hebrew prophets. For example, the Lord's coming in Revelation 19 is treated in a very summary fashion. That's because the various events of Christ's battles against the Antichrist and the nations of the earth were already spelled out in the prophets.

These are just a few thoughts about how it will honor God if we study His prophetic Word. Isn’t time that we “ate the whole scroll” and stopped skipping over things in the Scriptures?