Ask Pastor Mike Live

Pastor Mike: You're in the air with Pastor Mike. How can I help?

Guest (Female): Hi, Pastor Mike. I'm wondering how we should approach interpreting biblical prophecies. Particularly, the one that I'm thinking of because I was reading it recently was 2 Samuel chapter 7, verses 8 through 16. Initially, it seems like it's referring to Jesus, the promise of an everlasting throne, but then God mentions disciplining David's son in the prophecy for this, which obviously doesn't fit Jesus because he was sinless.

Then it led me to think that it was referring to Solomon, but then again, the everlasting throne—so, this conundrum. I've heard of the idea of a "lesser and immediate fulfillment" and a "greater fulfillment" in Jesus. How do we determine this, and is there a scripture supporting this approach? How can we even address a skeptic who might see this as convenient? It's multiple questions.

Pastor Mike: It's helpful. Here's the thing. There is in all these biblical prophecies—all that I would say are legitimate biblical prophecies—oftentimes a near-field and a far-field fulfillment. A skeptic can say, "I don't appreciate that." Well, here's the reality: you cannot, in many of these passages, say this only can apply to the near-field focus because they don't.

Think about even this child that was to be born in Isaiah, and you start calling him Mighty God, Wonderful Counselor, Everlasting Father. How in the world can you jive that with the reality of a human baby? You can't. Now when Christ comes on the scene and he starts pulling all these things to himself, he talks about him being the Bread of Life.

The showbread was to represent something, and he says, "No, I'm that." Or on the day that they're pouring out water in the ceremonies as they are going through all that they do at the Feast of Tabernacles, he says, "No, I'm the Living Water, and if you drink from me, you'll never be thirsty." He keeps making the connections of biblical analogy, biblical symbolism, and applies it to himself.

When you look at 2 Samuel 7, or let's go to the other side of the street, Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14—these are statements about Satan, but they start out talking about the Prince of Tyre or some figure that has a historical precedent. You can read that and go, "Prince of Tyre, he's a mess." But he's not calling him the king, but he was the king.

Now we're going to talk about the king who stands behind the prince that was described as human in the first ten verses. In the next ten verses, we're talking about how he was in Eden, the Garden of God, and he was a cherub and is on the holy mountain. How in the world is he covering a cherub? The Prince of Tyre—you could write a biography on him if you were there in Ezekiel's day.

You've got something that's impossible to read if you're going to take the words literally. You have that in the Davidic Covenant, that you can't just read it all and look at it as Solomon because it doesn't fit. It's a lot like what you have in all of the late prophecies at the end of the time frame of Judah.

Everything before 586 when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and took them away in three deportations, you could see all these promises of reassembling. They did reassemble under Zerubbabel and Ezra and Nehemiah, but never to the extent that he talked about the reassembling. For example, that Jerusalem would be the head and the whole world would be its tail, that everyone would bring their riches into Jerusalem, every king of every nation. Well, that's not happened.

Jesus, I think, gives us this precedent, not only in saying all these things are talking about me, but he even takes some that you would say like in Daniel. When Daniel speaks in chapter 9 about the idea of this abomination of desolation—if you read that in that day and then you lived from the time of Daniel in the fifth century BC to the second century BC when Antiochus Epiphanes did exactly that, everyone understood that as the abomination of desolation.

Jesus comes and says in Matthew 24, "There's going to be another one when you see the abomination of desolation that Daniel spoke about in the prophecy." Wait a minute, what does that mean? It's not really the ultimate abomination? Jesus is giving us the key to the fact that there are near-field and far-field fulfillments. We often call them the ultimate fulfillments.

If you read everything literally, carefully, and normally, you'll have to say Solomon could not have fulfilled everything spoken of in the Davidic Covenant. Just like everything in the Palestinian Covenant in Deuteronomy was not fulfilled at any time in Joshua's day, or any time even in David's day. The world did not bow to David. His surrounding nations did, but the world didn't.

When is that going to be fulfilled? That's where in the New Testament, Jesus says there's more to come. He says one day you're going to see the Son of Man coming on clouds in glory, and all eyes will see it, and every nation will be subject to me. I'm going to separate the peoples as a shepherd. You've got to get everything in view.

You can dive into a passage like the Davidic Covenant in 2 Samuel and you can say, "Wait a minute, it sounds like he's talking about Solomon." Well, he certainly is, because he's talking about someone that's going to commit sin. That's where it goes, and he's got to be disciplined. Jesus didn't sin, and we know that.

The rest of it, though, like a never-ending reign—we didn't even finish the Old Testament without knowing we don't have a king. There's no king in Israel by the time we get to the end of the Old Testament in the time of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Where's this eternal king? Now we have the prophecies in the New Testament.

Here they come through Zechariah, they come through the angel, and now there's the one being born where the government's going to rest on his shoulders. All the quotes now go back to the prophets who spoke toward the demise of the end of the time of Judah there in the fifth and sixth century BC. Now the New Testament picks it up and says, "Now it is, it's going to happen, and we're going to start with the birth of the king, and he's going to bring in justice and a light's going to dawn among the Gentiles."

All of those are all statements about the Old Testament promises, and we thought they were fulfilled when Zerubbabel came back after the Babylonian captivity. But it didn't, not fully. It kind of did, but there are hints throughout the Old Testament. Even when Ezekiel's talking about the temple that's going to be rebuilt, he gives very specific measurements for all of it.

You can lay those out, all of them are known, all of them are there, and you can say, "Okay, this is what we're going to build, this is what God is going to have built." Well, it wasn't built. Zerubbabel built a temple that was smaller than Solomon's temple, and it said the people that were old enough to live through the Babylonian captivity saw it and they wept because of how small it was.

The others were rejoicing because they finally had a temple, and he says you couldn't hear the difference between the wailing and crying of the old men and the cheers of the young men. They knew this wasn't the temple. God didn't do what he said he was going to do. It's not the temple of Ezekiel. Then there must be a temple that's yet to be built.

That's why I think we have to take the Old Testament seriously. Some of it was fulfilled in the first coming of Christ. There was a son of David that sat on the throne, and Luke and Matthew were careful to trace his lineage, both through Mary and through Joseph, back to David to say, "Here he is." He was called that, the Son of David. That's who he was.

I guess that's a fulfillment of 2 Samuel 7 of everything that's spoken of the eternal prince. He left and said he's going to rule the world. "I'm going to leave you. I'm going to come back the way you saw me." Zechariah 14 says he's going to come back, and when he comes back, he's going to come back as a victor.

As Jesus says in the book of Matthew especially, he's going to come back and rule the world. We tie all these prophecies together and say some of it was fulfilled, like in 2 Samuel's case in Solomon's life, and some of it is yet to be fulfilled. Same thing with Ezekiel in saying Tyre and the leaders of Damascus, they were enemies of God, but they were not the enemy, the ultimate enemy that walked around in the Garden of Eden.

Some of it applies and some of it doesn't. This is the nature of Middle Eastern prophecy. Here we are as Westerners thinking in a Western way. There are some good commentaries being written today that try to help us look at all of Scripture through the eyes and the lens of Easterners. I think that does help us to not treat it like we would read the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and say, "Why doesn't it just say this?" Well, that's not the literature we're reading.

When we're reading 2 Samuel, think about it: you're reading something that is 3,000 years old. It was written 3,000 years ago. Even the nature of prophecy as a literary genre is going to be different than we might expect if we're reading something today that Jeane Dixon predicts. She's going to write differently than what we have.

That's why understanding the literature of the Bible, looking at everything and knowing that God is communicating what he means—at the end of the day, some of it applies to the near-field, some of it applies to the ultimate, and we make that distinction. Honest scholars don't have a problem with that. We recognize that. Someone can dive into one passage and go, "No, no, no," but take it all, look at it all, and recognize that everything that was promised about David's son was not fulfilled in Solomon. Does that follow, Laura? I know I was blathering on and on.

Guest (Female): Yeah. Sometimes it's a little hard to hear, but I did. What it sounds like is Jesus is the one who points to prophecies being in this nature because he talks about it in Matthew 24 about the abomination of desolation. That kind of helps us go, "Oh, okay, so there are these two different near and the far or the ultimate fulfillment of prophecy." Because that was my other thing: how do we even know that that's how we're supposed to approach it? But you're right, Jesus does say that in Matthew 24.

Pastor Mike: Correct. Think about everything that was promised, and this is why I'm a premillennial Christian—because I see everything that was promised for the reassembling of Israel with the northern tribes and the southern tribes. Think of the dry bones prophecy of Jeremiah. They're going to come together, and it talks about joining together the North and the South and two sticks, and they become one in his hand.

That didn't happen with the coming of the church. Then we get an ending book to the New Testament called the book of Revelation. By the time we get to chapter 7, we learn about the 144,000 from the 12 tribes of Israel, and everything that we saw in the book of Jeremiah looks like it's still yet to come.

We didn't see clearly that the coming of Christ would come in two installments, but we're stuck with that because we live in the interim. As he left, he promised he's coming back, and then all of those promises are going to be fulfilled to Israel, including 12 tribes in the land leading the world. That's why we expect a millennial kingdom, because it says six times in Revelation 20 it's going to be a thousand-year period where all of this is going to be played out.

It's all about assembling all the promises and laying them out systematically, figuring out which ones have been fulfilled, which ones haven't. Then you look at Christ's teachings, and he said precisely that: some have and some haven't. He didn't come to rule the world with a rod of iron yet, but he says, "I'm coming back to do that." He says, "My wrath is going to be kindled and I'm coming." He didn't do it on his first coming; he's coming again to fulfill all that is not yet fulfilled. I hope that helps, Laura. Good question.

Guest (Female): It did. Thank you.

Pastor Mike: Okay.