Discrepancies
Steven Tuell on unfulfilled prophecies
As disturbed as we may be by unfulfilled prophecies in Scripture, examples are not difficult to find. Huldah delivered to Josiah the Lord’s promise, “Now I will gather you to your fathers, and you will be buried in peace” (2 Chr. 34:28//2 Kgs. 22:20). However, Josiah in fact died tragically in battle against Pharaoh Necho (2 Kgs. 23:29–30; 2 Chr. 35:20–27). In Jonah 3:4, the prophet (after a submarine detour!) at last arrives at Nineveh to deliver the message the Lord has given him: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.” But it does not happen. The people (and animals; Jonah 3:7) of Nineveh repent in sackcloth, and God changes God’s mind (Jonah 3:10). We might consider as well the many predictions in the New Testament that the end of the world would come soon (e.g., Mark 13:30; 1 Cor. 7:29–31; Rev. 22:12, 20), which, taking them at face value, clearly was not the case. The difference between the prophets of the Bible and modern charlatans who confidently claim to see the future is a difference not of degree, but of kind. The prophets are not accurate fortune-tellers, presenting to us their infallible visions of a fixed and unchangeable future. They are not fortune-tellers at all. Rather, the prophets are the obedient messengers of God, passing on to us what God has shown to them. God remains God, sovereign and free, but also caring and responsive to the world that God made and loves (see Jonah 4:1–2, 11). So Jeremiah delivers to his people God’s challenge, “If you really change your ways and your actions … then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever” (Jer. 7:5–7). Their present actions will lead them into exile and destruction, but the possibility of a different future lies before them, if they will claim it (though Jeremiah doubts that they can or will; see Jer. 13:23).Similarly, Ezekiel affirms God’s sovereign freedom: “I the LORD bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish” (17:24). God is free to go where God wishes (as the movements of the “glory” in chs. 1–3 and 8–11 powerfully demonstrate) and to do as God chooses: to punish, or to forgive (18:30–32). Hope, for Ezekiel, rests in that sovereign freedom of God—and not in any strength or virtue Israel possesses (16:59–63). We find the real difference between Ezekiel and the false prophets of Jerusalem not in the relative accuracy of their predictions, but in where their loyalties lie. The false prophets belong to their masters in the Judean nobility. Ezekiel is first, last, and always, the Lord’s. His appendix regarding Tyre and Egypt does not change that. If anything, it demonstrates the prophet’s openness and honesty before God and his community.
StevenTuellUnderstandingTheBible