L esson 1 *March 29–April 4
Some Principles of
Prophecy
Sabbath Afternoon
Read for This Week’s Study: Jer. 29:23, 24; Ps. 139:1–6;
Dan. 12:4; Rev. 22:10; 2 Tim. 3:15–17; Heb. 4:12.
Memory Text: “ ‘But let him who glories glory in this, that he
understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord, exercising loving-
kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these I
delight,’ says the Lord” (Jeremiah 9:24, NKJV).
A
s with most everything else in Scripture, Christians disagree
about prophecy, which often convinces others that Bible proph-
ecy is a waste of time. After all, if Christians fight over every pro-
phetic jot and tittle, how valid could it be? Unfortunately, many believers
also begin to think that some books of the Bible, such as Revelation,
are simply incomprehensible. Instead of reading them, they avoid them,
sometimes with the encouragement of a well-meaning pastor who thinks
that studying prophecy causes more problems than it solves.
It was not always so. For the first eighteen centuries of Christian
history, most Christians were very comfortable with biblical prophecy,
and there was a surprising level of agreement on what the key messages
of the prophecies were. This is how God intended for it to be: “Now I
plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you
all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but
that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same
judgment” (1 Cor. 1:10, NKJV).
This week, we will explore some principles that yield a consistent
and reliable understanding of prophecy.
* Study this week’s lesson to prepare for Sabbath, April 5.
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S unday March 30
Whoever Reads, Let Him Understand
Walk into any Christian bookstore and scan through the titles on
Bible prophecy. You will quickly discover that there is a mind-boggling
assortment of views and interpretations, and it can be tempting to
believe that no one can truly understand what books such as Revelation
are saying. For example, one author says the antichrist is nothing but a
metaphor; another says he is still coming in the future; and another that
he was a reference to something or someone in the days of the pagan
Roman Empire. As one old preacher put it, “Perhaps the Bible is like
an old violin; you can play any tune you’d like on it.”
The Bible itself, however, does not suggest any such thing. Instead,
it invites us to read, assuming that God is not speaking in vain and that
we can know the truth of what He is saying through His Word.
Read Matthew 24:15; Revelation 1:3; Matthew 11:29; and Jeremiah
9:23, 24. What do these texts suggest about God’s intention to make
Himself understood?
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Many universities offer courses named “The Bible as Literature” or
something similar. For the believer, it can be astonishing to sit through
countless lectures, only to discover that the professor reads the Bible
the same way one might read pagan mythology. The idea is that there
may be a kernel of moral “truth” in the stories, but one can make of the
stories whatever one wishes. To these teachers, the idea that this book
was inspired by God is laughable.
Thus, the instructor reads the Bible but does not hear the voice of
God speaking. Others come to conclusions clearly at odds with the
message of the Bible. Without being surrendered to the Lord, and with-
out a heart open to learning the truth, those who read the Bible will
likely come away not only missing its message but misunderstanding
the loving and holy character of the God revealed in its pages. This
could be easier to do than many realize, which is why just reading the
Bible without the right tools and (most important) the right attitude
under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, can be hurtful.
Someone not known to be pious was found reading the Bible.
When asked what he was doing, he responded, “Looking for
loopholes. Looking for loopholes.” Why is that exactly the wrong
attitude to have when reading God’s Word?
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M onday March 31
God Wants to Be Understood
Nothing is quite as frustrating as urgently needing to communicate,
perhaps at a clinic or pharmacy, while in a foreign country where you
barely speak the language. You know what you need to say, but you do
not have an adequate vocabulary to say it.
With God, a different problem emerges. “ ‘For as the heavens are
higher than the earth,’ ” He says, “ ‘so are My ways higher than your
ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts’ ” (Isa. 55:9, NKJV). The
problem isn’t that God doesn’t have the vocabulary to communicate
with us; the problem is that we don’t have the vocabulary or intellectual
capacity to understand Him fully.
What do the following passages suggest about God’s understanding in
comparison to our own?
Ps. 139:1–6
Ps. 147:5
Rom. 11:33
1 John 3:20
The truth of the matter is that we will never fully understand the
mind of God because He is infinite and omniscient. After all, we can
barely understand everything about the creation; how would we fully
understand its Creator? We can’t.
Though we will never understand everything, we can understand
what is necessary for our salvation. (See 2 Tim. 3:14, 15.) When
the apostles explained the gospel to their audiences, they frequently
referred to fulfilled prophecy, from which we can deduce that one
of the key purposes of prophecy is to illustrate the plan of salvation.
Indeed, in the end, Bible prophecy must ultimately, in one way or
another, lead us to Jesus and the promise of salvation that He offers
to all humanity.
After all, the Lord, through whom all things were created (see Col.
1:16, John 1:1–3), comes down to this earth and then offers Himself as
a sacrifice on the cross for the sins of every human being, even the most
wretched. That is how much God loves all of us. Having done all that
for us, the Lord would obviously want everyone, wretches included, to
know what He offers us in Jesus. And prophecy can do just that.
Though, yes, there is much that we don’t know, why is it crucial to
focus now on what we do know and to follow what we know—as
opposed to obsessing over what we don’t know?
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T uesday April 1
Daniel—Shut Up the Words
Read Daniel 12:4. What was the Lord telling Daniel here? (Contrast
this with Rev. 22:10.)
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It is not uncommon to hear preachers use Daniel 12:4 to predict the
rise of technological and scientific knowledge just prior to the advent
of Christ. Many also use it to describe the advances in rapid travel that
have taken place over the past century or so. Many of our own books
have taken this approach. Though certainly reasonable interpretations,
it might mean something else, as well.
Read the passage again. The angel’s instruction to Daniel begins with
an injunction to “shut up the words, and seal the book.” The subject
being discussed is the book of Daniel itself. Perhaps, then, could that
knowledge which would suddenly increase at the end of time be knowl-
edge of the book of Daniel itself?
This makes the book of Daniel somewhat different from Revelation,
in that John was told not to seal his book (Rev. 22:10). Revelation was
meant to be understood from the first, because “ ‘the time [was] at
hand.’ ” In contrast, Daniel would be understood more clearly at some
point in the distant future.
Over the centuries, many fine Christian thinkers attempted to explain the
book of Daniel, and some made great headway. Understanding of Daniel
increased rapidly, however, after the end of the 1,260–year prophecy,
which ended in 1798, when multiple expositors around the globe started
concluding that something spectacular was going to happen around 1843.
The most notable of these, however, was William Miller, whose preaching
launched the Great Advent Movement of the nineteenth century and began
a chain of events that would give birth to the “remnant” church and a clear
understanding of the three angels’ messages.
The birth of our global movement, in other words, is a fulfillment
of Daniel’s prediction that “knowledge shall increase” at “the time of
the end.”
In contrast, and without judging people’s salvation, think about the
“darkness” that so much of Christendom exists in. Something as basic as
the seventh-day Sabbath, established in Eden, is ignored, even dismissed,
in favor of Sunday, a day rooted in Roman paganism. Or think of the utter
ignorance about death, with the vast majority of Christians believing the
pagan idea that the dead immediately go soaring off to another existence,
which for some means an eternally burning hell.
In contrast, we should be thankful—and humbled—by the knowledge
of the truth.
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W ednesday April 2
Studying the Word
Seventh-day Adventists owe much to William Miller for their under-
standing of Bible prophecy. While his understanding of key passages
(such as Daniel 8:14) was not perfect, Miller’s methodology was, none-
theless, important, because it paved the way for the birth of our last-day
remnant movement.
Read Matthew 5:18, 2 Timothy 3:15–17, and Luke 24:27. What do
these verses teach us about the way we ought to approach Bible
prophecy?
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In some ways, studying the Bible is not unlike assembling a large
jigsaw puzzle. If you gather just two or three pieces together, it is
nearly impossible to discern the entire picture. Perhaps in those two
or three pieces, you can see a horse, and so you conclude that you are
assembling a picture of horses. But a few more pieces reveal a chicken
and a cow, and then once you have assembled hundreds of pieces, you
can finally see that you have been working on a picture of a landscape,
which includes a city, a farm, and a range of mountains in the distance.
One of the central ways in which some Christians err in their study of
the Bible is that they treat the Scriptures as a loose collection of sayings
or proverbs that they can use to address a specific situation. Some will
turn to the simple study guide at the front of a Gideons Bible, where
they can find helpful verses on a number of topics, and assume that
it represents the sum total of the Bible’s teachings on a given subject.
Unfortunately, they take the same approach to prophecy, lifting an indi-
vidual text out of its context and comparing it to current events instead of
the rest of the Bible. This, in part, has led to the constant stream of mod-
ern books on prophecy that have to be updated every few years because
they were wrong on what they said was going to happen—and when.
That’s why it’s so important not merely to select some specific texts
on any given topic but instead to study carefully everything the Bible
says about that topic and to take into consideration the context in which
it says it, as well. It is very easy to pull a passage out of context and
make it say whatever we want.
What has been your experience with those who use only certain
selected texts to try to make their point about, say, the state of the
dead? Or even the Sabbath? What is the best way to respond?
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T hursday April 3
Figurative or Literal?
One of the key issues students of prophecy need to deal with is how
to determine whether the language of the Bible is to be taken literally or
figuratively. How does one determine if the author was using symbolic
language, and how does one know what the symbol represents? The cru-
cial way to do this is to see how that figure, the symbol, has been used
all through the Bible, as opposed to looking at how a symbol is used in
contemporary times. For example, some see the bear symbol in Daniel 7
as pointing to Russia, because that image is often used today as a symbol
of Russia. This is not a sound or safe way to interpret prophetic symbolism.
Look up the following texts, allowing the Bible to be its own expositor
(to define its own terms). What is the prophetic symbol common to
the texts in each case, and what does the Bible say it represents?
Dan. 7:7, Dan. 8:3, Dan. 7:24
Rev. 1:16, Eph. 6:17, Heb. 4:12
Rev. 12:1; Rev. 21:2; Eph. 5:31, 32; Jer. 6:2
By following the simple rule that the Bible must be allowed to define
its own terms, most of the mystery behind prophetic symbolism simply
disappears. For example, we see that a horn can symbolize a political power
or a nation. A sword can symbolize the Word of God. And, yes, a woman can
symbolize the church. Here we can clearly see the Bible explaining itself.
What remains to be answered, however, is why God would speak in
symbols instead of being forthright? Why, for example, would Peter
cryptically refer to the city of Rome as Babylon, in 1 Peter 5:13?
There may be many reasons why God has chosen to communicate
symbolically in prophecy. In the case of the New Testament church,
for example, if the book of Revelation had plainly named Rome as the
perpetrator of so much evil, the already bad persecution of the church
might have been even worse. Whatever the reasons, we can trust that
God wants us to understand what the symbols mean.
Even if some symbols and prophecies remain mysteries, how can
focusing on what we do understand strengthen our faith?
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F riday April 4
Further Thought: Read Ellen G. White, “An American Reformer,”
pp. 319–324, in The Great Controversy.
“Ministers and people declared that the prophecies of Daniel and the
Revelation were incomprehensible mysteries. But Christ directed His dis-
ciples to the words of the prophet Daniel concerning events to take place
in their time, and said: ‘Whoso readeth, let him understand.’ Matthew
24:15. And the assertion that the Revelation is a mystery, not to be under-
stood, is contradicted by the very title of the book: ‘The Revelation of
Jesus Christ, which God gave unto Him, to show unto His servants things
which must shortly come to pass. . . . Blessed is he that readeth, and they
that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are
written therein: for the time is at hand.’ Revelation 1:1–3. . . .
“In view of the testimony of Inspiration, how dare men teach that the
Revelation is a mystery beyond the reach of human understanding? It is
a mystery revealed, a book opened. The study of the Revelation directs
the mind to the prophecies of Daniel, and both present most important
instruction, given of God to men, concerning events to take place at the
close of this world's history.
“To John were opened scenes of deep and thrilling interest in the
experience of the church. He saw the position, dangers, conflicts, and
final deliverance of the people of God. He records the closing mes-
sages which are to ripen the harvest of the earth, either as sheaves for
the heavenly garner or as fagots for the fires of destruction. Subjects
of vast importance were revealed to him, especially for the last church,
that those who should turn from error to truth might be instructed con-
cerning the perils and conflicts before them. None need be in darkness
in regard to what is coming upon the earth.”—Ellen G. White, The
Great Controversy, pp. 341, 342.
Discussion Questions:
Ê How can the study of prophecy greatly increase your faith? What
prophecies—some written thousands of years ago about events that
would happen hundreds, if not thousands of years later—have helped
increase your trust in the Bible and, more important, in the God who
inspired it? How, for example, does Daniel 2 give us powerful, and
logical, reasons to trust not only that God exists but that He knows
the future?
Ë What are the best ways to protect ourselves from the many wild
and speculative attempts to interpret prophecies, sometimes even
from those within our own church? Why must we be careful to “test
all things; hold fast what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21, NKJV)?
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i n s i d e
Story
“I Want That Book!”
By Laurie Denski-Snyman
Tim was a new missionary, and he was scared. He was selling Christian
books on a predominantly non-Christian island in Southeast Asia, and he
didn’t want any trouble.
As he made his way down a street, Tim prayed and nervously stepped into
the store of a seamstress. Ahead of him, he saw four people waiting in line.
The minutes seemed to drag by.
The wait was taking longer than Tim had expected. He was tempted
to leave, but something stopped him. He noticed that the seamstress kept
glancing over in his direction with an odd expression on her face. From time
to time, she even moved over to one side of the counter, close to the wall, so
she could peer around the other customers and get a better look at his face.
Finally, the last customer left the store, and it was Tim’s turn in line. But
before he could say a word, the seamstress pointed to the books sticking out
of his bag.
“I want that book!” she exclaimed. “I want that book, and I want that
book!”
“What?” Tim said. “How do you even know that I have books for sale?”
“I had a dream,” the seamstress said. “In the dream, I saw a young man
who looked just like you. He had books with him that I needed to read, and
one of those books was called The Great Controversy. So, I knew that you
were going to come. I knew that I had to purchase The Great Controversy.
Do you have that book?”
Tim’s fears about having trouble as a missionary instantly disappeared.
He grew excited about selling books. He realized the truth of Deuteronomy
31:8, which says, “And the Lord, He is the One who goes before you. He
will be with you, He will not leave you nor forsake you; do not fear nor be
dismayed” (NKJV). He knew that God was going ahead of him, paving the
way for him to share the good news about Jesus and His soon coming.
Pray for Tim and other missionaries seeking to reach unreached people groups in
the Southern Asia-Pacific Division, where this story took place. Thank you for your
Thirteenth Sabbath Offering this quarter that will help spread the gospel in the Southern
Asia-Pacific Division.
This Inside Story illustrates the following objectives of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s
“I Will Go” strategic plan: Mission Objective No. 1, “To revive the concept of worldwide
mission and sacrifice for mission as a way of life involving not only pastors but every church
member, young and old, in the joy of witnessing for Christ and making disciples,” and
Mission Objective No. 2, “To strengthen and diversify Adventist outreach in large cities,
across the 10/40 Window, among unreached and under-reached people groups, and to non-
Christian religions.” For more information, go to the website: IWillGo.org.
Provided by the General Conference Office of Adventist Mission, which uses Sabbath School
mission offerings to spread the gospel worldwide. Read new stories daily at AdventistMission.org. 13
