Born to Win Podcast - with Ronald L. Dart

I don’t suppose there has ever been a man on the face of the earth who had the power at his beck and call that Jesus had. But there was never a time when he abused it. He tried to make this lesson clear at the last supper when he got up, took a towel, laid aside his outer garment, got a basin of water, and began to wash his disciples feet. He said, The whole idea is that we are all servants. We’re not emperors, lords, nothing of the kind; we are not masters, we are servants. It seems odd to me when I think about it, but of all the things that Jesus might have said, of all the instructions he might have left us, these are his only words about church governance. He forbade his men from exercising dominion over, or authority upon, the people. It’s that simple. And Jesus, it seems, also taught that —that old principle still applies. And if you trace the grief that has befallen the church down through the ages, an awful lot of it has come straight from ignoring these words and letting some person become the big boss, the governor, the leader of all the people. I think this lies somewhere near the source of what God told Malachi to tell the priests in his own time: For the lips of a priest ought to preserve knowledge, because he is the messenger of the Lord Almighty and people seek instruction from his mouth. But you have turned from the way and by your teaching have caused many to stumble; you have violated the covenant with Levi," says the Lord Almighty. So I have caused you to be despised and humiliated before all the people, because you have not followed my ways but have shown partiality in matters of the law.

It seems like it’s very hard for the servants of God to keep their act together. The worst thing that can happen to us is good times. For the Israelites who returned to Jerusalem from exile, the times had indeed been very hard for a while. They had started rebuilding the temple, then they had to stop because of political pressure. Then, under the prompting of the prophets, and with God’s protection and blessing, they set to work again and finished it. Two men played a major role in all of this: Joshua the high priest and Zerubbabel the governor. They were good men and they wanted to get the job done, they had prophets along that were stirring everybody, up and the work got done. But there is another danger all of us face. When God has blessed us, we assume we have his approval in more areas than are really justified. In other words, we think that since we built the temple—we got it done—we are really good people. There is yet another danger when any long-term goal is finally realized. After all this striving is past, once you have arrived at your goal, you can find yourself at loose ends. You may think, “Well, I have accomplished this. I deserve a break.” And maybe you do; but it’s a serious mistake to presume it. So here’s the picture for the Israelites: the second temple has been finished, many aspects of their lives were now much better, the ongoing service of God in the temple was continuing on a day-by-day basis, and everything was going on like it was suppose to. Another generation, though, has entered the priesthood and public life, and there is the inevitable let-down that take place—the loss of focus, the loss of awareness, and that’s the picture that prevails when a prophet name Malachi comes on the scene with a message from God.

When you begin pondering the last days (as the Bible presents them) and you read what the prophets have to say about that time, you’re inevitably drawn to the Book of Revelation. And what I find fascinating is how commonly the Old Testament prophets are cited in Revelation. If you have one of those Bibles that have marginal references in it you can easily find where so many things that are said in Revelation originally come from. It shouldn’t be surprising, in a way, because all the prophets had a sense of a judgment day—a time when God would tie up all the loose ends and bring history to an end. I don’t know that they could have looked at the world and have imagined how things would end, but they knew all too well that God had a special place in his heart for Israel. They knew the history of the things he had done to judge those who had afflicted Israel, along with Pharaoh and others. And knowing God’s love of judgment, his love of mercy, his forgiveness, they were not entirely surprised by many of the things that God revealed to them. They must have known, in some element, that a lot of what they were writing down, while it might have some fulfillment in their own days, was actually aimed at the very last days of history. All this, coupled with the logic of history, told them that time could not go on forever. Thus there was a natural curiosity about how it all would end. They knew that God would win and that his balancing of the books was inevitable. They just didn’t know how it all would come about. And the way the end-time events were revealed to them, strangely, was not really a lot of help. Events beyond comprehension—even beyond their imaginations—had to be disclosed in terms they could understand. And that presents us with some difficult problems as we don’t have the frame of reference those ancient people had. To them, many of the icons and images you read, said something to them that they no longer do to us. So we have to study them, ponder them, and realize we will only really come to understand some of these events when they actually come to pass. But here’s the kicker: unless you do study them, unless you do ponder them, unless you do internalize them, you won’t understand them when they come to pass. In Zechariah, we’ve now come to that time of God’s judgment. And it’s described in terms that show no fulfillment to this day. Some of these things have simply never happened.

There is really no question that when you read an Old Testament prophet you should ask how he was understood at the time, and how the prophecy would apply in his own lifetime. But if you stop there you may miss something very important. What a prophet like Zechariah was seeing and hearing from God would tend to repeat in successive generations; like a standing wave repeats—they come they go, it ebbs and it flows. There may be any number of reasons for this, but two basic principals need to be taken into account: Therefore, history naturally tends to repeat itself. But then another question follows closely, What makes me wonder is the way a prophet like Zechariah will move so easily from something that can only apply in his own day into something that obviously has limited or even no application in his own day. Some friends and I were recently discussing the ideal temple that is found in the closing chapters of Ezekiel. That’s long been a curious section of prophecy because the temple you find there doesn’t fit any historical model at all. However, it has been pointed that it has similarities to things in closing chapters of the Book of Revelation: the New Jerusalem, the rivers of water and life, and the tree of life. What begins to emerge, only darkly at the moment, is an awareness that both prophecies are actually concerned with the same time, the same events, and the same outcomes. But that then leads to the conclusion that there is meaning behind the vision (that is, the prophecy) that transcends history. That fact of the matter is there’s something that’s going to happen in the future of this world that people would not understand if you explained it to them. We have no frame of reference for it so what the prophets tended to do was in the terms of their own day in the things people in their own time would understand. To idealize and to draw a picture, to create a painting as it were in the mind of what God is going to do that we can deal with. If you keep in mind that a vision is symbolic that reality will not look the same at all then you can compare something like the last of Ezekiel and the last of Revelation and see these are both aiming at something over the horizon that we can’t see yet. With that in mind, look at where we have come in Zechariah.

Two things came my way yesterday which, at first blush, seem unrelated. But, in fact, they have a common, underlying philosophy which needs to be challenged every time it raises its ugly head. It may even be called a hidden agenda, because it is an agenda, and no one ever talks about it. The first was an editorial in one of the popular news magazines, written by a scientist, arguing that scientists should stick to science and theologians to theology. What he was exercised about was that scientists should not allow into the classroom. My immediate thought was, unintelligent, but that was too easy. The second thing that came my way was an email taking me to task for using my broadcast to talk about politics. In particular, he was upset about what he perceived as support for President Bush and the war in Iraq in some of my past programs, which only demonstrated that he hadn’t been paying attention. Now, how exactly are these two things related, and why does it matter? Well, there is afoot in this country right now—and it has been growing and developing for some time—a philosophy that we should all keep our religious lives and our secular lives carefully apart. Society doesn’t mind if we are religious on Sunday, they just don’t want us bringing our religion out in the wrong places at the wrong times. They don’t seem to think we should apply our religion to the issues in the public square. Today’s program is not about intelligent design or evolution or politics. It is about society’s efforts to keep us all in our place. It is perfectly all right for us to have a religion, as long as it is kept in its place. We are expected to maintain our secular and religious lives apart. As long as we do that, society seems to be satisfied. We divide our lives into an upper story of religion, and a lower story of reality. Society is happy as long as we have an upper-story, lower-case , but not at all happy when we carry our God with us to, say, a high school football game. Not allowed. The truth is that society is afraid of Christians who integrate their faith with their whole lives. And it is not because they are afraid we would become tyrants or would do them violence. No, they are afraid of what we have to say as Christians.

When you are reading the Old Testament prophets, there’s a particular challenge you run into again and again: What time period is the prophecy aimed at? Now, I have long since explained that in order to understand a prophet you need to know where he was and how his prophecy would be understood by the people who heard it. Some of the prophecies are purely historical, others are set in the near future, and still others are way off—beyond the prophet’s horizon, and sometimes even our own. The prophet Zechariah is really an interesting case in point. He was writing in a clear, historical context and uses names of real people, dates, and places. His prophecies were delivered to real people who were affected by those prophecies. But every so often his prophecies, what shall I say, they fall off the table historically and suddenly you find they’ve joined up with the Book of Revelation—which is looking down to a time that is almost universally understood as the last days. In some cases it’s type and anti-type: there’s a historical fulfillment that’s reflected and an end-time fulfillment. In some cases there is nothing in history that matches it at all and we are forced to look ahead to see what in the world was this prophet seeing and what it meant. You can easily see how understanding what was going on around Zechariah can help in understanding what he’s on about. For one thing, he uses so many icons much symbolic imagery that you have to ask, In chapter six the prophecy turns back to the time of Zechariah and of the building of the temple. They had actually laid a foundation, but political circumstances have forced the abandonment of the project. Yet here comes a prophet saying, And now he has something more to add.

I find myself constantly fascinated at the way the prophets in the Bible interlace with one another. You wouldn’t know this on a single read. You wouldn’t know it by reading a chapter here a chapter there or by reading somebody’s argument that has proof-texts drawn in from everywhere. You have to read the Bible—all of it—again and again and sooner or later the relationships begin to emerge. If you never read the Bible for yourself all the way through, get a copy of . It’s easy to read and is laid out to help you complete the whole book in about 15 minutes a day, over one year. Make the Bible a part of your life and you will always be glad you did. All the bad stuff you heard about religion will fade into obscurity when you know what the Bible really says. And you won’t be suckered by some slick-talking preacher either, trust me. Every time I read back through the prophecy of Zechariah 1 see something there I have not seen before. Zechariah is complicated. For example, his vision beginning in chapter four, verse one: And the angel that talked with me came again, and waked me, as a man that is wakened out of his sleep, and said unto me, What see you? And I said, I have looked, and behold a lampstand all of gold, with a bowl upon the top of it, and its seven lamps on it, and seven pipes to the seven lamps, which are upon its top[.] We are a long way short of at this point in history—this is not a candlestick, it is a lamp-stand. It is fueled by olive oil that runs down through pipes for each of the bowls, which have wicks in them to burn the olive oil. When you go back and look at how they were made, each of the seven lamps is fashioned like an almond blossom (the almond tree was the first tree to bloom in spring). In Hebrew, this lamp-stand is the ; you have probably heard of that. It was the only light in the Holy of Holies. Spring time, of course, is Passover time, and this whole thing is suggestive of Christ, our Passover, who is the light of the world. God only knows what other meaning are hidden within this particular type of lamp-stand that he was looking at. It’s worth your time to grab a concordance and make your way through the Bible looking up all the places where it occurs, because it is both an interesting thing and has become the symbol of Judaism—that seven-branched menorah.

It seems odd, in a way, that Satan is not mention more than he is in the Old Testament—at least by name. There may be other references, but the word appears only once in all the historical books of the Bible, once in the Psalms, 11 times mentioned in the book of Job (but he’s a major player there in the whole drama), and in all of the prophets the only prophet that ever refers to Satan is Zechariah. When you read Zechariah, it’s useful to know where you are in the history of the Old Testament. Israel is beginning to drift back into Judah and Jerusalem after their long exile in Babylon. According to Ezra, two men—Zerubbabel and Joshua the high priest—rebuilt the altar and laid the foundation of the temple and began to build. Their work was stopped by opposition—according to some, by persons who remained in Palestine during the exile and did not actually go captive. Why they stopped it isn’t exactly clear, but Darius granted permission for the Jews to continue rebuilding the temple and they did under the urging of Haggai, later by Zechariah. Zerubbabel, who’s now the governor, and Joshua the high priest get to work on it and finally complete the temple in 515 BC. The second chapter of Zechariah’s prophecy ends on a remarkable note really, a high note: Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion: for, lo, I come, and I will dwell in the midst of thee, saith the Lord. And many nations shall be joined to the Lord in that day, and shall be my people: and I will dwell in the midst of thee, and thou shalt know that the Lord of hosts hath sent me unto thee. And the Lord shall inherit Judah his portion in the holy land, and shall choose Jerusalem again.

The next-to-the-last book in the Old Testament—the next-to-the-last of the Minor Prophets—is a man named Zechariah. In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, came the word of the Lord unto Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo the prophet, saying, The Lord hath been sore displeased with your fathers. Therefore say thou unto them, Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Turn ye unto me, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the Lord of hosts. Now, if you are just reading this to yourself you may not pick up on this. But if you were reading it aloud, with this repetition of Lord, you begin to understand that this is a poetic structure. So many of these prophecies, like the Psalms, are musical and may actually have been intended for performance. They are, in a way, the protest songs of their generation. A significant clue to this arises in an incident many years before this involving the prophet Elisha. We find it in 2 Kings 3.

Several years ago, I was driving through an area the weekend after a tragic mass shooting had occurred there. I listened on the radio to the people who lived nearby as they responded to being put in a goldfish bowl for the whole country to watch. I couldn’t help but reflect along with them about how unfair the whole thing was. Every special interest group had their spokesman on television telling us all why this tragedy had taken place. It was guns, of course. Someone noted that crime in the cities was going down while crime in rural areas was going up. He blamed the availability of guns for the problem. The poor fellow obviously has never lived in the rural south. I grew up in northern Arkansas, and I can tell you that guns are not a new arrival there. As a boy, I don’t think I knew a family—especially a rural family—that didn’t have guns and that didn’t teach their kids to hunt. We grew up playing war around the barns, pretending to shoot one another, and faking a fall out of the loft into a stack of hay below. None of us ever killed anyone. As far as I can tell, none of us even thought about it. Some other TV talking head blamed drugs. Another blamed the schools, another blamed the movies, and yet another blamed television violence. It’s true enough that everything that happens is the world is caused by something. But the causes are often so complex that specific prediction is impossible. However, general prediction is not at all impossible. There was no way to predict that those two boys would do what they did. But you can be certain that some boys (or girls) will kill again. It may be Elmira, New York. It may be Fairfax, Virginia. It may be your hometown. I can’t predict where it will happen, but I can predict that it will happen. And so can you. What we can’t be quite so sure is why it will happen. That’s what I want to talk about.

Most readers of the Bible are a little vague about the time of the later prophets. They may know that Jerusalem fell and the temple was destroyed in 586 BC. More likely, though, they will have little idea of the timeline. They may know from Daniel and Jeremiah that there was to be a 70-year exile, and indeed the second temple was completed 70 years later. Meanwhile, Daniel and Ezekiel did their work in Babylon among the exiled Israelites. It may be less clear that those Jews who rebuilt the temple faced serious opposition from the Samaritans and others in the process, even bringing the process to a halt some five years after it was begun. So they were working on the temple five years and then the political opposition stopped it. Ten years later, the temple is still unfinished, still in ruins, and two prophets come on the scene. One is named Haggai, the other Zechariah. And, of course, I’ve said this before, I’ll say this again: If you see a prophet coming down the road toward your house, it’s bad news. God never sends a prophet to tell you how well you are doing. Well, Haggai starts his prophecy by giving us the date. Here’s what he said.

It’s no picnic being a prophet. Of all the jobs God hands down to men, the job of the prophet may be the toughest of the lot. And it may come as a surprise to learn that some of them (maybe even most of them) were poets and musicians. I guess there’s something about that which, maybe, suits prophecy better. I feel sorry for the many self-appointed prophets you see around nowadays who claim to have the word from the Lord. The reason I feel sorry for them is because they have taken a hand to speak for God when he didn’t tell them to do it. He may have them carry the burden and the pain of the office without any hope of a prophet’s reward. When you come to a real prophet in the pages of the Bible, and you read them as they are intended to be read, you can sometimes feel the pain that has come to this man with the message. For some reason, I was particularly touched last night by a prophet named Habakkuk. He’s different from the others. He’s certainly a poet, and I suspect he sang his prophecies to the people who assembled to hear him. If not, he at least composed them for a singer. Habakkuk was a contemporary of Jeremiah, and it would not surprise me in the least to learn that Habakkuk sang and Jeremiah preached on the same day in the same place. In your imagination, place yourself among a crowd of people who have assembled at the temple gate. Jeremiah has been speaking and has just roundly condemned the justice system in one of the strongest sermons you have ever heard. Now, another man steps forward with a lyre in his hand—his name is Habakkuk—and introduces the song he’s going to sing.

The Old Testament book of Obadiah is the shortest of all the Minor Prophets and, strangely, it doesn’t really seem to say a lot to modern man. I can understand why people reading the Bible kind of brush by it. But as I have said before, trying to understand the biblical prophets solely in terms of events in the far-distant future or solely in terms of events in the far-distant past, it’s kind of pointless. I got the clue from something Isaiah said long ago. It was a challenge to idol worshipers. Here’s what he said: says the Lord. says Jacob’s King. [This is the real test, God says, if your idol are all that great tell us what is going to happen.] Now, it’s disappointing that so few people really study the history presented in the Old Testament. Because if we don’t understand what happened before, we have no hope of understanding what the Bible says about our own future. The Book of Obadiah just might be a case in point. It’s only one chapter and it’s all about a nation called . Now who on earth are they? Where are they and why do they matter so much? Well, the enmity between Israel and Edom can be traced back to an story that begins in the 25 chapter of Genesis.

There is a terrible irony in the prophet Zephaniah. Actually, he did his prophecy in the days of Josiah; and Josiah was one of the best of the kings of Judah but the prophecy that came down in his days were among the most dire ever handed down by any prophet. Here is how Zephaniah starts: The word of the Lord which came unto Zephaniah the son of Cushi, the son of Gedaliah, the son of Amariah, the son of Hizkiah, in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah. I will utterly consume all things from off the land, saith the Lord. I will consume man and beast; I will consume the fowls of the heaven, and the fishes of the sea, and the stumblingblocks with the wicked; and I will cut off man from off the land, saith the Lord. Now, what on earth can account for such terrible consequences? Well, to tell that story we have to go back in time. I’ve long held that you can’t understand the prophets unless you understand the history of the times in which they worked. When he came on the scene, the house of Judah was in one of the late stages of their decline when a man named Amon ben Manasseh came to the throne. He was 22 years old.

What do you do when God decides to take down his own work? What do you do when things you have believed in, trusted, committed yourself to, worked like the devil for, sacrificed everything for, are completely shattered—not by the Devil, but by God himself? No, I am not talking about this or that church splitting or falling apart. Nor am I dealing in speculation. I am dealing in known events that are well documented and well understood. Walk back with me to another place and time. It is late in the seventh century bc. The place is the equivalent of our courthouse steps today. It is the gate of the Temple—where cases in law were heard, where contracts were finalized and witnessed, where news was announced, and even sermons delivered. There is a very young man standing there to speak, and over his shoulder we can look up and see the most famous building in the world—the Temple of the Lord, built by Solomon, with no effort spared to glorify God. Solomon's Temple was legendary, not only in its beauty but in the events that marked its history. You could ask any of the old men seated near the gate and hear the whole story—how David had the concept, how Solomon inherited the job, all the material that went into the building, all the years it was under construction. They could tell you about the incredible events of its dedication. They all knew the story by heart. God himself actually entered this building and filled it with smoke. That had never happened before anywhere in the world, and it would never happen again. This great Temple had hosted over 330 years of the Passover. For all those years, it had been the hub for millions of camping pilgrims at the Feast of Tabernacles. It had been the center of the worship of Jehovah for generation after generation. It stood there looking as permanent as the mountains around it. It was the very heart of their faith, the symbol of their God, the rock around which all Israel gathered. It was the very work of God, God's own house…and it was doomed.

When you read the Old Testament prophets, a pattern begins to emerge. And if you know what to look for it begins to clear the air somewhat in trying to understand what they’re about. As long as society is behaving itself—people are living good lives, they’re being moral, they don’t start trouble—you don’t even hear from the prophets. God never sends a prophet to tell you what a good boy you are. So, consequently, the first phase of the pattern of a prophet in the Bible is that things in society have gone terribly wrong.

Living as we do in an age of plenty, it’s hard for us to understand famine. What we do know about it is a long way off and kind of unreal. We see picture of mothers with little babies with their bellies distended and being told they’re starving to death. You would believe it looking at those little twiggy limbs. We might even sit down and write a check for famine relief. Modern science and technology has not wiped out famine, but it sure has shoved it out of the center of most people’s lives. We don’t deal with it; we don’t think about it; we don’t have any experience about how it feels to be in the middle of one and to be helpless. Not many of us know what it means to face starvation. And so, when you pick up an Old Testament prophet like Joel, it’s apt to be just words on paper to us. Now, I can assure you that it was more than just words to those who heard those words the first time Joel spoke them. For one thing, famine was a periodic and a well-known fact of life in that world. It was something people lived with. There was no giant government to move stuff back and forth. There were no great trucks and airplanes and boats and ships that could move tons of grain from one place to another. Nothing like that existed. And people knew that either they prepared or they could die. The prophet Joel begins his work with a terrifying picture of a locust-induced famine. What we don’t know is whether to take this literally or as a metaphor or something even worse. I’ll tell you what he said, and then we can consider the implications.

We don’t know a lot about Nahum. He describes himself as an but no one knows where is to date him. The date of his prophecy can be placed between 700 to 600 BC. He mentions in the book two particular dates. One is the destruction of the Egyptian capital No-Amon (Thebes) in about 636 to 630 BC and he is speaking of the future destruction of Nineveh which occurs later, in 612 BC. So Nahum is prophesying somewhere after 650 BC and probably close to the time of the fall of Nineveh, when a coalition of Medes, Babylonians, and Scythians attacked and destroyed the Assyrian capital. So Nahum comes on the scene not that long before Assyria’s fall. Jerusalem is still traumatized by the invasion of the Assyrians and, no doubt, praying for revenge. Nahum titles his prophecy, . And here is something very important to know when you read this. It was probably a work of music—performance art if you will—and would resemble a recitatif from Mendelssohn’s or Handel’s . The difference would be that the culture at that time seems to have had a ten-note scale instead of the eight-note one we have today. So it would have sounded very strange to our ears. It may also have been a chant. Prophets commonly required a minstrel to play on a lyre as they preached or sang this recitatif. Turn with me to the Book of Nahum and we’ll listen to the prophet sing.

I’m sure you’ve heard the old axiom: Once bitten, twice shy. Or maybe you heard it another way: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I think that old saw may lie behind my skepticism of prophets. More than once, I have declared that I have never encountered anyone whom I considered a genuine prophet, in the biblical sense. I have no patience with pretenders to the prophet’s office, either, though I have encountered a few of these. One thing that made a major contribution to my skepticism was a book that appeared in 1967. The title was by William and Paul Paddock. The book had all the statistics, and was shocking in its conclusions and recommendations. What happened? Well, population growth slowed, and food production exploded in the years following. Development in disease resistant crops had been underway even as the Paddocks wrote their book. What is it about disasters that brings so many would-be prophets out of the woodwork? It was something Jesus said, that—misunderstood—fuels this sort of thing. We’ll find it in Matthew, chapter 24.

Reading the biblical prophets—with understanding—is no easy task, at best. But when you try to do it without knowledge of the history behind it becomes hopeless. For one thing, there are parts of prophesies that have to do with the distant future—and then an even more distant. Other parts deal with the prophet’s own day. How can you tell which is which? Well, the place to start is the past. If you’re going to understand what’s going to happen, you have to first go back and see what has happened before. There’s still another mistake you can make as you read the prophets. You can attempt a literal interpretation of the future. The prophets don’t do that. They use figurative language, poetic structure. and imagery. And their prophecies are not laid out in a linear form where you always know where you are and where you’re going. In a sense, you have to feel the prophets. You have to take them as a whole—as a work of art. You have to let them speak to us. Each of us brings something of ourselves to our reading of the Bible. And the Spirit that inspired the prophets can open your heart and mind to grasp what is there as easily as mine. But you need to relax a little bit and take a little time. You have to be willing to think about what you’re reading and to allow it to, kind of, flow over you as you feel or experience what the prophet is saying. Micah is a classic example of that. Just as you have him settled into historical context—you know right where he is, who the kings were and what’s going on—suddenly you find yourself in a totally different place and time. As Micah was writing, Assyria was rising as a power in the world. Israel is prosperous and powerful, but corrupt and will, in time, fall to the Assyrians. But then something strange happens in this prophecy. We find it in the fifth chapter.