Since the nineteenth century it has been popular to point
to the following examples of prophecies that were not fulfilled in Scripture:
1. The prophecy of the ruin of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar
(Ezek 26:7–14; 29:17–20).
2. Jonah’s prophecy of the destruction of Nineveh (Jonah
3:4).
3. Elijah’s prophecy against King Ahab for murdering
Naboth (1 Kings 21:17–29).
4. Isaiah’s prophecy of the destruction of Damascus (Is
17:1).
The so-called nonfulfillment of prophecies is to be
explained on the basis of the threefold classification of biblical prophecy;
that is, prophecy may be unconditionally fulfilled, conditionally fulfilled or
sequentially fulfilled. All three types are commonly used by the prophets and
are accompanied by textual indicators that aid the reader and interpreter in
distinguishing them.
The list of unconditional prophecies is not long, but
they are central, for they concern, for the most part, our salvation. They are
called unconditional because they are made unilaterally by God without any
requirements on the part of mortals to maintain their side of the bargain. Just
as God alone passed through the pieces in Genesis 15, implying that an oath of
self-imprecation would fall on him if he did not accomplish what he promised
Abraham in the Abrahamic covenant, so it follows that the same one-sided
obligation rests with the other covenants that fall in this same category. They
are God’s covenant with the seasons (Gen 8:21–22), his promise to Abraham (Gen
12:2–3; 15:9–21), his promise to David (2 Sam 7:8–16), his promise of the new
covenant (Jer 31:31–34) and his promise of a new heavens and a new earth (Is
65:17–19; 66:22–24).
The majority of the prophecies, however, were of the
conditional type. They contain a suppressed “unless” or “if you keep my
commandments” type of conditionality. Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, with the
alternative prospects for obedience or disobedience, were quoted or alluded to
by the sixteen writing prophets literally hundreds of times. It is this
provisional nature to the threat or promise delivered by the prophet that
explains such a famous case as that of the prophet Jonah. While it is true that
he was only to warn the people that in forty days destruction would come from
the Almighty, the people extrapolated, apparently, from Jonah’s own case of
deliverance (Did not Jesus say that Jonah himself was a “sign” to the
Ninevites? A sign of what? Mercy?) that God might be merciful and relent from
his announced judgment. They presumed that such a God must have a suppressed
“unless” or “if” in the threat of absolute disaster. They were correct, much to
Jonah’s deep chagrin. This principle received formal articulation in Jer
18:7–10:
If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to
be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of
its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned.
And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up
and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will
reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.
This relenting from an announced judgment (or
deliverance) by God based on the condition of repentance and change was
effective not only in dealing with whole nations but in dealing with
individuals as well. That is exactly what took place with regard to Ahab in 1
Kings 21:25–29 after he “humbled himself” before the Lord for what he and
Jezebel had done in arranging the murder of Naboth. After noting that “there
was never a man like Ahab who sold himself to do evil in the eyes of the Lord”
(1 Kings 21:25), the Lord instructed the prophet Elijah to reverse the threat
he had just delivered against Ahab, saying, “Because he has humbled himself, I
will not bring this disaster in his day, but I will bring it on his house in
the days of his son” (1 Kings 21:29). This is a classic example of
conditionality in prophecies working at the level of individuals. Presumably if
his son also repented, the threatened judgment would likewise be removed from
his son and that generation because of the same merciful provision of God.
But there are some prophecies that do not fit comfortably
in either the unconditional or conditional category. These are the sequentially
fulfilled prophecies, a subcategory of the conditional type. The prophecy in
Ezekiel 26:7–14 falls into this third category:
For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: From the north
I am going to bring against Tyre Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. … He will
ravage your settlements on the mainland; … he will set up siege works against
you. … He will direct the blows of his battering rams against your walls and demolish
your towers with his weapons. His horses will be so many that they will cover
you with dust. … He will kill your people with the sword, and your strong
pillars will fall to the ground. They
will plunder your wealth and loot your merchandise; they will break down your walls and demolish your fine houses and
throw your stones, timber and rubble into the sea. (emphasis mine)
According to many critics of biblical prophecy, Ezekiel
in 29:18–20 admits that his prophecy was not fulfilled:
Son of man, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon drove his army
in a hard campaign against Tyre. … Yet he and his army got no reward from the
campaign he led against Tyre. … I have given him Egypt as a reward for his
efforts because he and his army did it for me, declares the Sovereign Lord.
Is this, indeed, an example of nonfulfillment? What has
usually gone unnoticed is the shift in pronouns from the third person singular
pronouns pointing to Nebuchadnezzar to the third person plural, “they,”
pointing to some other force beside that of Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar did
indeed take the mainland city of Tyre after a long siege, only to have the
Tyrians slip through his grasp as they simply moved out to the island a half
mile out in the Mediterranean Sea. It was Alexander the Great, some two hundred
years later, who came and attempted to capture the island fortress of Tyre.
Frustrated in his attempts at first to float a navy that could compete with
these masters of the sea, Alexander finally resorted to scraping up the dust,
timbers, stones and rubble of the former mainland city, and dumping it into the
Mediterranean Sea to form a causeway out to the island. Thus in the 330s b.c.
Alexander took the city that Nebuchadnezzar had failed to take in the 570s b.c.
In this manner the prophecy was fulfilled. There was an
indicated sequencing of events denoted by the sudden shift in the middle of the
prophecy from the repeated references to the third person singular pronoun to
the third person plural.
In like manner, Elijah’s prophecy about Ahab’s punishment
for murdering Naboth and stealing his property was fulfilled. The threatened
doom was carried out, after Ahab’s sudden repentance, on his son a decade later
in 2 Kings 9:25–26. Joram’s corpse was cast onto Naboth’s ground; indeed, the
very spot that had been predicted in 1 Kings 21:19.
Isaiah 17:1 has also been used as an example of
nonfulfillment: “An oracle concerning Damascus: ‘See, Damascus will no longer
be a city but will become a heap of ruins.’” But what is missed here is that
Damascus, as the capital of the nation, stands for the whole Syrian nation.
Furthermore, there is a play on the similar sounding words of “city” and “ruin”
(m̄˒îr and me˒î). A careful reading of the rest of the prophecy
will indicate that Damascus is not facing a permanent and full eradication of
its existence from off the face of the earth. The other thing to note is that
this prophecy is put in the final eschaton, “in that day” (Is 17:4, 7, 9).
Thus we conclude that the prophecies of the Bible were
fulfilled just as they were predicted. When one considers the enormous amount
of predictive material in the Bible and that it involves some 27 percent of the
Bible, it is truly a marvel that it remains so accurate. (Walter C.
Kaiser, Jr., Peter H. Davids, F. F. Bruce, and Manfred T. Brauch, Hard
Sayings of the Bible [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996],
72-75)
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