The Prophetic Writings

So this is the sixth in a series on the gift of prophecy.

And you may remember from last time that I mentioned this and the previous lesson are kind of a pair.

Because when one is attempting to understand how inspiration works, how God reveals himself to prophets, there's really two pieces of evidence.

One is the statements the Bible actually makes about the process.

and the other is the process itself, the evidence that is seen in the actual prophetic writings and the prophetic experience.

So the previous lesson, we looked at some of those statements, major statements in the Bible about how the process works.

And we found that they were very helpful statements, but they still left us with some questions.

And so this week, we will take a look at the phenomena of Scripture.

demonstrate as to the way that inspiration happens.

When you see various Bible texts inspired by God, what do those texts tell you about the process that we got to for all of this? So moving to number one, the Bible describes three major ways that prophets communicated God's messages.

The last lesson was primarily on how God communicated with the prophets.

But now it turns right away how the prophets communicated God's messages.

And in that phenomenon of how scripture was put together, we will learn some things also about inspiration.

So it says three major ways prophets communicated God's messages orally, through speech, through writing, and through symbolic actions and dramatizations.

So sometimes, and I think Ezekiel is a classic case of this, where God invited Ezekiel to act out certain dramas, which would then the people watching would hopefully get the message that God was trying to communicate through those.

So this week's lesson focuses on the writings of the prophets themselves, their use of literary assistance, and how to deal with passages that are difficult to understand.

So the lesson doesn't necessarily describe this as further information on inspiration, but I think what we're going to see in this lesson does help answer some of the questions we might have had a week ago.

So the first question, according to Romans 15.4, what is the purpose of inspired writings? So inspired is a metaphor from breathing in and breathing out.

And so when we talk about inspired, it means that God is infused into the prophet's mind, infused into the speech, into the writing, etc.

So Romans 15 verse 4 suggests the purpose for such writings.

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.

All right, so everything written in the past, that's referring to the Old Testament, to the writings that prophets leave behind.

You'll find it interesting when Jesus is talking to the disciples in the upper room.

He says, I'm not just going to leave you here, but I'm going to send the Holy Spirit to be with you.

And when he's with you, he will bring to your remembrance the things that I said to you.