Value of Prophecy
Now Playing: Do we want to understand the mind of God ?
Topic: Discernment
"The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy"

There is often in believers the desire to look into prophecy as an academic pursuit. This verse, if understood, would preserve from such a sterile approach. To relate all of prophecy to Jesus warms the heart. I understand the verse is one of those in the Word which is reciprocal. That is, it could also be read: "The spirit of prophecy is the testimony of Jesus."

Everything in the purposes of God, present or future, is connected with the glory of His well-beloved Son! That is what makes the understanding of the prophetic scriptures of such importance to the believer.


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"I Daniel understood by books . . . and I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes; and I made my confession, and said, "O Lord, the great and dreadful God . . . We have sinned, and have commited iniquity . . ." Daniel 9.2-5

God shows us here, as W Kelly puts it in his "Lectures on Daniel", "the spirit proper for understanding prophecy." Daniel read in Jeremiah a prediction concerning the return of Israel to the land. Does he go immediately to the people to tell them the good news? No, he draws near to God. Faith draws into the presence of God the one who understands His mind or will in a matter.

Kelly says further: "If the study of prophecy does not tend to give us a deeper sense of the failure of God's people upon the earth, . . . we lose one of its most important practical uses. It is because of the absence of this feeling that prophetic research is generally so unprofitable. It is made more a question of dates and countries, of popes and kings; whereas God did not give it to exercise people's wits, but to be the _expression of His own mind touching their moral condition; so that whatever trials and judgments are portrayed there, they should be taken up by the heart, and felt to be the hand of God upon His people because of their sins."