“EXAMINE THE LIVER”: This was an ancient Babylonian process to try to discern the future.
- Ezekiel 21:21.
- I’m quite confident that I’ve never heard a sermon on this obscure phrase in this obscure corner of the Bible, but I think it’s interesting and sets up an important point about prophecy and the future. So let’s dig in and see if we can learn something.
- What in the world does “examine the liver” mean?
- This was an ancient Babylonian technique for trying to discern the future.
- The liver would be taken from a newly slaughtered animal and a priest would look at trying to discern what insight it gave him regarding the future. There was a whole serious organization around this. And, of course, then people took those predictions seriously.
- Now, I realize that it’s easy for us to blithely dismiss this as being ridiculous because it sounds so unfamiliar and weird. We might say, “No modern person would ever believe something that ridiculous.” But we have had famous people like Jeanne Dixon in the last few decades who were respected as mediums even though their rate of successful prediction was abysmal. Or why centuries later we still know the name Nostradamus.
- I think part of the problem here is that things like “examining the liver” fill a void that we desperately want filled.
- We don’t know the future. The future seems scary. There are big obstacles and fierce enemies out there. We want to know what we’re up against. It makes us more likely to buy into things that logically are just silly.
DO CHRISTIANS DO ANYTHING SIMILAR? The main way is sometimes we try to predict the future by reading more into the Bible than God put in there.
- It would be easy for us to say that we’re not inclined to do anything like that today, but many Christians do.
- There is still some popularity to mediums, although that’s not mainstream and would be dismissed by most Christians.
- More popular than that is how many of us just presume that God’s will is going to be what we want. But that is more wishful thinking than genuinely attempts at predicting the future.
- No, the way that we do this that is the most damning is books that claim to know more about the future than the Bible tells us.
- This is a regular phenomenon in Christian publishing.
- You get books like Harbinger and the multiple sequels. You get numerous end times books from authors like John Hagee than claim to have discerned the timeline. (Only to be wrong and then have another, different timeline in the next book.) You have books like Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code.
- These books just keep showing up and Christians keep buying them . . . and believing them! I’m not sure if we’re gullible or stupid or just too eager to know what’s ahead. Whatever it is, we keep repeating the same mistake again and again.
- What’s the essential problem with all these books? It is simply and profoundly this: they claim more knowledge from the Bible than God put in there.
- They claim to have found secret codes that no one else before had figured out.
- They claim to have dovetailed pieces of the Bible into contemporary history in ways that make it obvious he has great insight into the future.
-They claim to have the perfect prophetic framework that allows them to be absolutely certain that they know the future.
- In all these, they are claiming more than God intended.
- What do I mean by that?
- God has given us the Bible for our instruction and enlightenment. There are clear truths in there that we are meant to hold on to. This is what we would classify as the “plain meaning of the Bible text.”
But there are also ways to go in and try to read more than God intended to be pulled out. I have done that before to illustrate how easily this can be done and used to lead people astray. I once found some obscure details that vaguely matched the life of president George W. Bush and then laid those together to say the Bible predicted his presidency. Of course, it was just an exercise in making a point. It was something I told people up front was an attempt to prove a point about people’s gullibility, not about the Bible’s actual prophecy. But it did a good job of making my point.
- Doing things like that prove that it is possible to read more into Bible passages than God intended. It’s manipulation, not exegesis.
- Unfortunately, some people have made a lot of money doing it.
- Equally unfortunately, many Christians have bought into it hook, line, and sinker and walked down that road they should not have walked.
- Now, please understand that I do believe there is genuine prophecy in the Bible.
- And I know we are told that we are to pay attention to the signs in the world around us and see if they match the prophesied signs.
- But we are far too eager to make the mistakes I’ve listed above by jumping well beyond what we’ve been given by God in the Bible into purely speculative matters.
- I would like to think that we as Christians would say, “Let’s be careful in these matters and err on the side of not going beyond what God has given us.” But the opposite tends to be true: Christians are more than willing to run to the most obscure corners of speculation.
- So we’re not as far off of the ancient Babylonians as we might wish.
- Which raises an important question: how do we stay on track?
HOW SHOULD WE DEAL WITH THE FUTURE?
- I want to walk through a basic framework of a solidly Biblical way to think about these issues.
1. THERE ARE THINGS GOD HAS TOLD US ABOUT THE FUTURE THAT WE NEED TO KNOW.
- Let’s start with the prophetic portions of Scripture.
- We can say definitively that God has included information about the future in the Scripture. I think particularly of Revelation, Daniel, and some of the discourses that Jesus shared in the gospels.
- Why do we have confidence in these prophecies?
- One major reason is that there are already many prophecies in the Bible that have come true. Certainly there are many that have to do with end times which are unfulfilled as of now but there are also many that have already come to pass.
- One obvious example is all the prophecies surrounding the arrival of the Messiah. One of the reasons that we can be confident in Jesus as the Messiah is that He uniquely fulfilled many Old Testament predictions about what the Messiah would be like. In fact, there are so many of those predictions that fulfilling them by chance is essentially impossible. So those coming to pass help us to know (a) Jesus is the Messiah, and (b) the Bible is from God because it predicts things that had not happened at the time of its writing.
- As we read the portions of the Scripture that point toward future prophecy, we need to rejoice in what we’ve been told. It’s helpful information.
- Just to cite one example, we read details in Revelation that indicate some of the global political realities that will accompany end times events. This is good to have so we aren’t left completely in the dark. We know the broad outlines of what to look for.
- This is something we should be proud of. It’s an amazing thing and it’s in our book. It’s strong evidence that the Bible isn’t like other books.
2. THERE ARE THINGS GOD HAS NOT TOLD US ABOUT THE FUTURE THAT WE DON'T NEED TO KNOW.
- Let’s take this statement in its two halves.
- First, there are things God has not told us.
- As I just pointed out, we can rejoice in all that God has told us about the future through Biblical prophecy. It’s impressive and reliable.
- Quick on the heels of that reality, though, we need to acknowledge that there are far more things that God has not told us about the future. That’s not a criticism or a complaint, it’s just a reality. The future unfolding of the divine plan will involve literally millions of tiny and big details. God has not given us specifics on the vast majority of those. The Bible would be much, much thicker if He had.
- This is a reality that creates the problem I discussed at the start of this sermon. Many people want to try to add to the knowledge we have about the future. They aren’t content with what God has shared and so they want to find more details.
- Some of this has to do with personal power. When I know something you couldn’t figure out, it raises my strength. When people write these books claiming to connect the dots of Biblical prophecy in ways that no one has ever done before, many find that compelling and consider that person uniquely insightful, rather than considering them someone going too far.
- Some of this has to do with our yearning to know more. We want to understand all the details and so when someone comes along claiming to be able to give deeper insight, we too often jump into their conjectures.
- The second half of the statement is one that we don’t like. It is that if God didn’t share it then we don’t need to know it.
- Are we curious? Sure.
- Do we want to know more? Of course.
- Do we need to know all things? No.
- We need to find a measure of contentment with what God has shared with us. He is wise and loving and has told us what He thinks we need to know.
- I’m reminded of a father and a young child. There are things about the world that he is not going to tell his young child because they would be worrisome and bothersome to her. It’s the job of the father to carry those heavier truths. There is a measure of that here. We don’t need to know everything.
3. WE SHOULD DO WHAT WE HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED TO DO.
- In light of those two realities, what should we do?
- One of the main things we need to do is what we’ve been assigned to do.
- Is there a larger story unfolding around us? Yes.
- Is God bringing human history toward a specific end? Yes.
- Are we a part of that plan? Yes.
- But knowing that, we need to grasp that the Scripture does not instruct us: “Children, what I want you to do is sit around and endlessly speculate about how all these things are going to come to pass. Spend as much time in conjecture as possible until I return.”
- No, we have been given work to do. What’s that work?
- Love the least of these.
- Tell people about the good news.
- Grow to be more like Jesus.
- And so on.
- These are things we have specifically been told to do.
- Within all that there is a tiny sliver that includes understanding the prophecies that we have been given and thinking about whether the time that we are in matches up to that, but that’s an exceedingly minor part of our walk of faith. We have much more pressing and important things to be doing.
- And so we need to be “about our Father’s business.”
4. TRUST THAT GOD WILL DO WHAT HE SHOULD DO.
- We do our work confident that God will do His.
- There are millions of things that need to happen to bring history to its Biblically-predicted culmination. We are not in charge of that - God is. Let Him do His job and just concentrate on doing ours.
- Sometimes our problem is that we don’t seem to trust God to do what He promised.
- An example of this is some of the promises He’s made to us. A major part of our struggles with worry is that we are unwilling to turn issues and problems over to God and trust that He will take care of it. No, we hand it to Him only to then take it back out of His hands because we don’t think He’s doing it right or quickly enough or the way we expected.
- Trust Him to do what He promised.
5. TRUST THAT GOD HAS THE LARGER PLAN UNDER CONTROL.
- That leads to our final point, which is a continuation of point 4.
- God has the larger plan under control.
- It’s going to happen the way He predicted. He’s going to come together on time and the way He wants.
- Where does this leave us? Beautifully, it leaves us in a state of rest.
- I don’t mean that we have nothing to do. As I said a moment ago, He has given us things we are to be doing.
- But in the larger sense, we can rest.It’s all under control. He knows what He’s doing.
- There is a comfort when you’re in a situation that you’re not used to when you look at the expert in charge and they are calm and collected.
- Maybe it’s at a wedding and it seems like the preparations are going in a thousand different directions. But then you talk to the wedding coordinator who does this week in and week out and they calmly say, “Everything is ahead of schedule. We’re in great shape.” It doesn’t necessarily look that way to you, but you’re not the expert. So you trust them and, sure enough, it's a beautiful wedding.
- I don't know how everything is going to come together. Thankfully, that’s not my job. God has the larger plan under control.
- So we don’t need to “examine the liver” or do the modern equivalent - reading speculative books that go beyond what the Bible has told us. Sure, we’re curious but we can rest in God’s planning and power.
