When Christians Try To Predict The Future Series

“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.