Systematic Theology (Vol. 1-3). Augustus Hopkins Strong
of Babylon are connected with each other, without notice of the interval of a thousand years between them.
Instances of the double sense of prophecy may be found in Is. 7:14–16; 9:6, 7—“a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, … unto us a son is given”—compared with Mat. 1:22, 23, where the prophecy is applied to Christ (see Meyer, in loco); Hos. 11:1—“I … called my son out of Egypt”—referring originally to the calling of the nation out of Egypt—is in Mat. 2:15referred to Christ, who embodied and consummated the mission of Israel; Psalm 118:22, 23—“The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner”—which primarily referred to the Jewish nation, conquered, carried away, and flung aside as of no use, but divinely destined to a future of importance and grandeur, is in Mat. 21:42 referred by Jesus to himself, as the true embodiment of Israel. William Arnold Stevens, on The Man of Sin, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328–360—As in Daniel 11:36, the great enemy of the faith, who “shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god,” is the Syrian King, Antiochus Epiphanes, so “the man of lawlessness” described by Paul in 2 Thess. 2:3 is the corrupt and impious Judaism of the apostolic age. This had its seat in the temple of God, but was doomed to destruction when the Lord should come at the fall of Jerusalem. But even this second fulfilment of the prophecy does not preclude a future and final fulfilment. Broadus on Mat., page 480—In Isaiah 41:8 to chapter 53, the predictions with regard to “the servant of Jehovah” make a gradual transition from Israel to the Messiah, the former alone being seen in 41:8, the Messiah also appearing in 42:1 sq., and Israel quite sinking out of sight in chapter 53.
The most marked illustration of the double sense of prophecy however is to be found in Matthew 24 and 25, especially 24:34 and 25:31, where Christ's prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem passes into a prophecy of the end of the world. Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 183—“To him history was the robe of God, and therefore a constant repetition of positions really similar, kaleidoscopic combining of a few truths, as the facts varied in which they were to be embodied.” A. J. Gordon: “Prophecy has no sooner become history, than history in turn becomes prophecy.” Lord Bacon: “Divine prophecies have springing and germinant accomplishment through many ages, though the height or fulness of them may refer to some one age.” In a similar manner there is a manifoldness of meaning in Dante's Divine Comedy. C. E. Norton, Inferno, xvi—“The narrative of the poet's spiritual journey is so vivid and consistent that it has all the reality of an account of an actual experience; but within and beneath runs a stream of allegory not less consistent and hardly less continuous than the narrative itself.”A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 116—“Dante himself has told us that there are four separate senses which he intends his story to convey. There are the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the analogical. In Psalm 114:1 we have the words, ‘When Israel went forth out of Egypt.’ This, says the poet, may be taken literally, of the actual deliverance of God's ancient people; or allegorically, of the redemption of the world through Christ; or morally, of the rescue of the sinner from the bondage of his sin; or anagogically, of the passage of both soul and body from the lower life of earth to the higher life of heaven. So from Scripture Dante illustrates the method of his poem.”See further, our treatment of Eschatology. See also Dr. Arnold of Rugby, Sermons on the Interpretation of Scripture, Appendix A, pages 441–454; Aids to Faith, 449–462; Smith's Bible Dict., 4:2727. Per contra, see Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 4:662. Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 262–274, denies double sense, but affirms manifold applications of a single sense. Broadus, on Mat. 24:1, denies double sense, but affirms the use of types.
(b) The prophet was not always aware of the meaning of his own prophecies (1 Pet. 1:11). It is enough to constitute his prophecies a proof of divine revelation, if it can be shown that the correspondences between them and the actual events are such as to indicate divine wisdom and purpose in the giving of them—in other words, it is enough if the inspiring Spirit knew their meaning, even though the inspired prophet did not.
It is not inconsistent with this view, but rather confirms it, that the near event, and not the distant fulfilment, was often chiefly, if not exclusively, in the mind of the prophet when he wrote. Scripture declares that the prophets did not always understand their own predictions: 1 Pet. 1:11—“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.” Emerson: “Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.” Keble: “As little children lisp and tell of heaven, So thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given.” Westcott: Preface to Com. on Hebrews, vi—“No one would limit the teaching of a poet's words to that which was definitely present to his mind. Still less can we suppose that he who is inspired to give a message of God to all ages sees himself the completeness of the truth which all life serves to illuminate.” Alexander McLaren: “Peter teaches that Jewish prophets foretold the events of Christ's life and especially his sufferings; that they did so as organs of God's Spirit; that they were so completely organs of a higher voice that they did not understand the significance of their own words, but were wiser than they knew and had to search what were the date and the characteristics of the strange things which they foretold; and that by further revelation they learned that ‘the vision is yet for many days’ (Is. 24:22; Dan. 10:14). If Peter was right in his conception of the nature of Messianic prophecy, a good many learned men of to-day are wrong.” Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: “Might not the prophetic ideals be poetic dreams, and the correspondence between them and the life of Jesus, so far as real, only a curious historical phenomenon?”Bruce, Apologetics, 359, replies: “Such scepticism is possible only to those who have no faith in a living God who works out purposes in history.” It is comparable only to the unbelief of the materialist who regards the physical constitution of the universe as explicable by the fortuitous concourse of atoms.
8. Purpose of Prophecy—so far as it is yet unfulfilled. (a) Not to enable us to map out the details of the future; but rather (b) To give general assurance of God's power and foreseeing wisdom, and of the certainty of his triumph; and (c) To furnish, after fulfilment, the proof that God saw the end from the beginning.
Dan. 12:8, 9—“And I heard, but I understood not; then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the issue of these things? And he said, Go thy way, Daniel; for the words are shut up and sealed till the time of the end”; 2 Pet. 1:19—prophecy is “a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawn”—not until day dawns can distant objects be seen; 20—“no prophecy of scripture is of private interpretation”—only God, by the event, can interpret it. Sir Isaac Newton: “God gave the prophecies, not to gratify men's curiosity by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own providence, not the interpreter's, be thereby manifested to the world.” Alexander McLaren: “Great tracts of Scripture are dark to us till life explains them, and then they come on us with the force of a new revelation, like the messages which of old were sent by a strip of parchment coiled upon a bâton and then written upon, and which were unintelligible unless the receiver had a corresponding bâton to wrap them round.” A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 23—“Archilochus, a poet of about 700 BC, speaks of ‘a grievous scytale’—the scytale being the staff on which a strip of leather for writing purposes was rolled slantwise, so that the message inscribed upon the strip could not be read until the leather was rolled again upon another staff of the same size; since only the writer and the receiver possessed staves of the proper size, the scytale answered all the ends of a message in cypher.”
Prophecy is like the German sentence—it can be understood only when we have read its last word. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 48—“God's providence is like the Hebrew Bible; we must begin at the end and read backward, in order to understand it.” Yet Dr. Gordon seems to assert that such understanding is possible even before fulfilment: “Christ did not know the day of the end when here in his state of humiliation; but he does know now. He has shown his knowledge in the Apocalypse, and we have received ‘The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show unto his servants, even the things which must shortly come to pass’