I have been
reading so many pastors and scholars writing about those 27% of Bible as being prophecies
yet to come. Unfortunately that is not true and the Bible cannot be tought this
way.
My family,
mostly my father and mother ministry, has been studying and teaching the Bible
for more than 62 years now. We consider ourselves Bereans, searching the
Scripture every single day. Actually my father around sixty years ago created a
method for illiterate people in Brazil to learn how to write in read in
Portuguese, using the Bible as the educational primer. This method is being
used as an alphabetization tool in more than 5,000 churches in Brazil now. All
Portuguese spoken countries have small teaching nucleus which use that method.
Also, it has been translated to several languages.
The entire
Bible contains 31,103 verses. If we just take verses which talk about prophetic
things in general, they come out to 8,352 verses or 26.85% of the Bible. Those
verses are called prophetic verses and they talk about future events in
general. Of all those 8,352 verses, a total of 6,312 have already been
fulfilled. It means that 75.57% of those prophetic verses in the Bible have
passed away already, remaining only 2,040 verses or 24.43% of those 8,352
verses yet to be fulfilled. So, from the entire Bible, there is only 6.55% of
prophetic verses awaiting for God´s appointed time for their completion and
they are (have to be) used to teach modern day Bible prophecy.
Amazingly,
those 2,040 verses can take some people entire life to study, teach and preach
about them. It is the case of Dr. John Barton Payne, who was a professor at the
Covenant Theological Seminary, and spent his whole life (57 years, short but
very productive life) to only study Bible prophecy. He ended up writing these
books which are fundamentals to anyone who is interested in learning more about
Bible prophecy: "The Unity of Isaiah: Evidence From Chapters 36-39"
(1963), "Biblical Prophecy for Today" (1978),"The Goal Of
Daniel’s Seventy Weeks" (1978), "Encyclopedia of Biblical
Prophecy" (1980), "Theology of The Older Testament" (1980),
"The Expositor´s Bible Commentary" (several editions), and "The
Iminent Appearance of Christ" (2011), among dozens of others about Bible
Prophecy. He separated all Bible prophetic verses categorizing them about those
related to Israel, Church, Anti-Christ, Christ return, etc. . All his writings
can be found at the *PCA Historical Center, St. Louis, Missouri under J. Barton
Payne Manuscript Collection. Collection #024 and Box #248.
* PCA =
Presbyterian Church Archieves.
So, that man said that out of those 2,040 verses, these all come together to predict 215
facets about Christ return to the earth. Those 215 are specific predictions
from God about the end of the world. All those events are now in the process of
being fulfilled. Just look at the news today. Inside of those 2,040 verses
(6.55% of Bible) we can find descriptions about these events which are coming:
The Tribulation, The Rapture and Second Coming of Christ, The Day of God´s
Wrath, The Judgment Seat of Christ, The Millenium, The Great White Throne. God
warned us that these events will happen so we better be prepared for them.
Be blessed.
* Article written to Mr. Ron Edwards in response to his writings about JESUS SECOND COMING posted at LinkedIn on March 6th, 2020.
