Quote:
Originally Posted by Berkley
I have never met anyone that interprets it like you do. Hm.
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You can make that two people, now.
First came the start of the 'time of the Gentiles', most noted by Peter and the apostles with the conversion of Cornelius and his household. Then after the destruction of the Second Temple, the nation of Israel was dispersed throughout the world, just as Jesus said, yet the time of the Gentiles continued on, even to today with the Temple Mount is still control by non-Jews (Gentiles).
The year 1948 fulfilled another prophecy concerning Israel, when the nation was established in a single day, and Jews from around the world started their return to the promised land, a process that continues even to day. The next step is for the nations of the world to array themselves against Jerusalem - and that is taking place even as we contribute to this forum. The entire world is turning against Israel, and Jews are once again being accused (scapegoated) for every ill and problem known to mankind.
Prophecy is in the process of being fulfilled on a daily bases.
As an aside: We must remember that even the New Covenant scriptures were written by Jews and mostly for Jews, or Gentiles familiar with the Jewish people and their religion. Therefore, when reading New Covenant texts it is necessary to remember that in the Hebrew language worldview (methods and modes of thinking and interacting with the physical world), that there are only two 'tenses' in their language, perfect and imperfect. That is, "things will happen or they have already happened." This makes rendering some prophesies difficult to interpret. Some, however, passages such as
Isaiah 9:6 in the chapter's context, are rather easy to follow. A child is born and child is given, translated in the presence tense, while the rest of the verse is future tense ("... the government shall ...", yet, the entire verse is understood to be future tense.
Another problem in interpreting scriptural prophecy is that within the Hebrew language and historical religious perspective, of which Christianity is a continuation, men have the ability to either speed up or slow down the time line of the events predicted, there are several example of this throughout the Bible.
Therefore, for the proper understanding scripture, we must alter our worldview to that of the original writers. Our Western though process are time dependent and linear (abstract in nature), while the Bible is written in a non-linear, time independent, conceptual frame of reference. Then, to further complicate matters, there are the Hebrew idioms that do not translate well into either Greek or English, and all of this creates much consternation among translators and makes the proper interpretation of scripture difficult.
Added comment: When the Hebrew thinking process (world view) is translated into Greek and then into English, the problems are compounded even further.
Linear Mode
