However unimportant the study of prophecy may be in the judgement of men, it is a subject of greatest importance in the sight of God.
Certainly it is true that the great majority of professing Christians dismiss prophecy as unimportant and uninteresting. This is often because instead of allowing God to mean what He says, each interpreter declares that He actually means something different, and thus the ordinary Bible–reader is bewildered by the Babel of voices around him.
As to ourselves, all our hopes are built on prophecy. The promise of future glory, the pledge of resurrection, the joys of heaven, the hope of glory and all that we know about them is nothing but prophecy.
Surely if we are to judge the importance of a doctrine by the prominence given to it in the Word of God, then we may say that we have in prophecy a subject “to which ye do well taking heed” (2 Pet. 1: 19). The Old Testament may be divided into the “Law and the Prophets”, and if the former is little read, then the latter is even less so––yet how vast a proportion of God’s Word it occupies! When we turn to the New Testament we find that it is full of “the coming of the Lord”––and the more we loved Him the more we would delight in such prophecies. Dear friends, it is not right to pay so little attention to what is clearly so important in the divine eye––we must not lightly esteem that part of God’s Word to which He especially exhorts us to “take heed”! Nor can it be right to view those who “love his appearing” (2 Tim. 4: 8) as eccentric. That they are eccentric is certainly true, but only because the mass of professing Christians have drifted away from God’s Word. If this doctrine which holds so large a place in the Bible is neglected, and unheeded by the majority of those who claim Jesus as Lord, then we need no other evidence that the Church has departed from the faith, and is on the terrible “down–grade”. May you and I, as individuals, be over–comers in such a scene!
