This past Sunday our sermon focused on 1 Peter 1:3-2:3. In this passage, Peter places a strong and repeated emphasis on our living hope that produces precious faith which results in the glory of Jesus. Part of this passage speaks about how the prophets 'searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances [of]…the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.'

That phrase stuck with me as I studied this passage. I think we often think of the prophets in one of two extremes. On the one extreme is this sense that when they were writing or proclaiming their prophecies that they had only a contemporary knowledge of its application. In other words, when Isaiah spoke of the virgin that would give birth (Isaiah 7:13-17) that all Isaiah understood this to mean was that within a few years, the king's enemies would be overthrown and a greater enemy of judgment would be on Judah's doorstep. On the other hand, we sometimes think that the prophets had this crystal clear understanding of the future-like when Isaiah wrote about the virgin that he had this vivid picture in his mind of a Christmas crèche.

Probably neither is completely true. I'm sure that the weight of certain passages of scripture and their fulfillment in Christ were hidden from the prophets. On the other hand, I think that some of the pictures that they paint of the Messiah are so clear that they would have had to have seen Him in them.

But for them, they lived most of their lives in the hazy in between-searching intently each other's writings-using the greatest care to try and figure out when and where and how and who and what was going to happen with the sufferings and the glories of the Messiah. My guess is that sometimes they got their investigations 'spot on' (as my British friends like to say). Other times, I'd guess that they wildly misinterpreted a passage never realizing how God was going to fulfill something.

We're in that same place. We have all the writings of God's revelation. And he's given us a glimpse of the future. We search intently and with the greatest care to find out the time and the circumstances of the coming glories of the Messiah. We set up all sorts of charts and diagrams. We do calculations. We read newspapers. We try to make it all fit so that we can know the times and circumstances. And, at some level, I don't believe that's wrong.

Until we lose perspective. Probably what is most important for us is to learn from the prophets is what Peter says they learned. They were not serving themselves but future generations when they spoke the things of the Gospel. The prophecies they had been given and that they themselves prophesied weren't for them-the prophecies were for the ones who would be living at the time of their fulfillment. As those prophecies are part of the Gospel, they are part of what has been passed on to Peter's readers…and on to us.

So, we have all these promises from God how things are going to work out. And probably we've got some spot on and others way off but we won't know exactly until the time when they all come to be. In other words, it's fine for us to spend time understanding end times predictions-as they are included in the Gospel proclamation. But to miss that lesson-the lesson that the predictions are there for those who will go through those times and our role is simply to pass them on as part of the Gospel-is to get ourselves entangled with things that we can never know for certain. We ought not to find ourselves joining the long, long list of eschatological predictions that have failed to come true.

Peter admonishes us to understand end times, to proclaim those promises boldly-but only as we proclaim them within the context of the Gospel that Jesus is both our Judge and King.