Born To Win Podcast - With Ronald L. Dart

The Old Testament prophets pose a singular problem for the reader. This is because they are prophets, not seers like Nostradamus. They aren’t there to tell you when things are going to happen off in the future, and in what order, or what the signs are so you will know what they’re going to be. That’s not really what prophets are all about. They are there to tell you where you are going, what’s going to happen when you get there, and what you can do to change the outcome. I get the feeling when I read some lengthy discourses on prophecy that the writers think the prophets are fortune tellers. It never seems to occur to them to ask the question, Why would God bother to tell any of us what the future holds? It isn’t really necessarily a good thing to know what’s in the future.So what is the purpose of sending a prophet? What is the purpose of sending a prophet to tell us, Your nation is going to the dogs? The answer is simplicity itself. God reveals the future to us so we can

I’ve been reading the Biblical prophets for a long time now. In all that time, the thing that strikes me the most about these prophets is how real they were. These aren’t just old Hebrew poets with an axe to grind. These men are who they say they are and they had a close encounter with God. The word of God had come to them and spoken. They’re not really volunteers, not in that sense of the word. They didn’t go off to school to study the prophets, although apparently there were schools of the prophets, at least these guys didn’t need to.For one thing, when the prophet Amos was threatened by one of the low-life leaders of the religion in northern Israel, he said to the man, I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son. It’s not in my heritage, my dad didn’t send me out to do this, I’m not doing this because my dad did it. I was a sheep herder and a fruit picker and the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said to me, Go preach to my people I

“If a man dies, shall he live again?” That’s the question, isn’t it? “Is this all there is?” People want to know.We are going to live out our lives here in misery, pain, frustration, aggravation, and irritation, and after that comes oblivion forever. Sometimes one thinks that oblivion might even be merciful after all of this. “If a man dies, will he live again?” It was Job who asked this question, and Job had a really good reason to ask whether life was even worth living or not. Here’s a man who had been wealthy and successful—I mean, everything the man ever did in his life worked, and all of a sudden, everything in his life fell completely apart. All of his children were killed when a windstorm came by and destroyed the house they were all partying in that particular day.A group of civilians came by and stole all of his livestock—every bit of it, leaving him with nothing. I don’t think they had insurance back in those days to pay for all that. One moment he was a wealthy man, and the next moment he had nothi