Born To Win Podcast - With Ronald L. Dart

When you begin pondering the last days (as the Bible presents them) and you read what the prophets have to say about that time, you’re inevitably drawn to the Book of Revelation. And what I find fascinating is how commonly the Old Testament prophets are cited in Revelation. If you have one of those Bibles that have marginal references in it you can easily find where so many things that are said in Revelation originally come from. It shouldn’t be surprising, in a way, because all the prophets had a sense of a judgment day—a time when God would tie up all the loose ends and bring history to an end.I don’t know that they could have looked at the world and have imagined how things would end, but they knew all too well that God had a special place in his heart for Israel. They knew the history of the things he had done to judge those who had afflicted Israel, along with Pharaoh and others. And knowing God’s love of judgment, his love of mercy, his forgiveness, they were not entirely s

There is really no question that when you read an Old Testament prophet you should ask how he was understood at the time, and how the prophecy would apply in his own lifetime. But if you stop there you may miss something very important. What a prophet like Zechariah was seeing and hearing from God would tend to repeat in successive generations; like a standing wave repeats—they come they go, it ebbs and it flows. There may be any number of reasons for this, but two basic principals need to be taken into account:Human nature never changes.The divine nature doesn’t change, either.Therefore, history naturally tends to repeat itself. But then another question follows closely, What was God really aiming at in that prophecy? Was it an earlier wave of history, or was the earlier used only as an example—a type of what was ultimately to come and what God was really aiming at? What makes me wonder is the way a prophet like Zechariah will move so easily from something that can only apply in his own day

Two things came my way yesterday which, at first blush, seem unrelated. But, in fact, they have a common, underlying philosophy which needs to be challenged every time it raises its ugly head. It may even be called a hidden agenda, because it is an agenda, and no one ever talks about it. The first was an editorial in one of the popular news magazines, written by a scientist, arguing that scientists should stick to science and theologians to theology. What he was exercised about was that scientists should not allow Intelligent Design into the classroom. My immediate thought was, Okay, they want to stick to unintelligent design, but that was too easy.The second thing that came my way was an email taking me to task for using my broadcast to talk about politics. In particular, he was upset about what he perceived as support for President Bush and the war in Iraq in some of my past programs, which only demonstrated that he hadn’t been paying attention. Now, how exactly are these two things related, and why d

When you are reading the Old Testament prophets, there’s a particular challenge you run into again and again: What time period is the prophecy aimed at? Now, I have long since explained that in order to understand a prophet you need to know where he was and how his prophecy would be understood by the people who heard it. Some of the prophecies are purely historical, others are set in the near future, and still others are way off—beyond the prophet’s horizon, and sometimes even our own.The prophet Zechariah is really an interesting case in point. He was writing in a clear, historical context and uses names of real people, dates, and places. His prophecies were delivered to real people who were affected by those prophecies. But every so often his prophecies, what shall I say, they fall off the table historically and suddenly you find they’ve joined up with the Book of Revelation—which is looking down to a time that is almost universally understood as the last days. In some cases it

I find myself constantly fascinated at the way the prophets in the Bible interlace with one another. You wouldn’t know this on a single read. You wouldn’t know it by reading a chapter here a chapter there or by reading somebody’s argument that has proof-texts drawn in from everywhere. You have to read the Bible—all of it—again and again and sooner or later the relationships begin to emerge. If you never read the Bible for yourself all the way through, get a copy of The One Year Bible. It’s easy to read and is laid out to help you complete the whole book in about 15 minutes a day, over one year. Make the Bible a part of your life and you will always be glad you did. All the bad stuff you heard about religion will fade into obscurity when you know what the Bible really says. And you won’t be suckered by some slick-talking preacher either, trust me.Every time I read back through the prophecy of Zechariah 1 see something there I have not seen before. Zechariah is complica

It seems odd, in a way, that Satan is not mention more than he is in the Old Testament—at least by name. There may be other references, but the word Satan appears only once in all the historical books of the Bible, once in the Psalms, 11 times mentioned in the book of Job (but he’s a major player there in the whole drama), and in all of the prophets the only prophet that ever refers to Satan is Zechariah.When you read Zechariah, it’s useful to know where you are in the history of the Old Testament. Israel is beginning to drift back into Judah and Jerusalem after their long exile in Babylon. According to Ezra, two men—Zerubbabel and Joshua the high priest—rebuilt the altar and laid the foundation of the temple and began to build. Their work was stopped by opposition—according to some, by persons who remained in Palestine during the exile and did not actually go captive. Why they stopped it isn’t exactly clear, but Darius granted permission for the Jews to continue rebu

The next-to-the-last book in the Old Testament—the next-to-the-last of the Minor Prophets—is a man named Zechariah.In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, came the word of the Lord unto Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo the prophet, saying, The Lord hath been sore displeased with your fathers. Therefore say thou unto them, Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Turn ye unto me, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.Zechariah 1:1–3Now, if you are just reading this to yourself you may not pick up on this. But if you were reading it aloud, with this repetition of sayeth the Lord of Hosts, you begin to understand that this is a poetic structure. So many of these prophecies, like the Psalms, are musical and may actually have been intended for performance. They are, in a way, the protest songs of their generation. A significant clue to this arises in an incident many years before this involving the prophet Elisha. We find it in 2 Kings 3.

Several years ago, I was driving through an area the weekend after a tragic mass shooting had occurred there. I listened on the radio to the people who lived nearby as they responded to being put in a goldfish bowl for the whole country to watch. I couldn’t help but reflect along with them about how unfair the whole thing was.Every special interest group had their spokesman on television telling us all why this tragedy had taken place. It was guns, of course. Someone noted that crime in the cities was going down while crime in rural areas was going up. He blamed the availability of guns for the problem. The poor fellow obviously has never lived in the rural south. I grew up in northern Arkansas, and I can tell you that guns are not a new arrival there. As a boy, I don’t think I knew a family—especially a rural family—that didn’t have guns and that didn’t teach their kids to hunt. We grew up playing war around the barns, pretending to shoot one another, and faking a fall out

Most readers of the Bible are a little vague about the time of the later prophets. They may know that Jerusalem fell and the temple was destroyed in 586 BC. More likely, though, they will have little idea of the timeline. They may know from Daniel and Jeremiah that there was to be a 70-year exile, and indeed the second temple was completed 70 years later. Meanwhile, Daniel and Ezekiel did their work in Babylon among the exiled Israelites.It may be less clear that those Jews who rebuilt the temple faced serious opposition from the Samaritans and others in the process, even bringing the process to a halt some five years after it was begun. So they were working on the temple five years and then the political opposition stopped it. Ten years later, the temple is still unfinished, still in ruins, and two prophets come on the scene.One is named Haggai, the other Zechariah. And, of course, I’ve said this before, I’ll say this again: If you see a prophet coming down the road toward your house, it’s

It’s no picnic being a prophet. Of all the jobs God hands down to men, the job of the prophet may be the toughest of the lot. And it may come as a surprise to learn that some of them (maybe even most of them) were poets and musicians. I guess there’s something about that which, maybe, suits prophecy better. I feel sorry for the many self-appointed prophets you see around nowadays who claim to have the word from the Lord. The reason I feel sorry for them is because they have taken a hand to speak for God when he didn’t tell them to do it. He may have them carry the burden and the pain of the office without any hope of a prophet’s reward.When you come to a real prophet in the pages of the Bible, and you read them as they are intended to be read, you can sometimes feel the pain that has come to this man with the message. For some reason, I was particularly touched last night by a prophet named Habakkuk. He’s different from the others. He’s certainly a poet, and I suspect he sa

The Old Testament book of Obadiah is the shortest of all the Minor Prophets and, strangely, it doesn’t really seem to say a lot to modern man. I can understand why people reading the Bible kind of brush by it. But as I have said before, trying to understand the biblical prophets solely in terms of events in the far-distant future or solely in terms of events in the far-distant past, it’s kind of pointless. I got the clue from something Isaiah said long ago. It was a challenge to idol worshipers. Here’s what he said:Present your case, says the Lord. Set forth your arguments, says Jacob’s King. Tell us, you idols, what is going to happen. [This is the real test, God says, if your idol are all that great tell us what is going to happen.] Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare to us the things to come, tell us what the future holds, so we may know that you are gods.Isaiah 41:21–23 NIVNow, it’s disappointing tha

There is a terrible irony in the prophet Zephaniah. Actually, he did his prophecy in the days of Josiah; and Josiah was one of the best of the kings of Judah but the prophecy that came down in his days were among the most dire ever handed down by any prophet. Here is how Zephaniah starts:The word of the Lord which came unto Zephaniah the son of Cushi, the son of Gedaliah, the son of Amariah, the son of Hizkiah, in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah. I will utterly consume all things from off the land, saith the Lord. I will consume man and beast; I will consume the fowls of the heaven, and the fishes of the sea, and the stumblingblocks with the wicked; and I will cut off man from off the land, saith the Lord.Zephaniah 1:1–3 KJVNow, what on earth can account for such terrible consequences? Well, to tell that story we have to go back in time. I’ve long held that you can’t understand the prophets unless you understand the history of the times in which they worked. When he came on

What do you do when God decides to take down his own work? What do you do when things you have believed in, trusted, committed yourself to, worked like the devil for, sacrificed everything for, are completely shattered—not by the Devil, but by God himself? No, I am not talking about this or that church splitting or falling apart. Nor am I dealing in speculation. I am dealing in known events that are well documented and well understood.Walk back with me to another place and time. It is late in the seventh century bc. The place is the equivalent of our courthouse steps today. It is the gate of the Temple—where cases in law were heard, where contracts were finalized and witnessed, where news was announced, and even sermons delivered.There is a very young man standing there to speak, and over his shoulder we can look up and see the most famous building in the world—the Temple of the Lord, built by Solomon, with no effort spared to glorify God. Solomon's Temple was legendary, not only in its beauty but in the even

When you read the Old Testament prophets, a pattern begins to emerge. And if you know what to look for it begins to clear the air somewhat in trying to understand what they’re about. As long as society is behaving itself—people are living good lives, they’re being moral, they don’t start trouble—you don’t even hear from the prophets. God never sends a prophet to tell you what a good boy you are. So, consequently, the first phase of the pattern of a prophet in the Bible is that things in society have gone terribly wrong.

Living as we do in an age of plenty, it’s hard for us to understand famine. What we do know about it is a long way off and kind of unreal. We see picture of mothers with little babies with their bellies distended and being told they’re starving to death. You would believe it looking at those little twiggy limbs. We might even sit down and write a check for famine relief. Modern science and technology has not wiped out famine, but it sure has shoved it out of the center of most people’s lives. We don’t deal with it; we don’t think about it; we don’t have any experience about how it feels to be in the middle of one and to be helpless.Not many of us know what it means to face starvation. And so, when you pick up an Old Testament prophet like Joel, it’s apt to be just words on paper to us. Now, I can assure you that it was more than just words to those who heard those words the first time Joel spoke them. For one thing, famine was a periodic and a well-known fact of life

Once upon a time there was a man named Jonah. I am sure you heard of him. He was the son of a man named Amittai and we know he was an active prophet during the reign of Jeroboam II, king of Israel. In those years Israel was riding high—at their height in prosperity and in military power. But so was Assyria in the east with its great city, Nineveh.

We don’t know a lot about Nahum. He describes himself as an Elkoshite but no one knows where Elkosh is to date him. The date of his prophecy can be placed between 700 to 600 BC. He mentions in the book two particular dates. One is the destruction of the Egyptian capital No-Amon (Thebes) in about 636 to 630 BC and he is speaking of the future destruction of Nineveh which occurs later, in 612 BC. So Nahum is prophesying somewhere after 650 BC and probably close to the time of the fall of Nineveh, when a coalition of Medes, Babylonians, and Scythians attacked and destroyed the Assyrian capital.So Nahum comes on the scene not that long before Assyria’s fall. Jerusalem is still traumatized by the invasion of the Assyrians and, no doubt, praying for revenge. Nahum titles his prophecy, The Burden of Nineveh. And here is something very important to know when you read this. It was probably a work of music—performance art if you will—and would resemble a recitatif from Mendelssohn’s Elijah

I’m sure you’ve heard the old axiom: Once bitten, twice shy. Or maybe you heard it another way: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I think that old saw may lie behind my skepticism of prophets. More than once, I have declared that I have never encountered anyone whom I considered a genuine prophet, in the biblical sense. I have no patience with pretenders to the prophet’s office, either, though I have encountered a few of these.One thing that made a major contribution to my skepticism was a book that appeared in 1967. The title was Famine 1975: America’s Decision, Who Will Survive? by William and Paul Paddock. The book had all the statistics, and was shocking in its conclusions and recommendations.What happened? Well, population growth slowed, and food production exploded in the years following. Development in disease resistant crops had been underway even as the Paddocks wrote their book. What is it about disasters that brings so many would-be prophets out of the

Reading the biblical prophets—with understanding—is no easy task, at best. But when you try to do it without knowledge of the history behind it becomes hopeless. For one thing, there are parts of prophesies that have to do with the distant future—and then an even more distant. Other parts deal with the prophet’s own day. How can you tell which is which? Well, the place to start is the past. If you’re going to understand what’s going to happen, you have to first go back and see what has happened before.There’s still another mistake you can make as you read the prophets. You can attempt a literal interpretation of the future. The prophets don’t do that. They use figurative language, poetic structure. and imagery. And their prophecies are not laid out in a linear form where you always know where you are and where you’re going. In a sense, you have to feel the prophets. You have to take them as a whole—as a work of art. You have to let them speak to us.

The words of the prophet Micah could just as easily be said and written today. Micah wrote in chapter 2:Lately my people have risen up like an enemy. You strip off the rich robe from those who pass by without a care, like men returning from battle. You drive the women of my people from their pleasant homes. You take away my blessing from their children forever. Get up, go away! For this is not your resting place, because it is defiled, it is ruined, beyond all remedy.Micah 2:8–10 NIVI mean you would think he was watching our television and reading our newspapers. Today, these things are being done by the government—primarily through the courts.You take away my blessing from my children forever. We have the estate tax which takes money away from a person who has worked all his life, saved, and builds up a good estate. They actually tax some of it away and his children don’t have all the benefits of their father’s labor and sacrifice. In living mental memory we’ve seen men returnin