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By its nature, prophecy can be difficult to interpret. It uses many symbols, and these can be taken in more than one way.The key to understanding biblical prophecy is to determine itsliteralsense—that is, what it meant in itsoriginalcontext, what the prophet was trying to communicate to his audience for their benefit. Normally Old Testament prophecies have their primary fulfillment within the generation to which they were given or within a few generations. However, they can have additional fulfi …

Did you ever wonder why twelve apostles and only twelve? Good rule of thumb for future reference? Numbers in the Bible (especially the number twelve) are almost never a coincidence.Let's start at the very beginning.“And when day was come, he called unto him his disciples; and he chose twelve of them (whom also he named apostles): Simon, whom he [later] surnamed Peter, and Andrew his brother, James and John [the sons of Zebedee], Philip and Bartholomew [Bar Tolomais, that is, our own Nathanael], …

The final book of the Bible, Revelation, was written by St. John while he was in exile on the island of Patmos (Rev. 1:9). It contains information about our future, but perhaps not as much as many people suppose. The book was addressed to a group of seven churches in the province of Asia Minor (in modern Turkey) for a specific purpose: “to show to [Christ’s] servants what must soon take place” (Rev. 1:1). It thus encourages Christians to hold fast to their faith in the face of persecution and th …

God did not reveal his plan of the ages all at once. As the centuries rolled on, he sent prophets to his people Israel, and they learned more about the shape of his plan. This is a concept that scholars refer to as progressive revelation, because the revelation happened in stages. Jesus also taught his disciples progressively, during the years he spent with them. Very quickly, they realized he was the Messiah (John 1:41), but they did not initially understand that his kingdom was “not of this wo …

When a true prophet says something about the future, at some point, it must be fulfilled. This raises the question of how the concept of fulfillment works. In cases of non-symbolic prophecy, it is often easy to identify the fulfillment, as when Jesus said he would rise from the dead. The concept of fulfillment is not always so straightforward, however. One reason is that—as we noted in Answer 5—a symbol can have more than one meaning and thus be fulfilled in more than one way. In Revelation, the …