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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 …