I
thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden
these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to
babes; yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will
YOUR QUESTION (No. 27)
When
Jacob blessed his twelve sons in Genesis 49, he prophesied what would
happen to them. Does this mean that these things were predestined?
My Answer
There is one thing on which we can
depend throughout
the OT -- nothing should be taken too seriously unless Jesus has
commented
on it or otherwise validated it. The Old Testament, including
Genesis, is not the wholly inerrrant and inspired Word of God as
commonly taught and
believed. Here is the text of Jacob's blessing of Judah:
[8] Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the neck of
your enemies; your father's sons shall bow down
before you. [9] Judah is a lion's whelp; from the prey, my son, you have gone
up. He stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as a lioness; who dares rouse him
up? [10] The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between
his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs; and to him shall be the obedience of
the peoples.
An old man gathered his sons and made known to them his last will and
testament,
blessing them in the process. Nothing was written, and the event
and the
words spoken were transmitted by word of mouth for centuries before
they
were recorded in Genesis. To some degree, the prophecies of the
old man
during this event, when finally recorded, were surely written back into
the record from subsequent
history. We can also take as historical the bold outline of Hebrew
history
depicted in Genesis 49, though not all the details, and certainly we
can take the
record of the transmission of the covenant through the centuries as
validated
by Jesus (until he comes to whom it belongs),
not only by his words but also by his deeds and self identification.
Prophecy, including fulfilled prophecy, does not mean the event was
or is predestined.
A prophecy is a statement of the Father's intention. Its
fulfillment means that the Father has pursued it in the world by one
means then another until it has come
to pass. The prophecies that were fulfilled through David were
not fulfilled
as first desired by the Father -- by a continuous line of succession
until the Messiah appeared.We have noticed that, when such prophecies were announced, they were
often made conditional, as this one about Solomon:
[4]
And as for you, if you will
walk before me, as David your father
walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according
to all
that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my ordinances, [5]
then I will establish your royal throne over Israel for ever, as I
promised David your father, saying, `There shall not fail you a man
upon the throne of Israel.' [6] But
if you turn aside from
following me, you or your children, and do not keep my
commandments and
my statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods
and worship them, [7] then I will cut off Israel from the
land which I have given them; and the house which I have consecrated
for my name I will cast out of my sight; and Israel will become a
proverb and a byword among all peoples. [8] And this house
will become a heap of ruins; everyone passing by it will be astonished,
and will hiss; and they will say, `Why has the LORD done thus to this
land and to this house?' [9] Then they will say, `Because
they forsook the LORD their God who brought their fathers out of the
land of Egypt, and laid hold on other gods, and worshiped them and
served them; therefore the LORD has brought all this evil upon them."
The prophecies were nevertheless fulfilled in another
way, without the continuous line of secession. The messianic prophecies
could
have been fulfilled through the tribe of Judah -- according to the
blessing of Jacob in Genesis 49 -- as a continuous succession
from David. But due to faithlessness, the royal line played out
with Zedekiah. The tribe of Judah was still in line to be
blessed, except that
the Jews rejected Jesus. Then it fell to the single individual,
Jesus of Nazareth, and
to a very small remnant -- the little flock of Jewish disciples -- to
be the
fulfillment of the prophecy. The Father predestined nothing; he
just continued
working with men by one means or another to the end that the
unconditional
strand of the covenant found a fulfillment. It must be very frustrating
--
to God -- to have to repeatedly make adjustments in His plan to account
for the vacillations of men! But it must be so. Otherwise,
humans could not be held accountable for anything due to lack of
freedom,
nor could they qualify for rewards when they do not freely choose to
do the Father's will.
Jesus was not an exception for, as a man, he was subject to
temptation. Had he yielded to the temptations to save his life
that pressed him most heavily in Gethsemane, the messianic prophecies
would not have been fulfilled in and by him. In that case the
Father, in his love for the world, would have continued to pursue his
intention by other means and through other individuals. Far from being
predestined, we find the details of the outworking of true prophecy to
be always conditioned by unknown human responses to the divine
initiative.
Now let us assume that in blessing his sons in Genesis 49, Jacob was
truly inspired by God to issue prophecy as there stated. We have
seen, with respect to Judah, that the prophetic blessing was finally
fulfilled in Jesus (to whom it belongs),
but not in the direct and uninterrupted way desired by God -- that is,
through the continuous line of descent from David. There was no
predestination and the free will of humans was preserved.