Broad meadows

Imagine for a moment being allowed to sit on a couch with God at the dawn of creation and Him allowing you a view through time. He does this to point out the many challenges His word will have to go through to remain consistent with His will. First, God confuses the languages at the Tower of Babel. Then, it won’t be until the time of Moses that it will be written down at all. The people writing will be separated by centuries. It would seem an insurmountable problem.

This series is meant to show that the Bible is God’s word and is meant to honor His omniscience. What I will be doing is not that dissimilar from any word study that a pastor or Bible teacher might do in preparing a sermon or class. One thing I have learned is that you don’t have to necessarily define a symbol to get useful information from it by simply following it through the Bible. As I mentioned in the previous post, you’re letting the Bible tell you what a symbol means instead of trying to define prior to study. This brings me to a second point, where the Bible does define a symbol, such as in Jesus’ parables, you can plug those into prior Biblical stories to get spiritual/prophetic meaning.

I want to give you three examples of some of the guidelines and techniques that I have found that produce sometimes very specific prophecy. From that point, however I will be following a set of symbols through scripture and into the book of Revelation. I call this technique a horizontal reading of scripture with the only tie in being the same symbols being present in each story spread over the entire Bible. Rather than giving an exhaustive list of the guidelines and techniques that I will use, I’ll introduce each one as they are used.

Example 1: Genesis 14:18-20.

“Then Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High, and he blessed Abram, saying,
“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Creator of heaven and earth.
And praise be to God Most High,
who delivered your enemies into your hand.”
Then Abram gave him a tenth of everything.”

When looking at this particular passage, there doesn’t seem to be much information to go on. So what can we know from this encounter? One, he’s the king of Salem. Two, he greets Abram with bread and wine (our symbols). Three, he’s a priest of God Most High. Four, Abram gives him a tenth of the plunder, which is the divine prerogative.

Melchizedek is only mentioned three times in the Bible, in this passage, in Psalm 110:4 and in Hebrews. It’s clear from these passages that they are messianic in nature. But what can we learn just from this passage?

The same conclusion can be drawn simply from this passage. The tithe is paid, indicating divinity. He is a priest of God Most High. He is a bringer of the bread and wine. The commentaries that I have read seem to shy away from the connection of the bread and wine to the Lord’s Supper, but let me put it to you this way: From the time of Abram to the time of Christ, no world religion other than Christianity has as it’s sole ceremonial meal the bread and the wine and that anyone who might come afterward could only be seen as a usurper of those symbols. What this means is that Jesus and only Jesus can be the promised messiah.

As you can see, we didn’t have to define the symbol to get specific prophetic meaning, we simply needed to attach (merging) them to the type and the type to its ultimate fulfillment, Jesus Christ. Merging is an important concept that I will be more fully explained in the third example.