afterWORD Malachi 3 Depth Perception

LifeTruths family,
Sorry we didn't get to do the full survey of the minor prophets in class. There were so many amazing things we discovered this quarter, it would have been great to have recapped at least some of them.  And so many critical ties to the Old and New Testaments in these little messages, oracles, burdens.

One thing I thought would be valuable as a transition from studying the end of the Old Testament to the study of the end of the New Testament is to link you to some very interesting diagrams I mentioned in class by Clarence Larkin. He was an American Baptist preacher who studied, taught, and wrote a lot of interesting detailed descriptions, tying together various prophetic images and times tables through books like Isaiah, Daniel, Malachi, and into Revelation. 

The "mountain peaks" I so terribly drew Sunday is listed on the left side of this page:

http://clarencelarkincharts.com/

Worth a look anyway. It's interesting when you read some of the prophecy of the OT and there is little to no distinction of two comings of Christ, it's just one event, the great and terrible day of the Lord.  And in pockets where they saw something of the first coming (Ps 22, Is 53), the suffering servant, to look upon the One whom they pierced, the receiver of the full brunt of the wrath of God, they couldn't get a full grip on its meaning let alone the depth of its eternal power.  I can't, and it happened.  How could they?  Blessed are they that do not see and yet believe...

You could say they had a depth perception problem.  Of course, we have the same thing looking back. Even Pastor Ray said in his sermon on Sunday that "as far as the east is from the west...if you are traveling east, you never go west."  I wonder if that is at all tainted by the fact that we had Pythagoras, Ptolemy, and Eratosthenes and many others to convince us the world was round, but the Psalmist in writing that line knew only a flat, finite world.  Is it possible to view the NT without having to first acclimate ourselves to the knowledge that the prophets of the OT had when they received their visions?  Maybe perhaps time is not just mountain peaks but itself has horizons like a sphere, and we can only see so far in one direction, whether forward or backward, without losing perspective.

If you click in the middle of that page and see the chart on the Revelation, he tries to line up the various images of prophecy and the full spectrum of human history.  Mind boggling.

One last thing I'll mention as a close of the Minor Prophets (named that by the length of the books, not by the value or extent of their vision), and that is the tie between prophecy, the gospel, and the church.  Malachi heard clearly from the Lord that our righteousness is imputed, about being spared from wrath and remembered as His "own son who works for him" (Mal 3:16-18).  He spoke of the need of an intercessor and revealing His own arm of salvation. He talked of a book of remembrance of those who feared the Lord.  He spoke of giving His people spiritual discernment of those who serve and those who don't, what is of God and what is not of God. These things captured in a mere 3 verses in Malachi will take all of the letters of John, Jude, and Revelation to unpack.

Very exciting! My email signature from Jonathan Edwards captures it in one line what just took me a whole blog to say:
"Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected."