Eschatalks 04: How Future Prophecy Speaks to Today

Why did God tell us what He is going to do in the future? Biblical prophecy wasn't given merely to satisfy our curiosity or provide material for theological debates. God revealed the future because knowing what is coming should change the way we live today.

In this final episode of Eschatalks, Zac considers the practical purpose of biblical prophecy. How should the coming judgment of the world affect our priorities? What should future prophecy do to our worship, our response to evil, our understanding of the world around us, and our desire to please Christ?

God told us the future for a reason. The question is whether we will allow what He has revealed about tomorrow to change the way we live today.

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Well, here we are. The last one. The last one that I've planned to record here for our time. If you like this stuff, this has been helpful. If you found this interesting, I have a few other things that I could do that we might find that we could do later on if you're interested. You just have to send a message. If I don't really get a whole lot of messages, then I'm probably just going to leave it at this and uh we'll call it good. Uh thank you so much for tuning in to this. What has been an appendix to the Theologic Podcast, uh, as it has been, as I mentioned, just uh all the way at the beginning of this appendix, about uh three episodes ago. Uh this has been what's been on my heart for over a year, and um so much of what I see around the world, around the American church, uh I think there's so much just uh lack of clarity on end times, I think is one of the big reasons uh behind why uh I think people are being maybe convinced of things they shouldn't be convinced of. Uh because uh um interpreting scripture matters so that you know what God says. And um I want to address that this point as we get to the end of this is the most important one. This is the one I've been most excited about because this is the one that I think most people are gonna find interesting. Um I might have said this already before, but I'll say it again. It seems to me that most people have in mind the value of what the Bible helps us do. Um, you know, we could kind of sometimes take or leave, just the general person. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but uh, the general Christian can sometimes just take or leave kind of what the Bible might mean by what it says. Um, but we really want to know how do we live generally? Uh what's the practical benefits of taking in the things that are in this passage of scripture and so on? And that's what I want to address here, and I really want to address more specifically why future prophecy and how future prophecy speaks to our immediate practice. And that's so important because that's one of the big things that most people bring up when they hear, well, revelation, right? Future? Come on, what kind of benefit is that to our practice? Well, I have about six or seven here uh that I have put together of different reasons behind why a future prophecy matters to our practice. And uh that's what I want to address. All about practical, all about application, and I hope what you'll find here will be very, very useful. So uh with that, before I get into the specifics of that application, I want to speak more broadly about applications of scripture in general, because I really think that as Christians, we tend to have sort of a um uh minuscule, we might say a limited view on the value of an application. Uh we tend to have maybe one category of application we're itching for, but other categories we tend to take or leave. Um what I want to do as we start is to expand what I hope you'll see uh in our thinking is and in our desires should be a valuable category or a couple of valuable categories of our application. Doesn't matter whether you're talking about end times passages or you're talking about anything in scripture, these categories of application should be valuable to us, uh, how scripture applies to us along these lines. Okay. So let me start again by broadening our expectations of what an application should be. Look for this when you hear your pastor preach. Uh, when he's giving applications, look for these categories because it speaks to so much more than what we are looking for. The uh the first one I want to point out, number one, application of scripture, no matter what passage of scripture, should inform our worldview, and that should matter to us. How we view the world does indeed matter. The wisdom you partake of, the way you see the world, uh whether it's right or wrong, if you partake, if you see it wrongly, uh very often it's going to lead you in a direction where you might be more easily deceived. Wisdom has a way of guarding your life, guarding your practice. And the word of God, no matter what. If you're talking about Proverbs or James, of course, those are wisdom books. But if you're talking about even the book of Revelation, it has a way of informing our worldview. We should be able to inform our worldview by any passage of scripture, and we should value that. It should be like uh looking through the glasses through which we see the world should be biblical glasses, and sometimes those glasses get smudges on them, and uh sometimes it's very, very well clouded. The goal of preaching by way of application should be to inform our worldview, to clean off our glasses a little bit so that we can get our minds and our eyes in the right direction. That's a valuable category of application. Number two, application of scripture should conform our worship. Now, if you're if you're listening, um, and if you're saying, well, I'm a good worshiper already, well, we can all become better worshipers. Um, I would encourage us to reckon with the psalms of the past. The psalms are there. They are the psaltery, the hymn book of the of the early church and the hymn book of the church in a lot of ways. And as you read through the Psalms, some of them are very, very different from the kinds of psalms or hymns that we sing. Um, they are there to conform us as worshipers to the living God, and there is a lot there. The book of Revelation does that very same thing. Future prophecy does that very same thing. In the book of Revelation, especially, you have various worship sections of Scripture, and I would put it this way, you have God being worshipped for the very things that the church in general is afraid to worship him for, or unwilling to worship him for, or don't spend enough time thinking about. In fact, in Revelation 16, you have an angel praising God for extending his wrath to the wicked. That has a way of informing our thinking. It should. Because we tend to praise him for salvation, rightly so. We tend to praise him for the cross, rightly so, absolutely. But do we praise him for all the character traits that the Word of God reveals concerning him? You might have heard a few years ago, that little line in Christ's alone, very popular and important hymn over these past uh couple decades, that statement, the wrath of God was satisfied, was disputed over in various church denominations, uh, that uh really, some of which would very much reject the wrath of God. Even just mentioning that, the wrath of God was satisfied. And the hymn writers said, No, you've got to keep that. You can't just change that and say the love of God was magnified. Why? Because the love of God was magnified by this very important statement concerning the wrath of God. God's wrath is satisfied in the work of Christ. And you have people who are surviving and living along this time that are giving him praise. But more importantly, you have the people that have entered into heaven. You have the angels that are praising him for his exercise of his wrath. It was their just due. In chapter 16, that angel praises God because uh God had repaid the world by turning their water to blood in that passage, and uh the angel says it was their just due because they decided to quote unquote drink the blood of the saints to kill as many believers as they possibly could. So there's reasons for us to give glory to God for his wrath, and we see that in that passage, and other character traits of God as well. Scripture conforms our worship, and if heaven can praise God for his wrath, so should we. And finally, this is the one that everybody really likes anyway, so I'm not going to spend too much time on. Everybody expects that an application should tell me uh how I should live currently. What is my specific, what can I do this week with this text? Now, uh, and I I those are good applications, of course. I would not knock those applications, those are important. I find that as if you're going to exposit through the word, you don't always have an application of scripture that is always that way. Um, that uh sometimes this is log this away for the future. Maybe you hear a sermon on sorrow and hardship, and uh you you have to conclude that, well, I'm not going through a hardship and sorrow now, but you know, I might need this a year from now when I lose somebody in my family or something. But even still, it's something you can apply. How can I how can I weather a crisis going through that I'm going through today? How could I improve in being a better husband, better father? You know, frankly, I think there are a lot of good people in churches that are doing well already as husbands and fathers. Uh, we should all be considerate of not only being husbands and fathers or mothers and and uh wives and things like that, but we should be thinking about, yeah, I'm doing that well now. Here's another area of my Christian life. How about my worship with God, right? How is my worldview? Am I really valuing and seeing the world through a Christian lens? Or am I seeing the world through the lens of uh this culture right now, or my job, or people that I know, right? The Bible has a way of informing all those three, right? Your worldview, your worship, as well as your current living. Dear brethren, let me exhort you to see those categories of application as valuable, not just one out of the three, because that's what the word of God is there for. The word of God is to shape you to be a Christian. And I'll say this: if you are being shaped to be a Christian, a better Christian, you will be better in these other areas that you desire to be better in. If you're a better worshiper, you'll be a better husband and father and mother and wife and things like that. In all the areas that you want to have something practical if you worship God with a deeper longing. And so I would put it this way, those are the different categories of application. Another way we should expand our thinking when it comes to application of Scripture is to whom the application is to be given. Number one, you have application to those who are unbelievers. If you're reading a prophetic portion of the book of Revelation, for example, to unbelievers, the call very notably and clearly is to repent and believe the gospel. Turn because of what is coming. Right now, God has extended salvation to those who are not believing currently so that they would believe. But the day is coming when, should you decide to harden your heart like the rest of the world will, as the Revelation describes, and then there is coming this against you. Repent if you would survive during that time, if you'd be brought to that time, who knows? Uh it may happen, it may not happen in your lifetime, but the point is to say, be motivated to turn. Not only that, well, you'll find, even as you're going through the book of Revelation, is that God gives the world multiple occasions to repent. He gives preachers going through, he has the two witnesses in Revelation 11, he has uh uh he has an angel going and proclaiming the gospel, he has the hundred and forty-four thousand preaching. It's not as if the world has no testimony of the coming kingdom of Christ, but oh time and time again you get to the end of chapter sixteen, and um what happens? Well, it says that as these judgments keep coming upon them, they kept hardening their heart, and they blasphemed the God of heaven. In other words, when God says, Come be saved, or this is gonna happen, turn your turn away from the thinking, turn away from the wickedness, they say no. And then you get to the end of chapter sixteen, and that's what brings the beginning of the battle of Armageddon, which is their final demise. To unbelievers, know these things, repent, turn, believe the gospel now. But to believers in your individual lives, why is it we should preach and teach these things? Why is it we should pass these things on? One important, and I'm gonna say this later on, application is that uh is that the people who would be living during that time, because the church not only has the book of Revelation but has explained the book of Revelation, people who knows, we got recordings and so on in our day, books that have been written in in uh church history past, right? These sorts of things people could get a hold of, understand, and believe as they see the world going in the direction that the book of Revelation is describing and be saved. So we have an evangelistic influence that we have no idea how far it will extend. I always put it this way. Did John Calvin know how far an ex an extent his message would be even 500 years later to those people who read the Institutes and understand it and are blessed by it? No, he probably didn't. I I would guess not. I mean, I don't know what he was thinking, but but it's amazing how well the message can uh extends through time. And so we think about this to believers, believers, uh, this speaks to your individual lives, as we'll see. We'll talk more on that in a bit. But it speaks directly to us along those lines as well. An application should be given to the broader church as a whole. Thirdly, how should we understand and correct faulty thinking about important topics of the church today? Even the book of Revelation stands to say those things, what dangers lurk for those who get those topics wrong, what blessings are afforded to those who get those topics right, what is taught in the church that revelation might help correct or clarify? And it has a lot to say that would correct and clarify. I would say this as well. We don't always think about every book of the Bible or any book of the Bible, even an end times book of the Bible standing to prevent heresy. But there are end times false teachings that are out there. In fact, 2 Timothy 2 describes two false teachers where they are preaching that the resurrection has already happened. That is an end times heresy. That is an end times false teaching that Paul says was shipwrecking the faith of some. Why is it important for us to get this right so that we don't go in that kind of direction? It's important for us to get the chronology of the end times right rather than saying it's happening now, rather than having what we call an overrealized eschatology, that is to say, that we're saying the end times things are happening now, like the blessings of the end times are happening now and so on, when they are not, we ought to make sure we put these in their proper time. And so that we don't miss that application. That's a big way that the end times can speak to the broader church as a whole, who have been doing that in some terrible ways in recent years. And finally, number four, even the book of Revelation, and no matter what book of the Bible, by the way, but the book of Revelation, even that book, what is taught in our culture, Revelation stands to correct. In what ways are we, through the culture of this world, being forced to conform our thinking and living to bogus standards? The Book of Revelation stands to correct that as well. One example of that is in chapter 17. Here you have the description of the final capital of the world's empire that is uh destroyed after its great wickedness. At the end of chapter 16, there's a great earthquake that takes place. At the end of chapter 17, when that earthquake takes place, the Antichrist's armies invade the city, loot and riot, and burn it to the ground. And uh this was to be the great, luxurious, powerful city of the entire world, and all these people in chapter 18 lament and they weep and they're heartbroken over the destruction, and here we are in a culture that is also very lavish, very rich. And I can stand to correct us. If this is what God's going to do in the end, to the final world system, what makes us think that the luxuries that we live in right now aren't gonna possibly be taken away along those lines, too? Dear ones, that speaks directly to an American culture that right now is not in the best shape economically. We don't know what God's going to do, and I'm not going to say I do, but this stands where is your heart when it comes to those kinds of things, the luxuries, the comforts that you have. If God were to take it away, would you be like the people in Revelation 18, weeping and mourning in a way that is well more self-centered? Those are the people to whom application should be given. And the future nature of this book matters to how we live. And I want to say this: the timing of the events of a book of the Bible, I said this in my first episode, the timing of the events of the book of the Bible is not relevant to applying that book. It is just as wrong to say that because the gospels, for example, take place in the past, and that therefore does not have anything to say to me in the present, at the prophetic book, that is the book of Revelation and others, when they describe the future has nothing to say to the present either. That is a category error. The past and present nature of a book speaks concerning the interpretation, not your application. The timing of events described in this book has no bearing on how applicable something is. And if this book wasn't talking about events that are yet future, we would miss a number of applications. And so here we get into the section of I've been using the first sixteen minutes to just go on my introductory rant, but we're going to be looking at the next section here. If this book, the book of Revelation, or any other prophetic book, take Isaiah, take Zechariah, this is how it speaks to our application, right? Number one, we have no reason to believe that the sins we participate in today will be dealt with any differently than it will be in the future. And stop for a moment and look at all the wrath of God that's taking place in Revelation chapter six, all the way through nineteen. This is describing the final end of the world system. It's describing and dealing with all the sins of humanity on an individual basis. And ultimately we get into the final judgment at the end of chapter twenty. That stands to speak to those things as well. And we might be tempted to think, well, we look back at the past and the old testament and we say, Well, God did the judgments back then against them, but God doesn't do judgments like that now. Well, He's going to do judgments like that in the future. Much misunderstanding happens when we wrongly separate the Bible's world from our own. But let us say that because the Nicolaitans in chapters two and three lived in such wanton, pleasure, and idolatry, jump forward to chapter 17 of the Book of Revelation, what happens to the idolatrous city? What happens to the sexually immoral city? It is destroyed. Do we think that the Holy Spirit is there describing something valuable to the people who were tempted toward that kind of idolatry and sin in that day? What does that say to our day with idolatry and sexual immorality? If it is so rampant in our culture as it is, we have great motivation to repent. And what happens in the end stands to motivate us. Because of the sins in the future, we note we cannot escape even the consequences of our sin in the present. Imagine, for example, a CEO from a company tempted to send lewd texts to one of his female colleagues, but someone gives him a glimpse into the future of what will happen if he does this. He loses his job, his wife divorces him, his children will be ashamed of him. Do we not think that that that kind of thing will help change his mind on his living today in the present? I better not do that. In the same way, a future glimpse into the world gives more motivation toward living rightly now. And by the way, that's exactly what the New Testament says. The New Testament prophecies and Old Testament prophecies are there for. Second Peter 3 11 says this. Another very important application, because it is future, is in Revelation 14, verse 4. And a hundred the 144,000 are described in that verse as sexually pure. It says this, quote, These are the ones who are not defiled with women, for they are virgins, end quote. A context of Revelation is a time where it is the darkest and most evil, vile culture and world that is going to be committing those things. Yet these people in the worst culture that would be, that you could probably imagine, right? We have no excuse in our day to say, well, I live in a culture that's so sexualized, I can't help but commit sexual sin myself. No, because that is future, because we know that that's future, that the content of what is taking place in that future day is described the way that it is. We have motivation to live holy in the present. Because those people will we can too. Could the everyday Christian listen, use more or less motivation in our current day to live sexually pure? You tell me. There's a lot of reasons why somebody should live sexually pure. You look at your current circumstances, you look at what could happen in the future, there's all sorts of reasons. Let's add another one. Look at what's gonna happen in the end towards sexual morality. If we add more reasons, listen, if we add more reasons behind why we do what we do, we would be much more prone to live rightly like we should. Habits are formed when you have multiple reasons behind why you do what you do. That very same thing that you do. And as Christians, we need all the help we can get. And the end time stands to do that. Stands to give us more motivation. You have motivation based on what Christ has done on the cross, of course. That's your soteriology, that's your doctrine of salvation. It can also be from your eschatology, your doctrine of end times. Judgment on sin will not change the future. It is the same in our present day as it has been in the past with the Old Testament prophets. Another way that it speaks to our practice, it calls us to persevere because of the hope that is laid. For us. John says it expressly in 1 John 3, he who has this hope in him, what's that? That's the second coming, purifies himself as he is pure. And I would echo in a different way what I brought out earlier about motivations for living holy. Does the church need more hope or less to motivate them toward holiness? I mean, we have a lot already from other portions of Scripture. We could use more, couldn't we? Does it need a vague and muddied hope or could she benefit from some clarity? The details of the book of Revelation show forth saints in Christ who must endure the darkest of this world's persecution that will ramp up to a high degree toward the end of this age? Can we learn something from them? Something that could challenge our faith, challenge our consistency and our walk today as we live in a time that's not nearly as dark? Let me ask you, have you ever learned from some martyrs in the past and seen valuable their testimony? I know I have. We can also learn from the martyrs in the future. Are we strong in the church today and therefore don't require such an example? Are we fearful that the influence of godliness in our current day will somehow be snuffed out? Isn't that encouraging? We should not feel like that. Godliness might not be in America, but there will be godliness toward the end, strong, powerful, God honoring, persecuted, beleaguered believers. And it is because the gospel continues to spread that we will have some influence along those lines to some people who will be during that day. If we are faithful to pass on the faith to the next generation, defend the faith from those who would corrupt it, proclaim the faith so that it spreads to those in our day, we might just be looked back at from the very saints of this future day as someone who influenced them for salvation. Think about how many men in church history have thought about those things. Lavish rewards that they'll have. Why? Because they had and they had no idea. They were just faithful to say or to do or to write and proclaim. But God is the one who's taking and using their influence to influence countless people for generations. To think faithful pastors today speak to the saints of tomorrow. What could be more applicable than that? What value is lost when we fail to see revelation as future? Well, the same value that's lost when we fail to see it as clear. Number three, evaluate the world today according to the destiny tomorrow. That's what this does. It helps you evaluate the world today according to its destiny tomorrow. One example to consider is Scripture's consistent testimony at the creation we understand today will look radically different tomorrow. Back in June, I went on a hiking trip with my sons, and um we went to Devil's Tower out in Wyoming. It is a it is a massive, unique looking mountain, and it's beautiful. The day is coming, according to Scripture. Revelation 16, for example, Isaiah 24, Zechariah 14. The day is coming when the topography of the earth will radically shift and change. It's not just the book of Revelation that describes that, it's also the Old Testament prophets. I would say this, dear ones, enjoy the creation as it is today, the mountains, the hills, give glory to God for its beauty today because it won't look like that tomorrow. And I would remind you that the past worldwide judgments of the flood had that very same effect. It came upon all those who dwelt on the earth. And with great splitting open of the waters of the deep, the topography of the earth completely changed, mountains and valleys formed that weren't there before. Noah landed on Mount Ararat in Turkey, and no doubt had to relearn the world as he had known previously. Sin was the reason why the pre-flood world, beautiful, glorious as it was, was changed, and sin is the reason why this present world will one day be destroyed and changed. And by the way, Revelation tells us that it will happen another time after the thousand years of Christ's return, when the Lord makes the new heavens and the new earth. Now, is it any less interesting or helpful to believe the general reality that God is going to do this than it is to know the specifics of how he's going to do it as expressed throughout the book of Revelation? Is it not more valuable to see the details of a plan God has given ages ago to perhaps fill in the gaps and give you even greater confidence in exactly what he says he's going to accomplish? Is that less helpful for you as a Christian, or is that more helpful for you as a Christian? Why would we embrace something we generally know and choose not what we can specifically know? The idea is Jesus is coming back. I I that's there's this cop out kind of argument. I'm not a premillennial, postmillennial, a millennial, I'm a pan millennial. Everything is going to pan out in the end. Just a cop out, okay? I know you're trying to be funny, right? But if you're if you're a pastor or whatever, you should know. Because it does inform how you live today. God has not merely promised that Christ will return. He has graciously told us how history moves toward that return. And to neglect those details is to neglect further light himself that God himself chose to reveal. Number four, conformity to God's person and standards in our worship. The end times, the book of Revelation, as future, teaches us how it is to conform our standards to worship. As I already mentioned that earlier, what it does presently. When God is praised in the book of Revelation by believers or angels, he is surprisingly not praised only for the work of salvation, but also his judgment on the earth, as I said. And the worship is weighty, it's meaningful, it's meaning driven, it's responsive to what he's doing on the earth in wrath. Dear Christian, if you wince at the wrath of God now, if you are apologetic to unbelievers because God's wrath is expressed, if you're ashamed of the God who rightly administers justice at his timing and that perfectly calculated, and that's what Revelation describes, you are missing a key component in something that motivates your worship of Him. The wrath of God is something that should be first understood. And that means we don't confuse it with the wrath of man, which is foolish and self-centered, flying off the handle, mindlessly self-destructive. That's the wrath of man. By contrast, the wrath of God, it's patient, it's long suffering. It is after the perfect amount of information has been not only revealed, but also constantly, constantly warned about and then after a long period of time, then it's expressed. We accept God's justice and wrath because it is always rightly done, rightly calculated, mindfully administered, and done for the protection of the people he loves. It is for this reason that the wrath of God is something that must be understood, accepted, and praised. This is something that the angels in heaven have no problem doing. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, and he has specifically detailed, outlined, expressed, and delivered to us the way in which he delivers and will deliver that vengeance to a hateful, maniacal, and deeply satanic future world. Saints will praise him for it, and you ought to do the same. Let me put it this way. Because this is future, we have every reason to believe that God is not finished in correcting evil on this earth. We cannot say that expressions of derivine wrath in this world become finished at the cross, and now people just do their own thing and God can stay out of it. God is still directly involved in correcting things even in this day, and he's worthy of praise because of it. Number five. Understanding the book of Revelation as future gives us satisfaction in the removal of evil. Satisfaction in the removal of evil. If this book was all past or vague pastoral stories, what would we have to say about the removal of evil described in worldwide judgments in this book? Don't Christians get plagued by the evils of this world? Well, God has specifically outlined how he is going to deal with it. Christians, do we not have righteous indignation, though we are called to let God bring vengeance, not us? Well, instead of wandering into the void with no clarity, look at what God has said he's going to do. Would not your heart be satisfied after you've had evil done to you to know that God has its correction in mind? If he's going to take the entirety of the world's deep evil in the future and end it all, surely he can deal with the evil that has been done against his own even today. Is the world more evil in our day than it used to be? Do Christians have more or less evil done to them in America than even forty years ago? Let's not forget this. Paul wrote to a suffering people in Second Thessalonians to comfort them that God will deal with the wicked, and this is what he said, quote, These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power when he comes to be glorified in his saints on that day, and to be marvelled at among all those who have believed, for our testimony to you was believed. If Paul can comfort Christians along those lines, the pastor today can comfort the believers, and believers can be comforted along those lines. Understanding revelation and and prophecy in general and scripture is future gives us food to please our Christ when we understand and believe and live up to it. In Luke Chapter 24, verse 25, the disciples on the road to Emmaus were disappointed. Jesus had died. And they said to Jesus, who they did not recognize, we were hoping that it was he who was going to redeem Israel. They then recounted the empty tomb. And after hearing this, Jesus says to them, O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken. Is Jesus commending them? No, he's rebuking them. It was Christ's rebuke. And he assumes, he presumes rightly, obviously, that the prophets had spoken clearly enough to make belief a genuine responsibility for them. If the Old Testament prophets were not understandable, if they were obscure or confusing, Jesus might not have rebuked them about not understanding the prophets. Now he was kind and decided to explain in that text from the law, the prophets, and the Psalms, that is to say, the entirety of the Old Testament, all that was supposed to take place at Jesus' crucifixion. But dear Christian and dear pastor, would you rather be the one being taught because you were slow to believe, or would you rather be the one who warms the heart of God's people, setting their motives ablaze for the glory of their Lord, like Jesus did by explaining the Old Testament prophets? Christ graciously explained the scriptures to them, but his explanation came after his rebuke. Dear Christian, dear pastor, would you rather hear from your Lord, O foolish one, slow of heart to believe what the prophets have spoken, or well done? Would you rather be the one who understands, whose understanding must be corrected, or the one whose understanding of God's plan strengthens the faith of others? Here's the point. If the events of Jesus' first coming were so very valuable and knowable that Jesus would rebuke disciples for not understanding them from the Old Testament, why do you think we would have an excuse to misbelieve the things written in the New Testament as well as the Old? I told my congregation a few weeks ago and as I've been going through the Book of Revelation, that understanding future prophecy shapes and molds your expectations of God's plan, so that when you see him face to face, someday you'll be able to tell him, Lord, I believed what you said you were going to do before I ever saw it fulfilled. I have learned to love your plan, to trust your wisdom, and to worship you because of it. Let me ask you, does the church need more reasons to praise her Lord or less? If our Lord thought his prophetic word worthy of our belief, shouldn't we think it worthy of our study? Let me conclude by saying this. I want to ask you this question. Shouldn't future prophecy matter to us because the one who gave it is our God and we love him? If a good man, separated from his wife by the will of God, having done what was right, perhaps suffers in prison, right? And he wrote letters to his beloved wife, and in those letters he told her of his great love for her, reminding her of all that he has done and what he's going to do for her, how much he loves her, and all the plans he has for when he gets back when he gets out of prison, and finally the day comes, they are reunited. And on that day she then brings the letters he sent to her out of a box and then says to him, You know, I really enjoyed the parts where you told me that you love me, but the parts about uh all the plans you had when you were going to be back, I just didn't see them as applicable to my life, so I skipped over them. What do you suppose the man will think? What do you suppose we should think of such a love of a wife to her husband? What's the deepest reason behind why God reveals the future? Because he loves the people to whom he has given his word and he wants them to know it. And what should be more motivating than that? Thanks for tuning in. It's been great to talk with you all. It's been great to chat and bring all these things before you. If you like this, please let me know. Send a message. Um, and I have some more things I could talk about. I've been thinking about talking about maybe this generation and Matthew, um, or I could do a whole episode working through Zechariah 12 through 14. Uh, whatever you'd like to do on that. Um thank you so much for tuning in to this appendix to these eschatocs that I've been bringing out.