February 11, 2023: 1 Peter 1:10 - The Prophets Prophesied of the Grace

“Of this salvation the prophets have inquired and searched carefully, who prophesied of the grace that would come to you…” - 1 Peter 1:10

The Bible has many prophecies of Jesus, of both His first coming and His second coming. All the prophecies of His first coming have come true, and all of the prophecies of His second coming will also come true. Jesus’ first coming was to offer each and every one of us the way to be redeemed from all of our sins, through belief in Him as the Christ, Messiah, Emmanuel - God with us. His name - JESUS - means Savior. At His second coming, He will come to judge a wicked and evil world.

The prophets were chosen by God to write down what God had told them. As Peter wrote in 2 Peter 1:20-21, “…knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.” In some cases the prophets did not understand what they were being told at the time they received the prophecy from God. One example is Daniel, who received a prophecy of the end time, as written in Daniel 12. This prophecy speaks of the 7-year tribulation period, the time of Jacob’s trouble, the time of the end before Jesus would come again and which He spoke about in Matthew 24:21. Daniel wanted to understand the prophecies that he had been told to write about. He wrote, “Although I heard, I did not understand. Then I said, ‘My lord, what shall be the end of these things?’ And he said [I believe this is the angel Gabriel], ‘Go your way, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.’” (Daniel 12:8-9) As with this prophecy, it may take hundreds of years for the events of a prophecy to take place and be fulfilled. This is what happened with the prophecy of our Savior Jesus Christ when He left heaven and came to earth to offer us redemption from our sins through His precious blood, once and for all. The events were foretold hundreds of years before they happened, but they all happened.

The Bible gives strict guidelines for identifying a true prophet from a false prophet, including in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy. This is critical because Satan will use whomever he can to send false prophets to deceive people. It happened in the days before Jesus, it happened during His life here on earth, and it is happening today, and I would say especially in our churches. Moses told us what should be done to false prophets:

“But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in My name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die. And if you say in your heart, ‘How shall we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?’ - when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.” (Deuteronomy 18:20-22)

The Bible calls out false prophets, including in Lamentations 2:14, when Jeremiah wrote about Jerusalem, God’s holy city, that had been reduced to rubble when it was invaded by Babylon. God had allowed this to happen because of Judah’s idolatry, worship of false gods, and deep and repeated sin against Him. Instead of listening to the one true God, they had chosen to listen to false prophets. Oh, how are we seeing this today in our own country, the USA?

“Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions; they have not uncovered your iniquity, to bring back your captives but have envisioned for you false prophecies and delusions.”

Another example of where the Lord God called out the false prophets is written by the prophet Ezekiel:

“And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, ‘Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel who prophesy, and say to those who prophesy out of their own heart, ‘Hear the word of the LORD!’ ‘ Thus says the Lord GOD: ‘Woe to the foolish prophets, who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing!’” - Ezekiel 13:1-3

Jesus warned His disciples, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:15-16)

The Bible establishes that there are true prophets who have been called by God and false prophets who speak things of their own mind and who have not been called by God in order to deceive people.

Long before Jesus was born, the prophets foretold of Him. Isaiah was one such prophet. In my Bible’s summary of the book of Isaiah it says, "Isaiah is like a miniature Bible. The first 39 chapters (like the 39 books of the Old Testament) are filled with judgment upon immoral and idolatrous men. Judah has sinned; the surrounding nations have sinned; the whole earth has sinned. Judgment must come, for God cannot allow such blatant sin to go unpunished forever. But the final 27 chapters (like the 27 books of the New Testament) declare a message of hope. The Messiah is coming as a Savior and Sovereign to bear a cross and to wear a crown.”

In chapter 53, Isaiah describes this Jesus, who would be despised and would be a Man of sorrows and yet would take on all our sins, healing those who believe from the shame of our sins. This beautiful prophecy is one of many in the Bible that foretells of the grace of God that provided the way out of sin for all who would believe. Because of its richness in the prophetic words that Isaiah wrote, through our sovereign God, I chose to include the entire chapter below and the last few verses of chapter 52 that describe Jesus as God’s sin-bearing Servant. I encourage you to access this link to see all the prophecies about Jesus not only in the Scriptures below but in the entire book of Isaiah that were later fulfilled: https://www.preceptaustin.org/messianic-prophecies-in-isaiah

“Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high [lifted up]. Just as many were astonished at you, so His visage [appearance] was marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men; so shall He sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; for what had not been told them they shall see, and what they had not heard they shall consider.” (Isaiah 52:13-15)

“Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded [pierced through] for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes [blows that cut in] we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity [sin] of us all.

“He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not HIs mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions [sins] of My people He was stricken. And they made His grave with the wicked - but with the rich at His death, because He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth.

“Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand. He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities [sins]. Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong, because He poured out His soul unto death, and He was numbered with the transgressors, and He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

Chapter 53 of Isaiah so accurately describes the reason why God sent His only begotten Son, Jesus the Christ, to this earth to suffer at the hands of those He was sent to save - all of us: To take on all of our sins as He was scourged and beaten beyond recognition, lifted up on on a cross and crucified, pierced with a spear, and be resurrected to life three days later, when He in fact saw His seed, those who believed in Him as Messiah, just as He will see us one day when we are resurrected to new life with Him in glory. He was the intercession for our transgressions. He is our grace. He did what the Jewish Law could not do - He took away all of our our sins - once and for all.

What do we have to do to receive His grace, His free gift of salvation that we do not deserve but which He made available to us? We have to acknowledge that we are a sinner and that only He can redeem us of our sins, just as the thief who was crucified at the same time as Jesus was. Two criminals were crucified when Jesus was crucified. One of them mocked Jesus, but the other recognized his own sin, saying to the criminal who mocked Jesus:

“‘Do you not even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this Man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said to Jesus, ‘Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.’” (Luke 23:40-43)

There was no time for the thief on the cross to get baptized. There was no time for him to do any good works. The only thing he could do was to acknowledge his own sin, that Jesus had done nothing wrong, that Jesus would go to Paradise when He died, and to ask Jesus to remember him when He was in Paradise. By doing so, he was given the free gift of salvation, and Jesus told him that on that day, he would be with Him in Paradise.

The only time it is too late to accept Jesus’ free gift of salvation from all your sins is when you die. For the thief on the cross, He was saved. However, for the other criminal, whose heart was hard and prideful and had no room for Jesus in it, he died and took all of his sins with him, forever preventing him from being allowed into the eternal kingdom of God, Paradise. Instead, he went to hell, forever separated from Jesus, in a place of eternal torment, the lake of fire.

Will you accept the gift of grace that has come to you, of which the prophets inquired and searched carefully, or like the criminal on the cross, will you and your hardened heart take all your sins with you to hell, for eternity?