Most of us
think of prophecy as something coming in the future. So in our Bibles, Old Testament prophecies are
translated in the future tense. What
else could they be? But the writers of
the Hebrew Bible had a different view of prophecy than we do. When they wrote prophecy, they used a verb
form most often used for past events.*
Why would they do that? It seems that the most important thing about
prophecy for them was not that it was coming in the future, as we think of it,
but that it was something completed, fixed and finished in the mind of God—God
said it, and that finishes it—even though the fulfillment might be far in the
future.
