II Peter 1:16-21
“Prophecy”
August 16, 2020 – Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
In 1888, ninety miles of the Oregon coast was dark, between a lighthouse at Cape Arago by Coos Bay and one at Yaquina Head in Newport. There was no through road, but boats moved up and down between towns along the ocean. So the lighthouse board commissioned two new lighthouses to fill in the gap, one at the Umpqua River and one near Florence at a rocky point named after a Spanish explorer, Heceta, Heceta Head.
It’s hard to imagine now as you turn off the highway and down into a huge parking area below the lighthouse and then walk up a paved trail to it, but Heceta Head back then was remote and inaccessible. And there were no trees. A forest fire a few years before had swept through and left the whole area bare. When construction began in 1892, if weather and tide permitted, materials were brought in by ship or hauled up by wagon from Florence. When the light was finally lit in 1894, the lighthouse keeper had to walk down the beach for twenty miles from Newport to get to his new post.[1]
There is more to the Heceta Head Lighthouse story, but suffice it to say that its light only failed once in 1961. The keeper and two Coast Guard assistants lit an oil lamp and turned the lens by hand all night to keep it lit. The next time it stopped turning was in June 2000, when the lens was removed for restoration. The light went back on in March of 2001. Repair was again needed in 2009. But for more than 125 years, that lighthouse has punched a hole through the dark and fog, guiding those out on the water and more recently delighting tourists who go to see it.
As Peter wrote to an early Christian community, he worried about their situation in a dark cultural landscape. He was especially concerned about them being led astray by false teachers pointing them in the wrong direction, away from the true good news of Jesus. If you skip down to chapter 2, you find a long rant against those teachers, their dangerous teachings, and godless motivations. So Peter directs his readers’ eyes to the true light and calls them to pay attention to it. “As to a lamp shining in a dark place,” he says in verse 19.
The first part of verse 19 tells us he is talking about “the prophetic message.” He means the Old Testament, Hebrew prophets who foretold what he started with in verse 16, “we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Verses 16 to 18 are Peter’s testimony that he saw for himself that prophetic message about Jesus confirmed on the Mount of Transfiguration when “we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty,” and “we ourselves heard the voice come down from heaven,” the voice of God saying about Jesus, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.”
Citing that eyewitness testimony, Peter wanted to guard against another sort of darkness. He began with “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths.” He meant to distinguish what the prophets said about the coming of Jesus from the stories of other gods which circulated in the ancient world. They too talked about a “coming,” a parousia of this god or that. Romans even talked about the “coming,” the parousia of their emperors. Beginning with Augustus Caesar, emperors were held to be gods. “Coming” in Latin was adventus, from which we get “Advent.” When the emperor Nero visited Greece in Peter’s time, the cities of Corinth and Patras minted “advent coins.” The coming of an emperor was felt to be the beginning of new era, the start of a new set of dates on the calendar.
Some Romans and Greeks agreed with Peter’s assessment of all those stories about the coming of various gods or the divinity of the emperor. Stoic philosophers too thought they were all just “cleverly devised myths,” stories made up to entertain or to keep people in line beneath the emperor. So Peter is not only distinguishing Jesus from all of that, he is agreeing with how at least one group of ancient intellectuals assessed the religion of their time. But Peter did not want the truth about Jesus to get swept away with all those other silly stories about gods who squabbled and fought with each other. That’s why he is so careful to say, “This is not that, not just stories we or someone else made up. We know it because we saw the evidence of its fulfillment with our own eyes.”
When Peter talks here in verse 16 about the Christian message regarding the “coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” we might think he means what we call the “first coming” of Jesus, His incarnation. Peter’s recollection of Jesus’ Transfiguration would be a memory of how Jesus’ divinity and glory was confirmed for them. That is how the Transfiguration is often understood. The humanity that covered Jesus’ godhood was peeled back for a little while and His glory shone out.
But if you read the whole letter you can see that Peter is not so much oriented toward the past as toward the future. Turn over to chapter 3 and it’s clear that Peter is talking about the second coming of Jesus, the one that hasn’t happened yet. That coming in glory, when the kingdom of God is completed, is what is confirmed by the Transfiguration. The three apostles with Jesus on the mountain were given a glimpse of how it’s going to be when Jesus returns.
So when Peter turns to prophecy in the second part of our text today, saying “So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed,” he is talking about what the Old Testament prophets said about the coming glory of the Messiah and the final establishment of God’s kingdom. He is telling his readers that they can truly look forward to the coming of Jesus by looking back, not just to the Transfiguration, but to the ancient prophets of the Hebrew Bible. That is exactly what we want to do as we read those same prophets together over the next four months. We want to hear the prophetic message, see how it is confirmed in Jesus, and hear how it offers us the very things we’ve sought earlier this summer: faith, hope, and love. We particularly seek the light of hope in our own dark times.
That’s why I started out in the middle, talking about a lighthouse as a picture of what Peter means when he tells we will “do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” As he makes plain in the last couple verses of the text, he means for us to look back to the words of the prophets in order to fully look forward to that time when it is no longer dark in our world, but light, the time when the morning star, who Revelation 22:16 tells us is Jesus, rises not only in the sky but in our hearts.
Peter goes on in verse 20 to give us another reason to pay attention to the prophets. He begins, “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation.” This is the only place the word translated “interpretation” occurs in the New Testament. It literally means a “setting free” and typically involves giving an explanation of something. The big question in interpreting this verse is whether when Peter says “a matter of one’s own interpretation” he means the prophets’ interpretation of what they have seen and heard from God or our own interpretation of the prophets.
Either way, Peter is telling us that the message of Scripture, of the prophets, is not a matter of individuals thinking and acting on their own, by themselves. The next and last verse of the text tells us that the Holy Spirit inspired men and women who spoke the words set down in the Scriptures as the Word of God. While they often used their own language, imagination, and creativity with words, the Spirit guided them to speak the truth about God and human beings. They did not just spin out new ideas or stories with no foundation.
And if Peter is talking about how Christians read the prophets of the Bible, then he is also correct that it is not merely a matter of private interpretation. That is one of the reasons the Immerse reading plan we are following emphasizes getting together and talking with each other about what we have read. The Holy Spirit fills and inspires and guides God’s people as the Body of Christ, as a community in interaction with one another. Individual Bible reading and interpretation is good, but it is incomplete. We have to add to our private understanding what the Spirit teaches us through each other.
So we will read and talk about the written prophets of the Bible, confident that what we are reading is inspired by the Holy Spirit and, as Peter says at the end of verse 21, “from God.” At the same time, we will read and talk together trusting that the Holy Spirit will guide our understanding, our own interpretation of what we read. And, just as Peter looked back to the prophets in order to look forward to the coming of Jesus, we will look back at the prophets in faith that they will speak to us of Christ and His coming kingdom.
That is why I encourage you not to get discouraged as you read these books of Scripture. They can be daunting. Like lighthouses shining in dark places, they were called by God to illumine dark times. But that means their message will itself seem dark as they confront sin and warn of judgment. This week as you dig into Amos and hear him dish out God’s wrath on the nations around Israel and on Israel itself, you may wonder where the good news is in all of it. But I urge you to look for the light the prophet is shining. It could be a light that reveals the dangers of sin, like a lighthouse can steer ships away from rocks. Or it could be a light that guides God’s people into a better way of living, a course aimed in the direction of life and hope in Him.
Go back to the prophets and then bring forward what they say to our own time. Listen to Hosea at the end of this week speak for God about how Israel had been to Him like an unfaithful wife, going after idols and other gods like an adulterer going after other lovers. Then bring it forward to think about how you and I are often unfaithful to God, going after things like money or security or entertainment instead of seeking our Lord.
Go back to Amos and read how he in God’s name rails against those who are rich and lazy while ignoring and exploiting the poor in Israel. Then bring it forward and think about how our own wealth and possessions may be built on a system which exploits cheap labor both in our own country and in other parts of the world. Or how our own pleasant neighborhoods may benefit from the systematic exclusion of low-income housing in a way which may be racist or which adds to the growing number of people who have no housing.
Yes, go back and let the light which the prophets shine on the sins of ancient Israel and their neighbors around them shine a light on our own sins. But don’t despair. As Peter suggests, the light of the prophets also shows the way forward, a way of hope. Hosea tells the people to seek the Lord and live, to “Seek good and not evil, that you may live, and so the Lord, the God hosts, will be with you… Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gates; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious.”
Our Old Testament reading today from the great prophet Isaiah said the same thing, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance will be revealed.’” And Isaiah’s prophecy specifically included foreigners and those with disabilities in that promise of salvation and deliverance.
The Lord will be gracious. That is what the first coming and the transfigured glory of Jesus Christ confirmed. The message of the prophets is illuminating and lasting. God will not let evil have the last word. The day is coming, the morning star will rise. The prophecy of Amos finishes with a promise of the restoration of Israel. Peter’s own letter here finishes near the end of chapter 3 in verse 13 with the promise of the restoration of everything, a “new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.”
Our psalm today, Psalm 67, gave us that same vision of God’s graciousness and the glorious day toward which He is bringing this world. The psalmist prays, “May God be gracious to us and bless us,” then he sings,
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you.
Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,
for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth.
The light of the prophets aims toward a world where everyone praises the one true God through His Son Jesus and where every person is judged with equity and the nations are all guided by the Lord.
In a different way, Jesus in our Gospel lesson showed us that same message of the prophets working out very personally. A foreign woman who came to Him for help was not turned away like a dog, but included in His grace. He affirmed her faith and healed her daughter. Jesus did what the prophets said God would do, healing and including everyone. God is still doing those same sorts of things through people who follow Jesus. God is proclaiming grace and salvation and justice for all people. He causes it to happen when His people do what He and the prophets have been saying down through the ages.
Jesus made it clearer for us. The light of Jesus is glorious, but we really do not want to do without the prophets. We need to understand that God has had the same plan for human beings all along. Jesus did not come to say that God had changed His mind, but that God will, in fact, keep on graciously inviting us to praise Him and to do justice, to love Him and to love our neighbors, as I just preached last month. Jesus came to give us a way forward on the same course the prophets lighted for us long before.
Jesus has come, but we don’t want to forget the light of the prophets. Peter told the first Christians to pay attention to them. He says the same to you and me. They are old and crusty and hard to understand, but they are not obsolete. Those lighthouses on the coast don’t feel as necessary as they did before satellites and GPS and radio, but they are still good markers for any vessel out on the water in the dark. It doesn’t hurt those on the ocean at all to go back to those lights to confirm what instruments might say.
In the Covenant church twenty years ago or so, there started a practice of what was called a “Sankofa” journey. “Sankofa” is word in the native language of Ghana. It means something like “bring it back” or better, “going backward in order to go forward.” Legend had it that there was a sankofa bird, which flew forward with its head turned backward, carrying a precious egg. It may be seem strange, but looking back is sometimes the way to make progress. If you have ever rowed a boat, you know that you face backward and fix your eyes toward a point on shore in order to row in straight line away from that point.
Our Covenant Sankofa journeys are three-day bus trips to sites filled with racial history in our country. Pairs of partners, one white and one black, ride together to historic churches of the Civil Rights movement in Alabama, to the place where slave auctions were held in Montgomery, to a walk over the bridge at Selma, to a meal at a diner in Memphis which was once one of the only places to eat where Blacks could enter through the front door. The whole aim is to go back in history in order to move forward into the future with more understanding and with true justice.
Those Sankofa journeys are much like the journey we take when we go back to the prophets. Yes, the idolatry of the time of the prophets is over and so is the institution of slavery in the United States. But we may not be able to see either the idols of our own time or current injustice against Black people without looking back. Yes, Jesus has come and fulfilled many of the promises of the prophets, but without going back to the prophets we may fail to see how the promise of His coming carries us forward into new and better ways of living in our world now.
So I invite you to go with me on a backwards journey, to look for light we may have forgotten about, buried in Hosea or Haggai, in Jeremiah or Joel. That light will point us forward, always forward, until, as Paul said in I Corinthians 13, prophecy begins to cease as the night of this world turns to day, and the Morning Star rises above it all. Let’s look back for a while now, so that our eyes are ready to see Jesus in all His glory when He comes.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Historical information gleaned from the Wikipedia article on Heceta Head, and the “Heceta Head” entry on lighthousefriends.com.