Born to Win Podcast - with Ronald L. Dart

I suspect the months leading up to the year 2000 saw more prophecies than any comparable period since, well, the last time they moved into a new millennium. But they weren’t really prophecies; they were just predictions. What’s the difference, you may ask? Well, predictions are not expected to be perfect—they are made on scientific data, like weather predictions or stock market predictions—and they can be wrong. Prophecy (at least, by real prophets) is made under divine inspiration—they speak on behalf of God. They are supposed to be infallible.

Now, how are you supposed to tell if a prophet is telling you the truth or not? How can you tell if he’s a real prophet or just a false prophet, or a predictor, astrologer, or whatever else it may be? Well, if you’re talking about God, then the place to go is the Bible, obviously. There are two interesting statements in the Bible (in the Law of God, specifically) dealing with how you answer this question I just asked: How do you know if a prophet is telling the truth or not? With all the modern-day prophecies we are hearing, these could be useful bits of information. The first one is found in the 18^th chapter of Deuteronomy. Here, Moses speaking on behalf of God warns:

But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.

We were eating in a Chinese restaurant some time ago, and I noticed something funny about my fortune cookie. On the back of the fortune (which, I think, said I was going to have a good year) it had a series of numbers. It was only the second or third time I saw those numbers there that I realized what they were. There were six, two-digit numbers—lottery numbers. How exciting! Here, within my fortune cookie, are the winning numbers for this week’s lottery. And I’ll bet a lot of people actually go out and buy a lottery ticket based on those numbers, given to them by a cookie. There were eight people at my table that night, and all eight of us had different numbers. All 80 people in the restaurant probably had different numbers. I can’t think of anything, really, that better illustrates the stupidity of fortune-telling.

You know, somewhere, someday, by the sheer weight of probability, someone is going to get a winning set of numbers out of a fortune cookie—and they will forever believe that they won because the fortune cookie told them what was going to be. They’ll tell their friends. It may never occur to them that the cookies were wrong five million times and right once. The people who make fortune cookies know that they are nothing but entertainment. We’ll get a laugh out them and pass them around to fit a fortune with a person—but they usually fit everyone in some way. All around the country, you’ll find astrology columns in the newspapers. Try to pin down the truth from any astrologist and they’ll tell you it is all for entertainment, as well. None of you really take it seriously, do you?

The hunger to know the future is so strong that people make real-life decisions based on the star charts and readings of astrologers, and based upon the predictions of psychics and others. Do you remember when Orange County, California—one of the richest counties in America—went bankrupt? You may or may not have heard what happened: the man who was investing their money was consulting a mail-order astrologist and a psychic for interest rate predictions—losing $1.6 billion of public money. He was not alone in wanting to know the future; we all want to know it sometimes. Last year, Americans spent over $300 million calling psychic hotlines. But there is one thing that is very important for you to know about the future. And if you know it, it will save you a lot of money, heartache, and frustration—and probably from making some bad mistakes based upon other people’s advice.

Is God a time traveler? How does God know the future? I know the question sounds a little silly. After all, God is God and he knows everything, right? But hold on a second; let’s develop that question a little bit. It may not be as silly as it sounds. In fact, this question is one of the most important questions you can ask about the future. Is God a time traveler? Does he run forward in time and see all the things that are there and then return and tell us mortals what there are? Or does he merely see the future on something like a cosmic television set. Someone once said that prophecy is history written in advance. Is that true? Well, let me see if I can explain the problem connected with it: if God is a time traveler, or if he merely sees the future, or if prophecy is history written in advance, that means that the future already exists; the timeline is all written out. Otherwise, how could it possible be known?

So the future is all there and written out. Every one of your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren are already known. Isn’t that interesting? It sounds good, doesn’t it? However, along with that is the fact that one of your grandchildren will get drunk one night, load five of his friends into his car, and then drive head-on into an 18-wheeler…well, that’s all written down, too. And there’s not a thing in the world that you can do to stop it—if the future already exists. The fact that the Nazis would create death camps in Eastern Europe and then gas millions of Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and mental defectives was all written in advance—and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

When you think about it this way, it’s really a small wonder that some people become angry and disillusioned with God. They want to know why God wrote the future that way when he could have written it another way. It’s just another way of saying, Why did God let it happen? And if prophecy is history written in advance, then what’s the point of all this? Don’t you think it gets a little boring for God knowing exactly what’s going to happen? And since it is already written out, well, there’s nothing he can do about it—nothing we can do about it. And why should we worry about the decisions we make? If we make a bad one, it wasn’t our fault—it was written in advance. The whole idea of divine forgiveness becomes a mockery: it was written that we should sin, and if it wasn’t our fault why would we need forgiveness? But what if it is not that way? What if the future does not exist? What if the future is being written, one day at a time, by the choices that human beings make?

Unless you have just recently arrived from outer space, you have probably heard of Nostradamus. The odds are you don’t know very much about him; you may have heard that he made a lot of predictions or prophecies and that some of them have come true. And the presumption is that those that haven’t come true—well, those must be somewhere out in the future and have yet to take place. Let me see if I can get you into the picture on Nostradamus.

He was born in France, of Jewish parents, in 1503. In his lifetime, the Inquisition was active and very hard on Jews. The approach to trying to convert the Jews in those days was fairly simple: you brought them in, showed them the instruments of torture, threatened to burn them at the stakes, and gave them the choice to accept Catholicism or die. It’s a very effective technique of evangelism; the Muslims used it throughout the known world, in their day. And so, Nostradamus’ Jewish parents converted to Catholicism when he was nine. He became a highly intelligent, well-educated man and a physician. In the process, he also became an astrologer and a clairvoyant. He’s been called a prophet by some writers, but that’s an inexcusable bit of ignorance on their part. There is a wide gulf between a prophet on the one hand and an astrologer or clairvoyant on the other. Nostradamus will serve us well as an example of the latter two.

His work exists in collections of ten sets, each containing 100 four-line poems. His predictions are written in highly symbolic language. They are also in archaic French, with a number of other old languages mixed in—so they are very difficult to translate and just as difficult to interpret. With all the peculiar metaphors, figures of speech, and even unknown terms that are in them, the interpreters have a lot of latitude in expounding one of Nostradamus’ quatrains. For example, the following could have any number of possible meanings:

The sloping park, great calamity,
Through Hesperia and Lombardy;
The fire in the ship, plague and captivity,
Mercury in Sagittarius, Saturn fading.

So, through sometimes rather creative interpretation, some of Nostradamus’ predictions have come to pass. So is he a prophet? What are we to make of astrologers, clairvoyants, and the like? Well, not much. First, let’s consider Dart’s First Law of Prediction…

Years ago, in watching the three memorial services for Ronald Reagan, and all the formality that went with them, I found myself strangely touched. There were several moments when I had a lump in my throat. I thought it was altogether fitting and right to have such a memorial for one of the great presidents of the greatest and most powerful nations the world has ever seen.

People will argue about Reagan’s place in history. Frankly, I think it is folly to try to rank all the presidents. Washington and Lincoln had to face utterly unique situations, and so they were utterly unique presidents. But what I’m talking about in my message today is not about the presidents. It is about the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful nation in history. I know, in their own days, Greece and Rome were great and powerful. And the British Empire at its peak was indeed a great empire on which the sun never set. These were nations that created empires.

There is no American Empire, however, because Americans have never wanted one. In our history, Americans have mainly wanted to be left alone. Left alone to build families and businesses. Left alone to live and enjoy life. Fortunately (or unfortunately) history has not left us alone. And, as I watched the greatest nation bury one of her greatest presidents, I was overwhelmed with an awareness of how great and powerful this nation has become. And some questions grew in my mind: To what do we owe our greatness as a people? Are there any obligations that go with that greatness, that power?

We have two sources of information about God. First, we have his revelation of himself in the Bible. Second, we have God’s revelation of himself in the creation. From those two witnesses we have a glimpse into the entirety of God’s plan—from now all the way back to the beginning.

Let’s think the unthinkable for a moment. The first words of the Gospel of John tell us that in the beginning, the Word already was. It did not come into existence in the beginning, it just simply was. What I want us to think about today, though, is the time before the beginning. (I warned you that I wanted us to think the unthinkable.)

So, is there anything from these two witnesses that we can use to better understand what happened before the beginning?

In any age, and under all conditions, men and women of God have serious responsibilities. In sickness or in health, in poverty or in wealth, we have a job to do. Perhaps you don’t think of yourself that way—as a man of God. But if you take his name upon you—if you are a Christian or a Jew—you are his man, his woman, and you are where you are for his purpose. Jesus, in his first recorded sermon, told his listeners:

You are the salt of the earth: but if the salt has lost its savor, how shall it be salted? it is thereafter good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a lamp, and put it under a bushel, but on a lamp stand; and it gives light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

I don’t know if you’ve thought about it, but this is a serious responsibility he has laid upon us. We’re not just here for ourselves. We’re not just going through this exercise for ourselves. We’re going through it for him and for the light we shine toward other people. I would think that our age is far from the most challenging that men of God have ever faced, but it may be more pivotal than we might think. I think we are standing on the cusp of history—a knife edge between two worlds. What, then, must we do?

Sometimes, when I am studying the Bible, I find myself faced with a mystery. What on earth was God saying or doing on this occasion and what does it mean? Someone once complained about this wondering why God hid things from us. Why, he wanted to know, doesn’t God come right out and tell us plainly so we don’t have to guess? I have two things to say about that:

One: How plain does God have to be? What part of Thou shalt not steal do we not understand? The truth is, the Ten Commandments are a plain, unambiguous statement of how we should live our lives. Two: When you have found your own way to an answer to a difficult question, you are far more likely to remember it. And I could add a third: God loves a mystery.

We should understand that well enough. There are people who take great pleasure in designing crossword puzzles that drive us crazy. But there may be a more serious side to this. There is a rather difficult passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans that reveals something unexpected. Here, Paul is trying to sort his way through a vexing problem. Let’s take a look beginning in Romans, the 11^th chapter.

Like every American I have read and heard the Gettysburg Address more times than I can recall. I had the singular misfortune not to be required to memorize it when I was in school, because U.S. News was right when they featured a brand new book about the Gettysburg Address and called it the greatest speech in American history. And, in one of the truly great ironies of speeches, it was only two 272 words. Seven sentences—the greatest speech in American history. The book U.S. News was featuring is titled The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech that Nobody Knows, by Gabor Boritt. The title is another irony. How can the Gettysburg Address be the Lincoln speech that nobody knows?

Sometime ago I watched the movie Gettysburg and was riveted by the story, the battle, how it was fought and I was sickened at the tragic loss of life. Why, I wondered, do these march in straight lines across an open field with no cover, under Union cannon fire. It made no sense. And then when they came within rifle range, the Union soldiers were cutting them down like wheat and they just kept on coming until finally a few of them got through. I didn’t learn until I watched the extras that came with the DVD I was watching, that I was witnessing an effect that is now understood by military planners: tactics and strategy (that is the way you go about war and fighting the battles) always lag behind technology. The South was following a tried-and-true tactic for advancing against musket fire. You know, a musket was a smooth-bored gun. The bullets came out of there, not spinning, but just static in terms of that and it buffeted as it went out into the air. The result of this was that you could hardly have any idea of where the thing was going to strike when it finally did strike. Well, maybe a little bit, but not much. And, of course, it would not have had the impact. But the Union soldiers were using guns with rifled barrels. That meant it gave the ball a spin coming out of the barrel which extended both the range, the accuracy, and the impact of the ball when it got where it was going. So, the South was marching out with musket tactics against rifles.

But I still had very little feeling for what really happened on that day. I could see it in a movie; it was sickening in the movie. But Boritt begins his book, not with the battle, but with the aftermath in the town of Gettysburg.