Then fear came upon all, and they glorified God, saying, “A great
prophet has risen up among us”; and, “God has visited His people.”
Luke 7:16
When Jesus and His disciples came to the town of Nain, a funeral procession passed by. The dead man was the only son of a poor widow and the Lord had compassion on her. He touched the open coffin and said, “Young man, I say to you, arise” (Luke 7:12-14). Christ then presented him alive and well to his mother.
Impressive? I should say so. A miracle of this magnitude hadn’t occurred in Israel for almost 900 years, going back to the time that Elisha raised another young man from the dead. The crowd concluded that Jesus of Nazareth was no ordinary rabbi; He was a great prophet.
Clearly Christ was a prophet, because He said the boy would come back to life and it happened exactly as He said it would. The greatness of the miracle put him up with two of the greatest prophets of Israel, but the Savior was much more than that.
Old Testament prophets saw visions of things in the future that they neither recognized nor understood. Often, short-term prophecies were superimposed on other similar prophecies that would be hundreds of years in the future. It’s common to find descriptions of Christ’s first and second comings in the same passage. Chronological order seems to be lacking with most of the major prophets, so seeing things in light of the New Testament sorts out the context and makes it understandable.
The Lord Jesus’ prophecies are not like that. He who knows the beginning from the end has given clear and understandable explanations of heaven and hell that were incomplete in Old Testament scripture. Christ’s predictions of the end times are unmistakably fulfilling themselves in the present. The last book of the Bible calls itself the Revelation of Jesus Christ. Although symbols and types are used as in all prophecy, there is a clarity and order of progression unlike anything in the Old Testament.
Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah were excellent men of God, but only Christ Jesus was the really Great Prophet.
February 16
