Seeing Through the
Prophet's Eye
A review of how to approach interpreting certain prophecies.
To understand certain parts of prophecy such as found in Ezekiel and Revelation, we must recognize what type of experience the prophets went through to know how to interpret the recorded prophecy. Their situation would have been very similar to the following hypothetical illustration.
Suppose that Genghis Khan is teleported, ala Star Trek, into the future where he is taken on a tour of Coney Island. Why anyone would want to do this is beside the point. But let us assume that it is so. Upon the completion of this tour, he is sent back in time to his own era. What would he say to describe his experience to his friends? If he wrote down a description of the roller coaster, what words would he use? He would likely say something of this sort:
"I descended into the world of the spirits. And I saw what looked like a winding serpent which
had swallowed his tail. Upon the back of the serpent were many souls, and they screamed in terror as they plummeted into the depths. After this I was taken back to the land of my birth. I was perplexed as to the meaning of this vision and pondered it many days."Then the theologians take over. After hundreds of years analyzing this as to its spiritual meaning, the theologians authoritatively proclaim that this vision of Genghis Khan was not to be taken literally. According to their interpretation, it was a visionary experience from a dream-state which must be viewed as a type or symbolic illustration of the afterlife. It shows how the evil are to be ensnared by the god of darkness, and punished for all eternity in the depths of the forgotten. Scholars debate endlessly the occultist nature of the "symbolic" serpent, and many connect it to the astral dragon of Chinese calendar tradition. In contrast, literalists believe that Genghis Khan saw the great death god which took the form of a snake, and that the spirits of the dead actually rode on its back down into the depths of hell. Agnostic skeptics dismiss the entire vision as merely a bad case of indigestion.
The truth of this situation is that this experience by Genghis Khan is neither a vision of symbolism as taught by most, nor to be taken strictly at its face value as proposed by literalists. Poor old Genghis Khan was simply doing his best to describe things of the future which he could not fully understand, and could not relate adequately with words of his day.
To understand certain parts of prophecy such as is found in Ezekiel and Revelation, we must recognize that the prophets were describing as best they could their mind-blowing experiences. Theirs were factual eyewitness accounts of real future events written in terms of the perspective of relatively primitive people. We must learn to see through the prophet's eye to understand more accurately what it was they saw.