Chapter 5—Theologians Comment on Predictions

The conditional character of Bible predictions may be explained on the altogether reasonable ground that God, though sovereign, is not arbitrary. He does not deal with people as if they were lifeless objects on a chessboard to be moved about exclusively at His will. He mysteriously holds in check, as it were, His own plans oftentimes, because He will not override the free will of anyone. That is what gives to divine predictions their conditional quality, and that is what caused God to speak of “my breach of promise,” or “my altering of my purpose.”1856V 3.9

Well-known Bible commentators have written of this:1856V 3.10

“God’s promises are as conditional as his threats. It would be neither just nor merciful to us for God to continue his favours unabated after we had departed from him. The removal of them is a wholesome warning to us. It springs naturally from the personal relation of God to his people, one which depends on reciprocal sympathy.”—The Pulpit Commentary, Notes (Homiletics) on Jeremiah 18:7-10.

“The majority of the [Old Testament] prophecies, however, were of the conditional type. They contain a suppressed ‘unless’ or ‘if you keep my commandments’ type of conditionality.... It is this provisional nature to the threat or promise delivered by the prophet that explains such a famous case as that of the prophet Jonah.”—Hard Sayings of the Bible, Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Peter H. Davids, F. F. Bruce, Manfred T. Brauch (1996).