Greater Than Angels

Transcript of the Segment on on Prophetic Time and Divine Context: David in the Spirit, or by means of the Holy Spirit, calls him Lord, saying, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand.” David, in other words, was under the influence of the Holy Spirit, like a man carried along by the tide of the Holy Spirit. And he was speaking by the Spirit, God’s words in that setting. Now this has led people, of course, in their understanding of prophetic speech in the Old Testament, to recognize a distinction between the prophetic setting of a text and, if you will, the divine context of a text. So the prophetic setting of a text is David is speaking or writing at a particular point in history. He was alive and well, and he was in a lyrical mood and the Holy Spirit had overtaken him and he is speaking words by the Spirit at a particular day. He could have told you it was before dinner on such and such a day of such and such a month in such and such a year. It happened to David at a particular point of time, about a thousand years before Christ. But the events that are captured in David’s words could very well take place in God’s time, which is no time, outside of time, in another realm altogether. And the early Christians, including the writer to the Hebrew, including the Lord Jesus in his use of Psalm 110, noted that throughout the Old Testament, particularly in the book of Psalms, but elsewhere as well, there are a series of conversations embedded, in which the Holy Spirit inspires a prophet to, as it were, take different personas in a conversation, a dramatic conversation, that reflects something of the inner life of the Godhead itself.