¹⁹ “From now on I am telling you before it comes to pass, so that when it does occur, you may believe that I am He.

Prophecy at its most basic is simply telling ahead of time what will happen. With mere humans, some may have remarkable intuition, a sense of what will happen based on insights about present activities and behaviors. Others are adept at so-called fortune-telling, by casting future predictions in such general or ambiguous terms that the predictions could fit almost anyone’s future experience, or at least be manipulated to fit what does happen. Still others go back and rewrite their predictions or claim to have made the predictions that fit the circumstances. All of these are not the substance of genuine prophecy as talked about in Scripture.

In our passage in the Upper Room, Jesus tells His disciples ahead of time that one of them will betray Him. First of all, this is no mere mortal speaking, but the incarnate Son of God, the one who, though presently living in time, is none-the-less timeless. He who said, “Before Abraham was, I am” observes all of time in the present tense—so the future is not unknown to Him. So what He has to say is not simply premonition. He is not just surmising from a remarkable ability to read a person’s face and know what he is thinking. This is not just a matter of the Master who knows well the tendencies of His disciples. This is the God who created their minds, but who also created time. Mind boggling as it may be, God created all things at every single point in time, past, present and future, from a position outside of time. He is not subject to the sequence of before and after as though He were traveling through time. To be sure, the incarnation teaches us that the infinite, timeless God intersected in time and space in becoming human. But, He did not cease to be God. So when Jesus tells His disciples that something will happen, you can count on it happening.

Secondly, His “prediction” is specific, and therefore could have been verified. Although we have no biblical evidence that the disciples wrestled with the statement intellectually, they certainly wrestled with it emotionally, such an unthinkable thing that one of them should actually betray their Master.

But Jesus didn’t tell them to satisfy an intellectual curiosity about the verifiability of prophecy. Rather, He told them so that they would believe that “I am He.” That they would come to know Him as He really is, the God-man, identified with the Creator God of the universe.

Lord, when I see all the things that have happened just like You said they would, I am increasingly driven in faith to understand You better.