Part Four, The Blueprint of the Future: A Prophet Walks the Site with the Drawing in Hand
Part Four, The Blueprint of the Future, is the seventeen books from Isaiah to Malachi — where the Five-Part Structure of the Bible draws in advance what has not yet arrived. Most of the seventeen, though, diagnose rather than forecast: where the building departs from the drawing, and what comes if it stays that way.
Some drawings show what is not there yet
Partway through a build, something has to be drawn that does not exist.
A picture of the finished thing. No walls up, no windows hung, and in that picture it is already complete. People look at it and understand what all this work is heading toward.
That picture is needed less by the people building than by the people waiting. When all you see each day is dirt and steel, you forget what it is becoming.
In the Five-Part Structure of the Bible, Part Four, The Blueprint of the Future, is the seventeen books from Isaiah to Malachi. Two hundred and fifty chapters — the longest of the five parts after the New Testament.
And a common misunderstanding sits right here.
Prophecy sounds like getting the future right. So people open these books looking for what happens when. Read all seventeen, though, and the material about what is coming is smaller than expected.
Most of it is about right now.
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A prophet is the inspector
On every site there is someone walking around with the drawing in hand.
That person lays no block and ties no steel. The job is one thing: comparing the drawing to what has been built. And where the two part company, saying so. This does not match the drawing.
That person is usually the least popular on site. Everyone else has their hands full, and here is someone building nothing and pointing at things.
One of them came round in my drafting days too. We would spend days getting something up, he would say one sentence about a dimension being wrong, and it came apart again. I disliked him at the time. I also saw what became of the places nobody made us take apart.
That is a prophet’s position.
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos — none of them arrived carrying new revelation. What they held was the drawing already given back in Part One. They compared that drawing to what stood there, and named where it had gone off.
Which is why the same lines keep returning in these books. Look after the orphan and the widow. Do not rig the scales. Do not bend a judgment. None of that is new. Every one of them is already a clause in the books of Moses.
The material about the future comes after that. Having named what is off, they say what arrives if it stays off. That is prophecy — not a knack for the future, but the conclusion drawn by someone who knows both the drawing and the site.
Least popular is not a figure of speech here. Jeremiah watched the scroll he had dictated cut into strips and burned in the king’s brazier, and was later thrown into a muddy cistern. That is why this stretch of the Five-Part Structure of the Bible runs so long. Naming one place where the building had gone off cost a man his whole life.
And behind almost every warning in these books there is restoration. Very few of them end on demolition. A picture of rebuilding follows the tearing down, because an inspector did not come to pull the building apart. He came to get it built to the drawing.
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Why people get lost in the Prophets
Part One stops readers at Leviticus, Part Two at the names of kings, Part Three at the few psalms they already know. Part Four traps them differently.
Here, people get lost.
Two reasons.
The first is the order. The seventeen prophetic books are not arranged by time. They are arranged by length: the five long ones first, the twelve short ones after. Read straight through and the era swings back and forth — before the fall, then after it, then long before it again.
One thing worth saying plainly: the Minor Prophets are not minor in importance. They are minor in length.
The second is the background. Almost everything in these books is spoken to someone. If you do not know that someone’s situation, the same sentence could be comfort or warning and you cannot tell which. This is sharpest for anyone who opens the Prophets without having come through the history books of Part Two.
One example. I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, is a verse a great many people can recite (Jeremiah 29:11). Where it was said is far less known. It was said to people already carried off to Babylon, and it comes immediately after the words that seventy years must pass before they return. It did not mean release was near. It follows an instruction to build houses in that land, plant gardens, and have children there. Knowing the setting does not make the verse lighter. It makes it heavier.
So one change of method helps in this section. Before opening a book, find out where it was spoken from. Before the nation fell, while it was falling, or after. Knowing only which of the three changes how every sentence sounds.
Seen through the Five-Part Structure of the Bible, these seventeen books are not a scattered collection of sermons. They are one building’s rendering, drawn in pieces by many hands across many eras.
Do the 66 books in front of you look like one building?
Seen that way, the twelve Minor Prophets are not an appendix. They are twelve sheets holding the corners of a large drawing.
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There was a person in the drawing
Renderings have people in them. Draw the building alone and nobody can judge its size.
At the centre of the prophetic rendering there is a person too.
Isaiah 53. The chapter draws one man: no beauty or majesty to attract anyone, despised and rejected, and pierced — the chapter says — not for anything of his own but for what belonged to others.
Who that chapter points to has been asked for a very long time. And Scripture answers it once, in the open.
An Ethiopian official, heading home from Jerusalem, was reading this passage in his chariot. Philip came alongside, and the man asked: tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about? Beginning with that very passage, Philip told him the good news about Jesus (Acts 8:34–35).
The question was not new that day. For seven hundred years after Isaiah wrote the chapter, people had asked the same thing. A person was drawn into the plan and no one reading it knew who he was.
Malachi, the last book of Part Four, closes like this: I will send you the prophet Elijah. And then, for four hundred years, nothing is said. The drawings are finished and the work has stopped.
Part Five of the Five-Part Structure of the Bible begins where that silence breaks. The person drawn into the rendering walks onto the site.
When the rendering was finished, nothing had happened yet. But what would happen had already been drawn.