Prophecy teaching has been a major pastime since the late 1800s, with interpretations changing regularly as newspaper headlines change. Like newspaper headlines, they sometimes fail to anticipate some major events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Like horoscopes, though, they are right sometimes.) It is one thing to say, “Current events might fit God’s plans,” or, “This fits the ways that God works in history,” and quite another to try to match them point-for-point as if biblical texts were predicting our generation’s newspaper headlines.
