It all relates to knowing God's revealed will. Those portions of His past, present, and future will that He has revealed can be a schematic for us to assist us in our living and our praying.
Fulfilled prophecy, like those relating to the life and crucifixion of Jesus, are provided as a testimony to the truth of the Word as revealed by the Spirit to those who are in Christ or who God is calling to Him. Most of the prophecy in the Bible is fulfilled. Much of this fulfilled prophecy was given as a testimony to God's existence and control of human events and was only proven
after its fulfillment. God is determined to make Himself known to men and that they should know that His Word is the only true description of Him, that He is the only "I am that I am".
Assming for a moment that the premillennialists are correct, the unfulfilled prophecies that remain (Isaiah, Daniel, Revelation) might be seen in somewhat the same light.
Maybe we need to ask how God has used prophecy
throughout the Word, in all the portions orthodox Christians agree are already fulfilled.
It's like this -- if I know the direction He's walking then I can walk that same direction. If the Lord is commanding the universe in a certain direction, then I can get with His flow, or I can battle against the current trying to go upstream against Him.
Naturally, we Calvinists expect you to have some difficulty with these matters. It's inevitable. Been there, done that. You have our sympathy. Really.
These prophecies (adopting again the premillennialist view) are already ordained. You (and every other person who ever lived and the entire host of fallen angels in hell) could bend every fiber of your beings to defeat or change them or assist their fulfillment and it would not matter one whit.
You can't alter these events. If you could, they would not be the holy prophecy of the eternal God whose Word cannot lie.
Since every created being is powerless to assist in the fulfillment or defeat of any true prophecy, then the prophecies can only be seen as instruction to believers, your prayers can only help
you to be in alignment with God's plan and, as a minister, help you to preach the Word correctly so your own flock is in accord with the Word.
In some areas, He has specifically revealed His will as opposed to generally revealing His will. If I so desire, I can work with Him and experience enhanced coordination of effort. Eschatology assists me in knowing what to pray for and what not to pray for.
I begin to suspect that you have some inkling of the underlying problem the entire Arminian viewpoint has with the foreordained prophecy of the eternal Word, which cannot lie.
You keep insisting that your free will has some bearing upon the results of God's prophesied plan for mankind. And God cannot lie. Let the word of God be true then and every man a liar.
<smug Calvinist barb>If only you'd let Him show you the heart of these matters...</smug Calvinist barb>
There is real comfort when we finally surrender every vestige of free will to Him.
Have you ever considered that these prophecies are not intended to be studied exhaustively and create entire financial empires for packs of scoundrels who misuse them but may in fact be intended to be something that will become apparent to all Christians in the final days prior to either the Rapture or the Tribulation [I'm speaking of premillennialism as a whole, not either the Historics or the Dispensationalists.].
Adopting the premillennial dispensationalist view: what if these prophecies are intended to be the warning that grants believers the knowledge of the end of time and gives them the courage to make their final testimonies before the Rapture and those testimonies and their subsequent supernatural disappearance is exactly that which God will use to convict the hearts of the Tribulation saints during that time when He withdraws His spirit from men?
Adopting the historic premillennialist view: what if these prophecies are intended to give God's remnant the faith and the vision in the final days and in the Tribulation itself to witness to the power and glory of God, to lay down their lives in testimony as the ancient church did against Rome and the pagan religions?
Given either of these outlooks on premillenialism and my suggestions for how they may be fulfilled and their actual purpose in God's plan, do you really thing it is profitable to spend a great deal of time arguing verb tenses and spewing essentially literary arguments over which portions to read literally and which to read figuratively?
I somehow doubt it. Call me a cynic.
Adopting the premillennial view, I think that the prophecies will serve a certain purpose in God's plan. I think that that the prophecies are given as a guide to those in the last days. And it won't take dissection of Greek verb tenses to know it. A basic acquaintance with the scripture will make it plain and I suspect that God will find a way to draw the attention of all His children to it. After all, the prophecy would do no good if He didn't ensure that our attention was upon it at the right time, would it?
So, vast amounts of prophecy study are likely to be a waste of time since every last person who ever lived and believed that the prophecy would be fulfilled in their lifetimes has thus far been wrong and therefore founding their beliefs and actions on that which is demonstrably unbiblical.
But we should be acquainted with the fundamentals of the various millennial views. To be prepared. But various forms of millennarian nuttiness (or complacency) aren't a service to God and may in fact be detrimental to the cause of Christ.
In the end, the real issue of Christian life is Christ and His indwelling of our hearts, the Holy Spirit of God guiding us to do His will. If we have that, the evil of men and the hosts of hell cannot triumph over us. If we don't have that, no amount of literary or linguistic knowledge of the scripture will help us.
Have the premillennialists noticed that the amillenialists (and others) essentially have pulled their horse out of the race and announced that they have won?
There is a certain spiritual advantage to premillennialism. It is activist, not passive. It leaves the premillennialist square in the middle of the Bible and he has a part to play in the end of time. But to the other millennialists, they have almost no personally relevant prophecy left to fulfill. They have joined Francis Fukuyama in declaring history is at an end. It's not particularly appealing to most of us. That doesn't tell us whether it's true or not though.
It sounds good but it isn't all it's cracked up to be just because it disposes of a lot of thorny issues and premillennarian nuttiness. But they are spared having to endure an association with the nutball books and personalities so strongly associated with premillennialism, particularly with the extreme dispensational variety.
In the end, there is nothing in these matters and the state of world events that justifies any harsh words over differences over eschatology. The Baptist Faith and Message tells me this. These are not matters which should determine our fellowship with others or the sort of matter that can legitimately split a church nor even be the occasion for harsh words between competing millennial interpretations. Nor, to us Calvinists at least, can they affect the salvation and eternal destiny of a single soul.
With all these Calvinists around, you had to expect a little Calvinism to rear its ugly head. After all, foreordained events and God's absolute sovereignty with regard to either the end of this world or in the salvation of a soul, are something of an obsession with us.