What Does Fulfillment Mean?

Authors: Jeffrey Bramlett

We often hear that a biblical prophecy has been “fulfilled.” The word sounds definitive. Fulfilled means finished. Accomplished. Something predicted beforehand has now happened.

But what exactly allows us to say that?

Suppose someone predicts that a particular city will be destroyed, its inhabitants scattered, and its temple burned. Years later, the temple burns, but the city survives and the people remain. Was the prophecy fulfilled?

Most of us instinctively recognize the problem. Something happened that resembled part of the prediction, but resemblance is not necessarily fulfillment.

That distinction is the reason for The Fulfillment Project.

Before asking whether a particular proqphecy was fulfilled in A.D. 70, in some other historical period, or remains future, we need to establish what fulfillment means. Otherwise, we risk deciding beforehand what must have been fulfilled and then adjusting our interpretation until history fits.

At its simplest, fulfillment requires correspondence between what was promised and what actually happened.

If I promise to deliver ten books and deliver two, I have performed part of what I promised, but I have not fulfilled the promise. If I deliver ten magazines instead, the quantity matches but the content does not. If I deliver the books before the agreement was even made, the event cannot constitute fulfillment of the later promise.

Prophecy should be evaluated with at least the same care.

For this project, I will therefore examine fulfillment through three basic questions: order, content, and magnitude.

Order asks whether the events happened in the sequence Scripture gives them. If the prophecy says one event occurs before another, history should not require us to reverse them.

Content asks whether what was predicted is actually what occurred.

At this point, someone may object that such a standard amounts to “wooden literalism.” But that criticism confuses literal interpretation with the denial of figurative language. No competent reader approaches language that way. We routinely recognize metaphor, symbolism, hyperbole, idiom, analogy, and other figures of speech without concluding that words therefore have no determinate meaning.

When someone says, “It is raining cats and dogs,” no one looks for animals falling from the sky. But neither do we conclude that the statement could mean anything. The figure communicates an intelligible reality: it is raining very heavily.

Biblical prophecy works no differently merely because it contains imagery.

The question is not whether every prophetic expression must be woodenly literal. The question is what reality the language, whether literal or figurative, actually communicates. Once that meaning has been established, a claim of fulfillment must correspond to it.

A symbol is not an escape from meaning. A metaphor does not eliminate its referent. Figurative language may change the manner in which something is described, but it does not give us permission to replace the thing being described with something fundamentally different.

That distinction is essential to this project.

Magnitude then asks whether the scale matches. A prediction describing all nations cannot automatically be satisfied by an event affecting one city. A universal event cannot simply be reduced to a local event because the local event was dramatic.

These three questions give us a remarkably simple test:

Did the predicted events occur in the predicted order, with the predicted content, and on the predicted scale?

This does not prejudge the debate between preterism, historicism, and futurism. The standard must apply equally to all of them. A futurist cannot reject a preterist fulfillment because it fails these criteria and then ignore the same criteria when defending a futurist interpretation.

The evidence must be allowed to decide.

That is especially important because finding similarities between prophecy and history is relatively easy. History is filled with wars, earthquakes, famines, persecutions, political upheavals, and destroyed cities. The existence of a parallel does not by itself establish fulfillment. The real question is whether the historical event corresponds to the prophetic claim as a whole closely enough to justify the word fulfilled.

A historical event may resemble a prophecy without fulfilling it. It may anticipate a prophecy without exhausting it. It may fulfill one portion of a larger prophetic sequence without fulfilling everything that follows.

Those distinctions matter because words matter.

So before we begin asking when biblical prophecy was fulfilled, we need to settle the more fundamental question:

What would history have to look like for us honestly to say, “This was fulfilled”?

My working answer is straightforward:

Fulfillment occurs when history substantially delivers what prophecy predicted in its order, content, and magnitude, according to the ordinary rules by which language—literal and figurative alike—communicates meaning.

That definition gives us something we can test.

And that is where The Fulfillment Project: Verifying Claims of Fulfillment begins.