However great a person may be, everyone has a great weakness: they all die. So we may honour the memory of dead prophets but we cannot have any relationship with them. Great people have another weakness; they cannot see the future; they may guess, but cannot see. David was both a king and a prophet (speaking to the people about what God had said to him) and dead, but in these verses Peter says that David also saw Jesus, His death and resurrection, in the future.

Two logical questions are, "How did he 'see', and how do we know he 'saw'?" Taking the second, first. We know David 'saw' what happened to Jesus because he wrote down the passage from Psalm 16:8-11 (Acts 2:25-28). It fully described the confidence Jesus felt as He went to the cross, confidence that Father God would protect Him from being destroyed. We also know that is true because of the multiple eye witness accounts for post resurrection encounters.

David, like every good poet, wrote what he saw. But the image in his mind was given by the Holy Spirit who knows the future. He, the Spirit of God, knows everything and can share what He knows with God's servants. Even though David wrote this Psalm around 1000 years before Jesus, the picture he paints accurately depicts the Lord Jesus' heart as He approached death. It also accurately described the resurrection, which has so many witnesses it was incontrovertible.

Jesus is a living Saviour, revealed by the Living Spirit of God to prophets who are now dead, and revealed to us who are alive now by the same Spirit. The Bible's record is true; we can trust what it says about Jesus. His confirmation of the prophecy and its witnessed fulfilment should give us great confidence in what God is saying. We can be certain that the cross was no accident and the resurrection was no freak event. It was all planned by God for our salvation. And, because Jesus is alive, we can form a personal relationship with Him. That is very good news indeed. Let's share it (www.crosscheck.org.uk).