and Zion, and they spoke of the kingdom in terms of a literal king from the line of David sitting on a throne in a palace in Jerusalem. This is known as “prophetic idiom.”16 Even in the NT, when God revealed the fulfillment of OT prophecy and when the NT writers point forward to the consummation of God’s plan, they use the language that their contemporaries would understand. As Steve Lehrer describes it, “when God used the prophets to explain the spiritual fulfillment of God’s plan in the New Covenant
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