I'd like you guys to share your thoughts on this.
Today I attended Bible study at my parish, and we were talking about prophecies. My priest, the one leading the discussion, said that prophecies reveal to us the will of God, and aren't just simple predictions of the future. He then said that for this reason, prophecies aren't always true. This confused me because I thought that all Biblical prophecies were always fulfilled, so I asked him to clarify. Using the example of Jonah and Nineveh, he said that Jonah prophesied the will of God that the city would be destroyed because of its wickedness. When they repented, the destruction didn't occur, and Jonah's prophecy went unfulfilled. He defined this prophecy as something that would have happened in accordance with God's will had nothing changed, a sort of "what-if." Scripture is inerrant, so we know it definitely would have happened if the Ninevites didn't repent.
The more I've toyed this idea over, though, I feel as if something isn't right here (even if only in my interpretation of what he said). I get the sense that if we think of prophecy as something that isn't always fulfilled, it's impossible for us to say that a prophecy can be false.
Let's take the Seventh-Day Adventists' William Miller, the supposed prophet, as an example. He made a prediction of the Apocalypse in the 1800s that failed, and later justified his prediction as being technically correct with some mental gymnastics about some shift in Heaven occurring on the date he predicted. When thinking about this man and others like him, I've thought that we can ignore them because of Matthew 7:15-20. They bear the bad fruit of false prophecy, so we know they are not being led by God. But taking what my priest said into account here, what's to say that he wasn't right? For all I know, maybe God did intend to return on the date Miller predicted, but something changed, and the world was spared for a time like Nineveh.
Is this a bad example or something? I'm confused.