How Prophecy Does and Does not Work

Christopher H. J. Wright on how OT prophecy works:

To expect that all the details of Old Testament prophecies have to be literally fulfilled is to classify them all in the category of flat predictions which have to ‘come true’, or be judged to have failed. . . . The Old Testament did make predictions and they were fulfilled with remarkable accuracy—as in the case of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. . . . [But] to insist on literal fulfillment of prophecies can be to overlook their actual nature within the category of promise, with the potential of different and progressively superior levels of fulfillment. To look for direct fulfillments of, say, Ezekiel in the 20^th-century Middle East is to bypass and short-circuit the reality and the finality of what we already have in Christ as the fulfillment of those great assurances. 

—Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1992), 76-77.