Over the last couple weeks, we’ve looked at self-proclaimed practitioners of the spiritual gift of prophecy, how they say God “speaks” to them, the sorts of things they claim he speaks about, and what they do with their gift. The most common threads in all this mystical mumbo jumbo are (1) money, (2) women, and (3) eagerness to get children involved.
If these are not aircraft carrier-sized red flags, I’m not sure what else we should call them.
Accordingly, I thought we should probably do a wrap-up post to highlight the difference between what is currently being practiced in God’s name and what the genuine prophets of yore actually did and said. The two “offices” are chalk and cheese. No biblically literate man or woman would ever compare them.
Neither these verses nor their subject are new to the blog, but I thought it might be useful to pull them all together in one place to demonstrate the unity of the scripture on the matter.
Prophecy and Interpreting God’s Word
Prophesying is not an interpretive exercise. Sure, many symbolic or allegorical prophecies are interpreted after the fact, both within the Bible and without, but the act of explaining the meaning or meanings of a prophecy is not in itself a function of the prophetic gift. Unlike teachers, Bible prophets did not slip into their studies with a cup of tea to put a little message together for Sunday morning with an introduction, three points and a conclusion, and hopefully the occasional humorous illustration to keep their audience awake. The prophet was not a creative or even the explainer of someone else’s ideas. He didn’t have to ask himself, “What subject would be best for this audience?” He was more like a primitive dictation machine. God would say it and his prophet would repeat it.
No teacher today can claim that on biblical authority. Maybe it would be nice if they could, but they can’t.
We ask most of the Bible teachers at our local church to fill 45 minutes or thereabouts. I catch almost every one who comes close to the expected message duration in some error, small or large, whether or not they have an obvious teaching gift. If I were up there instead of them, I’m sure they would catch me in as many or more. The longer we talk, the more likely we are to put our feet in our mouths.
The Downside of Teaching
Teaching is invariably error prone because the teacher is using his own words, not God’s. James writes, “Not many of you should become teachers … for we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body.”
The bad news is that there are no perfect men, and therefore no perfect teachers. The good news is that neither the Lord nor our audiences expect perfection from the teaching gift. You remember what Solomon wrote about a multitude of words. We are thankful for the helpful thoughts our brothers in Christ express, and we let those that are less helpful drift away on the wind like the chaff they are. We are thankful for teachers who study hard, are consistently faithful to scripture and accurate in their interpretations and explanations of it. If we are wise (and if our churches are free of politics), we do not ask back the teachers who are not.
Watering Down the Concept
Prophecy was not interpretive. Genuine prophets did not use their own words. They added nothing to God’s message. Even when they saw visions and wrote down what they saw, the Spirit of God still told them what to leave in and what to leave out.
That’s not my personal opinion. That’s the teaching of scripture. I know people use the words “prophet”, “prophetic” and “prophecy” in a much more watered-down sense today, as a euphemism for forceful or insightful preaching, but that usage is not biblical, as a few scriptures on the subject will (hopefully) make obvious. I am not talking about the much-bandied distinction people make between foretelling and “forth-telling”. Sure, not all prophecy is predictive. Sometimes prophecy is corrective or instructive. Sometimes it is full of rebukes, threats and condemnation, and sometimes it is encouraging too. But whether the prophet was forth-telling or foretelling, he was speaking God’s message to the people of his day, neither enhanced nor contaminated by his own thoughts, opinions or research.
How It Works
Possibly the earliest illustration of the prophetic gift in use is this one from Exodus 7. God is telling Moses how it’s going to work:
“See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet. You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go out of his land.”
So God would tell something to Moses, and Moses would repeat what God said to Aaron, and Aaron would in turn repeat it to Pharaoh. There’s very little room for message modification or subjective interpretation in that process. In fact, God instructs Moses not to leave anything out. “All that I command you” must be spoken.
Later on, God promised to send a prophet like Moses. We now know he was speaking of the Lord Jesus. However, even to Messiah, the established prophetic standard applied:
“I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.”
These would not be his words but God’s words and, like Moses, Jesus would leave out nothing.
The First Reluctant Prophet
Balaam was not an Israelite, but God certainly spoke to him and he spoke for God. Once again, the prophet was to add nothing to the word spoken by God. When asked to curse Israel, Balaam made this plain:
“Though Balak were to give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not go beyond the command of the Lord my God to do less or more.”
And again:
“Must I not take care to speak what the Lord puts in my mouth?”
Yet again:
“Did I not tell you, ‘All that the Lord says, that I must do’?”
And finally:
“What the Lord speaks, that will I speak.”
Note that poor Balaam was speaking against his own nature and interest. He wanted what the king of Moab had to offer. He would happily have taken his gold if only he were able to modify God’s message to suit Balak. But he could neither edit the word of God nor take the sting from it with a supplementary gloss on the subject. He went on blessing Israel long after Balak wanted him to stop, because he had no control over the message that came out of him. God was speaking.
As Peter puts it in the New Testament, summing up the work of the prophets of old, “No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
That’s how the prophetic gift worked, Old Testament or New.
The False Prophet at Work
I suppose we must talk about false prophets, because how they operated well illustrates the difference between the genuine and the fake. In the years leading up to the Babylonian captivity, God spoke many times through his prophets to the people of Judah and their religious leaders. However, the message he sent them was not to their taste. The leadership, especially the false prophets and priests, were disinclined to accept any correction of their way of life, yet understandably reluctant to be seen to defy God in any obvious way.
Then they discovered a rather ingenious solution. Instead of prefacing their own declarations with “Thus says the Lord” or some other claim to God’s final authority over the message they brought to the people, they began instead to speak of something they called the “burden of the Lord”. This “burden”, they claimed, came to them in dreams, sufficiently foggy and amorphous that it was necessary for them to explain it in their own words rather than God’s.
Modern “known prophet” Darby Slaton operates along these lines. His favorite words are “I feel.”
Putting the Test to Dreams, Burdens and Feelings
This approach enabled the false prophet of old to claim sufficient heavenly authority to maintain his prestige and position without obliging him to say anything difficult or truthful that might offend his audience. It was the perfect compromise, at least for him. God despised this manipulative device. He forbade the use of the phrase “the burden of the Lord” and threatened judgment against any alleged prophets who used it. Further, he challenged the people of Judah to force these false prophets to step up to the plate and speak a clear and unambiguous message:
“Thus you shall say to the prophet, ‘What has the Lord answered you?’ or ‘What has the Lord spoken?’ ”
These are specific questions that cannot easily be answered with vague generalities, messages plagiarized from real prophets and personal opinions, and they get to the core issue, which is always “What did God say?”
The Word of the Lord
It was risky to claim God’s authorship for the words a prophet spoke. At Jeremiah’s dictation, Baruch wrote the phrases “the word of the Lord” or “the word of the Lord came to me” a little over seventy times; “thus says the Lord” twice as often as that; and “declares the Lord” a mind-boggling 173 different times, sometimes twice in a single verse and an average of eight times a chapter, for the 52 chapters of the longest book in the Bible. Who would dare do that if God had not truly spoken through him? When the word of the Lord came to a genuine prophet of God, there was no doubt about it. He didn’t have to practice it. He didn’t have to “sense” or “feel” anything. Streams of words he often did not understand poured out of him by the Spirit of God.
Baruch wrote another book under his own name. You can find it in the apocryphal writings and the Bibles of some high churches. Not once does he claim the prophetic gift or to be speaking for God. Wise men knew the difference between God’s word and their own carefully studied opinions. Fools and liars died over it.
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