Doug Wilson is currently working his way through the book of Acts every Saturday on his blog. This week he’s in chapter 21, noting that as the apostle Paul made his way toward Jerusalem, he received prophetic warnings in every city to which he traveled concerning what would happen to him there.
That sort of thing happened often in the first century. If it happens at all in the twenty-first, it does so almost exclusively in Charismatic circles.
I don’t think I’ve had a spiritually meaningful dream in my life.
Well, let me qualify that just a little. I’m sure I’ve had dreams psychiatrists would call meaningful in that they revealed truths about my subconscious preoccupations, some of which are surely spiritual. I wouldn’t argue with the experts about the contents of my cranium either; it seems logical to me that when you have the same dream dozens of times, surely something is consistently on your mind that you haven’t resolved to your own satisfaction.
But personal messages from God in my sleep? Not a one.
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.
Darby Slaton is a Pennsylvania speaker, coach and teacher who bills himself as a prophet and teaches children to unlock their spiritual gifts of prophecy, as covered in last Sunday’s post. The mission statement on his website reads “Empowering people to discover their true identity, recognizing Gods [sic] voice and live out their calling.”
He also does not appear to be a fan of commas or apostrophes, but that’s a generational deficiency of education, not an accusation of heresy.
Last week we ran IC’s response to a reader concerned about curriculum that his local church had asked him to present to children. I was unable to link to the content he provided online, so I promised to do a deeper dive into the subject later on.* The four-page lesson (pages 39-42 of a KAIO publication) was entitled “Prophetic Practice”, and purported to help children unlock their spiritual gift of prophecy with the help of a local “known prophet” named Darby Slaton.
If the idea of Christians who need blow-by-blow instructions from a manual to teach a simple Bible lesson equipping your kids to lecture you and others with direct “messages from God” doesn’t curl your toes now, wait until you read some of the quotes that follow. Our reader politely and firmly declined to participate in the program … for very good reason.
A reader writes:
“I had recently just started helping with our children’s program only to stop dead in my tracks when I read this lesson from the curriculum they follow.
I know that something’s really off with this and I’ve been asked to share why I can’t be a part of teaching this to the kids.
Could you look it over and give me your thoughts?”
“Dead in my tracks” is right.
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“What does it mean that Saul is also among the prophets?”
The phrase in question comes up a couple of times in scripture, in 1 Samuel 10 and 19. The writer of 1 Samuel tells us that the (rhetorical) question “Is Saul also among the prophets?” became a proverb in Israel. It definitely meant something to the people of God, though not necessarily anything particularly complimentary to Saul.
Can you imagine becoming the subject of a proverb? It might not be as much fun as we think.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Everybody’s looking for greater certainty these days it seems, even Christians. Our own Immanuel Can has written at length about how the resurgence of Calvinism is evidence of it, and I’ve recently done some reflecting on how Christians often speak about the “call of God” to bolster their confidence in what in most cases are just their own decisions.
Tom: This, though, might take the cake, IC. A new and rapidly-growing charismatic movement mostly off the radar of other Protestants. Independent Network Charismatics (or “INC Christians”) find their certainty in alleged “prophetic” voices and the pronouncements of “super-apostles”.
It’s big-bucks too. Christianity Today notes that the Asuza Now conference in the LA Coliseum drew 50,000 people in the rain, and almost nobody knew about it outside the INC movement.
How’d you like to have the apostles and prophets back, IC?
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“What is the core message of the Minor Prophets?”
Sometimes a question is too general to be useful. That’s not a criticism of the anonymous person who asked today’s poser. He is probably trying to get a clear, simple reply to an area of Bible inquiry he finds interesting. Sometimes that is easy to do. Other times it isn’t.
This would be one of those.
Recently, I came across an online discussion concerning the relationship between prophets, preachers and teachers, as biblically defined. By some verbal sleight of hand, one of the participants had accepted as valid the proposition that preaching is the functional heir to the prophetic gift.
The question naturally followed: since there were female prophets (prophetesses) in both Old and New Testaments, why can’t women be preachers today?
Doug Wilson’s weekly letters column is equally a source of regular entertainment and occasional edification. I trek by it dutifully every Tuesday, as I do with several other writers who hold alternative theological views about this and that. My theory is that you can’t meaningfully address an area of perceived error without allowing its adherents to express themselves in their own words. If we don’t understand each other’s positions, we will always end up talking past one another.
Well, that is the theory, as I say. How it plays out is another kettle of fish.
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The New Testament writers quote, allude to, or possibly allude to Zechariah more often than any other Minor Prophet. Given the sheer number of passages that reference his writing, I will only attempt to deal in any depth with direct quotations or obvious repurposings of the prophetic word.
It seems as the time grew shorter for Messiah to enter the world, the Holy Spirit was all the more eager to testify to his coming at every possible opportunity.
The Lord Jesus had just left the temple, prophesying its complete destruction. He sat down on the Mount of Olives, allowing the disciples to come to him privately and ask, “When will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”
Three questions, and it’s not entirely apparent that the Lord answered them in the order they were asked. Over the ensuing centuries, much debate has resulted as Christians tried on various interpretations of his answer, comparing scripture with scripture.
The biggest news today is “fake news”.
What is “fake news”? Nobody seems to know. It could be the panicky blandishments of the liberal media. It could be the paranoid pronouncements of the extreme Right. But it could also be the confused babblings of the moderate centre. Nobody really seems to know. The only thing upon which all sides agree seems to be that there’s a lot of it out there somewhere.
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As we have worked our way through the Minor Prophets in our Saturday studies, we have noted repeatedly the problem of communication that the Holy Spirit had to resolve when speaking through Hebrew seers two to three thousand years ago about events still to take place. I mention the Holy Spirit particularly, because the prophets themselves may not always have understood the communication barriers involved, though the Spirit of God was well aware of what was going on as he carried them along.
After all, in many cases the prophets had no idea when God would bring about the fulfillment of the events they described, let alone all the things that would happen to the nations and peoples they mentioned in the interval.
Little is known about the writer of Psalm 89, but it’s still a great deal more than we know about the writers of some other psalms.
Ethan the Ezrahite was a Levite
musician, poet and prophet who came to prominence as a young man during David’s
reign, continuing his ministry into the reign of Solomon and perhaps even that
of his
Evidence for that last statement to come …
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“Are people who claim God talks to them insane?”
In the pages of scripture, God talks to men all the time. The closer we go back to the beginning of human history, the more it happened. He conversed with Adam and Eve in the garden. He even had multiple conversations with Cain, who became our world’s first murderer. He spoke to Abraham audibly at least seven times.
Of course, we have to remember that was over a thirty year period, and Abraham lived to be 175. God was speaking less and less as time went by, even to men he considered friends.
Almost seven chapters of 1 Kings are devoted to Ahab’s reign over Israel. A further ten chapters of 2 Kings make repeated references to him, and to the consequences of his life and choices for both Israel and Judah.
The Holy Spirit has seen fit to tell us substantially more about this wicked man than about any other king of the northern kingdom, and more than many Judean kings, notwithstanding the fact that he did more to provoke the Lord to anger than all the kings of Israel who preceded him.
Moreover, the expression “as the house of Ahab” became the standard by which the writers of Chronicles, as well as the prophet Micah, assessed the wickedness of Israel’s later kings.
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Why are the prophets so obscure at times?
Peter tells us they did not always understand how and when the the words they received from God would be realized. And if the men who spoke these words had to labor to put the pieces together, we should not be surprised if we have to do the same with prophecies that have yet to be fulfilled today. That’s one reason.
In Deuteronomy 30, Moses is coming to the conclusion of his address to a new generation of Israelites on the brink of conquering Canaan.
On the one hand, his message is a prophecy of total failure. The curse will come upon Israel. God’s people will be driven out of their land to dwell among the nations of the world for generations. On the other hand, it is also a prophecy of guaranteed success. Repentance will bring restoration and prosperity the like of which Israel has never seen throughout its entire history.