Non-Prophet Organisations

Martin:             Why God suddenly feels the need to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people escapes me. You should ask him about it while you’re in there. He’d probably say he moves in mysterious ways.

Philomena:       No, I think he’d say you’re a fecking idiot.

Philomena (2013)

The notion that it might be rather a good idea to write this blog post came to me as a result of all the conversations I’ve been having with fellow-believers about 1 Corinthians 14 of late. The chapter in question is highly relevant for my views about how church ought to work,¹ but, as so often happens, my referring to it often tends to throw up a number of other issues as well. In this case, it’s struck me that I’ve been back-and-forth-ing with various people about “let two or three prophets speak” and “you can all prophesy” and “the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets” and so forth, without taking the trouble to pin down what prophecy actually is. Honestly, it’s kind of hilarious: the church circles in which I tend to hang out are ones where nothing explicitly given the name ‘prophecy’ occurs in any meeting at any time of the week, and obviously the same has often been true of my colloquist.² There we are arguing about the details of how prophecy ought to be done in church, when prophecy has not ostensibly been part of the church experience of either one of us, ever. The churches to which we have belonged have been – if you’ll forgive me – non-prophet organisations.

 

The idea is of being prevented from speaking. Best I could come up with.

It seems to me that a lot of us are none too sure about what prophecy is, and therefore we don’t do it (or, if we do do it, don’t recognise that prophecy’s what we’re doing when we do). Well, that’s clearly a massive problem, given how insistent the New Testament is that prophesying is a really good and desirable thing – if you opened 1 Corinthians 14 last paragraph, give it another skim now and you’ll see what I mean – so I thought it might be rather a good idea to go and search the scriptures and see what they say about prophecy and take my best shot at defining it. And then pop the conclusions I reached here for you lovely people to peruse, should you wish.

Here’s what I think: ‘prophecy’ refers to two different but related things. On the one hand, it’s a general term for being in communication with God and relating what he says to others. On the other, it denotes a specific spiritual gifting that consists of speaking to God’s people on his behalf, to encourage and rebuke them so that they might remain faithful to him. In both cases, crucially, it’s a thing that human beings are enabled to do by the Holy Spirit. I shall now present a selection of the evidence.

To kick off, here are the first few mentions of prophecy in scripture; I’m looking at instances of the Hebrew words נָבִיא (nāvīʾ, ‘prophet’) and נבא (nbʾ, ‘prophesy’). In Genesis 20:7, God says to Abimelech in a dream: “And now return [Abraham’s] wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you, and you shall live; but if you do not return her, you shall surely die, you and all who are yours.” Strikingly enough, the key characteristic of Abraham as prophet here is not actually that he speaks for God, but rather that God hears him.³ In our next instance, though, in Exodus 7:1, God says to Moses: “See, I have given you as God to Pharoah, and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet. You, you shall speak all that I command you, and Aaron your brother shall speak to Pharoah, that he should send out the sons of Israel from his land.” What a helpful physical illustration: Aaron is Moses’ prophet in that he passes on Moses’ God-given message to its intended recipient. So from these two first references together, we see that a prophet has to have a two-way communicative relationship with God: God hears him when he speaks on behalf of others, and he speaks to others on behalf of God.

Our next reference is the following little story out of Numbers 11: “And the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and he took some of the Spirit that was on him and gave it on the seventy old men, and it came to pass as the Spirit rested on them that they prophesied, but they did not do it again. And two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the second named Medad, and the Spirit rested on them – and they were among the recorded, but they did not go out to the tabernacle, and they prophesied in the camp. And the young man ran and told Moses, and said, Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp. And Joshua the son of Nun, minister of Moses from his youth, answered and said, My lord Moses, restrain them. And Moses said to him, Are you jealous for me? Would that he would give the whole people of the Lord as prophets, that the Lord would give his Spirit on them!” So here we see that people prophesy that when God gives his Spirit on them. And we also see that under his covenant with Israel, he only did that for certain people at certain times. (Watch this space, folks.)

So, some people were prophets, because God had given them his Spirit that they might communicate with him and for him; some people weren’t necessarily known as prophets, but did prophesy on occasion, like Saul for example;⁴ and some people just weren’t prophets. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that many more people were prophets than have books of the Bible named after them. For example, someone called Obadiah managed to hide a hundred prophets when Queen Jezebel went on a killing spree, which kind of implies that there were substantially more than that altogether. Similarly, Ahab mustered some four hundred prophets to give a verdict on his planned attack on Ramoth-gilead. And fifty from Jericho alone (not that city’s whole population of prophets, either) followed Elijah and Elisha to the Jordan one time.⁵

 

A vintage print of the River Jordan. Not quite as vintage as Elijah and Elisha though.

As we progress through the scriptures, moreover, we see emerge the second, more specific prophetic role I mentioned above. Check out the following:

“And the Lord sent to you all his servants the prophets – sent and sent,⁶ but you did not listen nor incline your ears to listen – saying, Turn around, each from his evil way and the wickedness of your deeds, and dwell upon the ground that the Lord gave to you and to your fathers, from forever and until forever.” – Jeremiah 24:4-5

“And I sent to you all my servants the prophets, sent and sent, saying, Turn around, each from his evil way, and make your deeds right, and do not go after other gods to serve them, and dwell to the ground that I gave to you and to your fathers – but you did not incline your ear, nor listen to me.” – Jeremiah 35:15

“And I sent to you all my servants the prophets, sent and sent, saying, Do not do this thing of abomination that I hate!” – Jeremiah 44:4

“Do not be like your fathers to whom the first prophets cried out, saying, Thus says the Lord of hosts: Turn around from your evil ways and evil deeds – but they did not hear and they did not listen to me, says the Lord. Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers? And they turned around and said, As the Lord of hosts purposed to do to us, according to our ways and according to our deeds, thus has he done with us.” – Zechariah 1:4-6

“And they abandoned the house of the Lord, the God of their fathers, and they served the Asherim and the idols, and wrath was upon Judah and Jerusalem in this guilt of theirs. And he sent among them prophets to turn them back to the Lord, and they testified against them, but they did not listen.” – 2 Chronicles 24:19

“And they were disobedient and rebelled against you and cast your Law behind their back, and they killed your prophets, who had testified against them to turn them back to you, and they committed great blasphemies." – Nehemiah 9:26

I could go on – and do go and investigate further for yourself – but it’s a strikingly consistent picture, isn’t it? God sent prophets to speak on his behalf, but specifically he sent them to tell his people to stop their evil and their idolatry and turn back to the Lord and his ways. In one way, this second definition is only a logical follow-on from the first: if you’re speaking on God’s behalf, well, then, it seems pretty likely that that message is going to contain exhortations to serve God and live the way he wants. But I do think it’s worth drawing the distinction between the general role and the specific one, not least because it makes sense of how this stuff comes out in the New Testament.

Returning to my special favourite 1 Corinthians 14, I’ll remind you that Paul there says to the Corinthian believers, “you can all prophesy”. But just a couple of chapters ago, he’d rhetorically exclaimed, “Are all prophets?” in such a way as to clearly indicate that no, not all are. I think this apparent discrepancy is pretty easily solved by applying the same two categories I just pulled out of the Old Testament. “You can all prophesy,” as in, you’re all qualified to communicate with God and speak on his behalf – and indeed, unlike God’s covenant with Israel, the new covenant in Christ gives God’s Spirit to every one of us who believes, and, furthermore, as a permanent seal, not just a one-off.⁷ In that sense, we are all prophets, and whenever we speak on God’s behalf, we are prophesying. But in terms of particular spiritual giftings, some of the saints have been given the specific ministry of exhorting the people of God to repent from their idolatry and evil ways and turn back to their Lord, and others haven’t. Consider in this respect Acts 15:32: “Judas and Silas, also being prophets themselves, through many words encouraged the brothers and strengthened them.” The role of the prophet is to encourage and strengthen, which is actually the same thing as to call to repentance, because it’s through constant acknowledgement of our need for the cross that we become most strongly rooted in the one who died on it.

Of course, that’s not to say that nobody except a prophet can ever do any encouraging or rebuking, any more than nobody except an evangelist can ever preach the gospel to unbelievers. (Indeed, as a bit of a side note, I think this matter of two definitions, a general and a specific, is true of all the ‘higher giftings’ – that is to say, in one sense, everyone in the Church is an apostle, a prophet, an evangelist, and a teacher and pastor, but in another, each has his or her own gifting or giftings and not the others – but I won’t make this post even longer by going into massive detail about that here.) Still, the role of prophet is clearly a specific one and a highly significant one. The Church needs prophets, just as Israel did: we need people who are able, in the Spirit, to encourage and strengthen us in the faith by calling us to repent and believe. The sad thing is that we don’t seem to be very good at recognising that.

Prophecy, as a gifting, is not, in my experience of the church at least, identified and nurtured the way that, say, teaching is, and this is a crying shame of gargantuan size. We the Church, by neglecting to encourage the prophets among us to exercise their gifting, are cheating ourselves out of precious encouragement; and we are also leaving them unsure as to how they are able to minister to their brothers and sisters. We are leaving them questioning whether they even have a ministry, or are some sort of sub-par Christian with no ‘higher gift’ to offer in service of the Church. That is an injustice. We need to do better.

So if you know any prophets – and I hazard you very likely do, whether or not they’re yet aware that they’re prophets – do be encouraging in their ministry. They’ll learn to do what they were made for, and the whole Church will reap the – ahem – profits.

Footnotes

¹ See my post ‘Those Pesky Nicolaitans 2: What Church Leadership?’, under June of this year in the box on the right. Fun fact: it’s currently my most-viewed post. Oh, and here’s 1 Corinthians 14 in case you’d like to recap: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+14&version=ESVUK.

² Whether ‘colloquist’ is a real word seems up for debate, but I think it ought to be, because ‘conversation partner’ is the next shortest alternative and is still a little unwieldy. Webster’s 1913 dictionary acknowledged it: https://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/Colloquist.

³ This isn’t an isolated case, either: check out Jeremiah 37:3, and 42:1-4.

⁴ As in this story: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel+10&version=ESVUK. Saul wasn’t a prophet, but then the Spirit of God came upon him and enabled him to prophesy, and everyone went, oh hey, is Saul a prophet now then?

⁵ As related in 1 Kings 18, 1 Kings 22, and 2 Kings 2 respectively. Admittedly, in the Ahab episode, his four hundred prophets prophesied falsely, but that was because of a lying spirit sent from God, and I don’t think the way the story is told suggests that none of these prophets was genuine.

⁶ Here and elsewhere this is my rendering of a phrase which literally refers to getting up early in the morning and sending: the idea is of doing the thing persistently over a long period of time. This is probably a good point to mention that all quotations in this post are my own translation, but you probably already guessed that from the clunkiness.

⁷ Excuse to go and read Ephesians again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+1&version=ESVUK. You’re welcome.