Three Tests for Self-Proclaiming Prophets

What's a Prophet?

DEC 29, 2023

Leading up to elections there is always lots of chatter about prophets. I’ve heard lots of claims about prophets from both sides, to be fair. During Obama’s and Trump’s some folks donned the mantle and platform of a prophet but they were mostly people of the opposing party.

So, we ask…

What’s a prophet and what do prophets talk about? Since the term “prophet” is a term most of us get or have absorbed from the Bible, to the Bible we can go.

Prophets, we will learn, can’t be reduced to social critics or bloggers or tweeters or IG-ers or FB-ers.

We cheapen “prophet” (nabi in Hebrew, prophetes in Greek) when we turn them into social critics and bloggers and tweeters. There is something profound in what a prophet is. If you have never read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Prophets, the time is now. Or, if you have no read Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination, the time is now.

But I will turn today to John Goldingay’s discussion in The Prophet Jeremiah: The Book, The Man, The Message.

First, a prophet, taking Jeremiah as a paradigm, is one who has been in the cabinet room with God (Yahweh). There, Goldingay says, “he has voice but not vote.” Look at these words:

For who has stood in the council of the LORD
so as to see and to hear his word?
Who has given heed to his word so as to proclaim it?
I did not send the prophets,
yet they ran;
I did not speak to them,
yet they prophesied.

But if they had stood in my council,
then they would have proclaimed my words to my people,
and they would have turned them from their evil way,
and from the evil of their doings (23:18, 21-22).

No one should claim to be a prophet unless they have “sat at the table in the cabinet” or, more generally, heard from God. Repeating Eugene Peterson or Martin Luther King does not make one a prophet – no matter how invigorating.

Second, a prophet is someone who has been personally sent by God. Again,

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations (1:5).

Jeremiah is not eager for the calling, though many today are both eager and self-appointed:

Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” But the LORD said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you, Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD (1:6-8).

Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, “Now I have put my words in your mouth (1:9).

Third, it’s not fun to be a prophet. It’s painful. Prophets, Goldingay observes, seem to be called to say the opposite of what most people think so they are unpopular pests. In fact, in Jeremiah 11-20 the prophet protests against God for this prophetic calling!

His words are like fire because he’s on God’s side against a sinful people, and he has to warn them of their sins: unfaithfulness, rebellion, waywardness, sins, heedlessness, corruption, profanation, shamefulness, stupidity, self-interest, greed, and stubbornness.

If you’re having fun in your prophetic utterances, it’s not prophecy.

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