Knowing the Bible 101 by Bruce Bickel & Stan Jantz
Author:Bruce Bickel & Stan Jantz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780736968614
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers
How Did the Prophets Get the Message?
The prophets didn’t make stuff up. They only repeated what God told them to say. But how did God communicate with them? That’s a good question. It wasn’t always done in the same way. The prophet Samuel heard a voice. The prophet Daniel had dreams. But usually, it was a matter of the prophet being so completely devoted to God that he felt compelled and prompted by the Spirit of God to speak a certain message. When you read about the prophets in the Bible, you will see this phenomenon explained with phrases like:
The word of the Lord came to…
The Lord touched the mouth of…
However it happened, the important thing to realize is that the prophet was speaking what God wanted to say:
Above all, you must understand that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophets themselves or because they wanted to prophesy. It was the Holy Spirit who moved the prophets to speak from God (2 Peter 1:20-21).
Who Are These Guys?
God gave prophets to the Jews as His special representatives throughout their history. During the gaps between the prophets’ presence on the national stage, the Jews felt afraid and abandoned. One psalmist wrote, “We see no miraculous signs as evidence that you will save us. All the prophets are gone; no one can tell us when it will end” (Psalm 74:9).
The word prophet also described a person who conducted his ministry in a variety of ways. These are a few of the best-known prophets:
• Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, was referred to as a prophet in Genesis 20:7, but he didn’t function in the traditional capacity since there wasn’t a nation yet. Angels appeared to him on several occasions.
• Moses was a prophet, bringing the messages of God to the Israelites at Mount Sinai and as they wandered in the wilderness. He was known as the prophet “whom the L ORD knew face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10).
One Mistake and You’re Dead
God had a special relationship with His prophets, and He didn’t want any fakes or pretenders to claim the position. So He imposed a simple test. If anyone claiming to be a prophet made a wrong prediction, even once, then he was to be sentenced to death by stoning (Deuteronomy 13:10). It was a severe penalty, but God doesn’t like people lying about being His messengers. And it made it easy to tell the phony from the real thing.
False prophets were a real problem for Israel. Know why they were so appealing? Right. They said what people wanted to hear! Read about Jeremiah’s encounter with one phony in Jeremiah 28, or Ezekiel’s nasty prediction in chapter 13 for “the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing!” (verse 3, NIV ).
• Nathan was the prophet during the reign of King David, when the nation of Israel was united. He told the king that God knew about his sin with Bathsheba. Nathan also wrote a national history (2 Chronicles 9:29), but we have no book with his name on it.
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