THE BIBLE MAY BE SEEN , chapter by chapter and book by book, from beginning to end, as the voice of the prophets crying out a message from the LORD. The first of these prophets is Moses, the writer of the Pentateuch—the first five books of the O.T. About prophets he instructs, “You may say to yourselves, ‘How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?’ If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken.” (Deut. 18:21-22) We are well aware of Jesus’ admonition about false prophets. “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many.” (Matt. 24:4-5) And what is the message of God to the world? It is a message of both justice and mercy; they are both brought into balance in God’s scales at Judgment Day for everyone.
False prophets are the bane of the faith community in every age. Even as the prophets of God warn of the coming wrath, the false prophets promise prosperity and a good life for all. In times of judgment, their voices lull the unwary into false security. People generally listen to what they want to hear. The apostle Paul warns, “For the time will come when people will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” (2 Tim. 4:3) At such a time in ancient Israel, Micah says “If a liar and deceiver comes and says, ‘I will prophesy for you plenty of wine and beer,’ that would be just the prophet for this people!” (Micah 2:11) In our own times of first the television and now the internet, the loudest voices in the massive dissemination of information that floods our social media are those of the culture of doom and gloom. In the midst of this tsunami of darkness, the voice of today’s Christian church has no unity in its message from God. One of the loudest is the voice of promise. “God loves you, and has a wonderful life for you,” it proclaims. And while this is true, there is seldom the voice of a prophet widely heard also warning of immanent judgment—mercy, yes, but unseparated from justice.
It would be well to watch and listen to the true prophets of old, and see the results through eyes that can see, and hear the results through ears that can hear. (cf. Matt. 13:14-17) Many of the prophecies that surround the downfall of Israel foreshadow today’s world. In the Book of Habakkuk, the prophet’s second complaint is an attempt to understand why God is not moving to correct the moral, social, and political issues that expose the true climate of relationship between that nation and their ostensibly proclaimed God. Habakkuk rhetorically but plaintively asks, “Lord, are you not from everlasting? Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. Why then do you tolerate the treacherous while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves?” (Hab. 1:12-13)
He then does something we can and should all learn from. “I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me.” (Hab. 2:1) We are mindful of God speaking through the Psalmist, something Habakkuk would have been familiar with, something we would be wise to practice. “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” (Psa. 46:10) God then answers. “Then the Lord replied: ‘Write down the revelation and make it plain. For the revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false.” (Hab. 2:3a) The revelation concerns the first destruction and diaspora of Israel, and is proven true a century later when Babylon invades and conquers.
Where are today’s prophets? Again, we turn to the past to understand the present. “‘The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.’” (Amos 8:11-12) But we must ask ourselves a question as we interpret this in our context. We are not without prophets—they are everywhere! They are on the nightly news and on the cable op-ed shows. They scream the economic hysteria of the stock market, or the blather of the paparazzi in the glitzy world of this moment’s celebrities. Prosperity preachers abound on late-night cable. The voices all create a discordant cacophony that grates on the nerves, and so we learn to turn it out, reducing it by some mental gymnastics to the equivalent of white noise—meaningless static. And herein lies the problem, at several levels. We are on information overload, and our coping mechanism is to reduce active listening to only what we want to hear. We are, perhaps unwittingly, conditioned to a state in which we will only listen to “what our itching ears want to hear.” (2 Tim. 4:3)
Active and engaged listening requires desire and intention on our parts. This is difficult work for people who are not diligent in their pursuit of God. There are still real prophets of God in almost any community in both the eastern and the western world. They are typically found in bible teaching churches, irrespective of denomination, that are faithful to a careful interpretation of the word of God. These prophets are not fore-tellers of future events, for those events have already been spoken of by the prophets of old. The modern prophets may have words of knowledge about individuals or individual circumstances, but these prophets are first and foremost forth-tellers of the word of God, neither adding to it nor taking away from it. But there are three more critical distinguishing marks to these prophets: they preach Christ crucified and resurrected, they know what time it is on God’s event clock, and they do not allow the word of God to become mired in the cultural dissonance.
If you and I truly want to hear the word of the LORD, we must do two things. We must change our desire from seeking what we want to hear to seeking what the LORD wants us to hear, and we must seek out a prophet who delivers on all three of the critical and timely aspects of the word. “Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay.” (Hab. 2:3b)
Q. Am I seeking a solution to my problems, or am I seeking God?
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