DO I NEED A PROPHET? (Part 1 of 2)

You probably have heard it said that everybody can hear God for themselves, so we do not need to be ‘running after prophets’ to seek the voice of God.  Whereas that position is understandably an attempt to address the spiritual indolence of worshippers and sometimes the idolisation of the prophet, it is unfortunately one extreme attempt to correct the opposite extreme.

That we can hear God for ourselves is true, but not entirely so.  That the prophetic has been abused in some cases does not make it irrelevant.  For everything abused, there is a use.  God will speak to me about me, yet for reasons that only God knows, and sometimes for factors arising from my limitations, God can employ a third party, a prophet, as we shall shortly see.

According to Luke 11:49, it is “the wisdom of God” to “send them prophets.”  We cannot be wiser than God.  Whether those to whom He sends the prophet believe him or not is something else.  The God of wisdom knows that there is sometimes a message that someone could be too timid to receive unless it came through a respected third party.  Others could be in an emotional state that has affected their external receptivity.  Daddy seeks to reach everyone all the same.  For others still, the Father, in His wisdom, could “send” the prophet as a witness to the fact of the message. The reasons are plenty, but the fact that a people can reject the prophet that God sends to them both says, firstly, that God does send prophets, and secondly, that everyone does not always know or receive the prophet that God sends to them.  They might reject the prophet out of ignorance or out of pride, their rejection does not mean that God did not send him.

Even prophets need other prophets, because no prophet has all the ‘parts’ to any truth, even a truth about himself (1 Corinthians 13:9).  It is the wisdom of God to not put all His eggs in any single basket (1 Corinthians 12:4-7), lest He loses all if the basket should be ruined (1 Corinthians 12:17-18).  It is the wisdom of God to not let any good prophet fall into the temptation of self-deification from possessing the power to know everything (2 Corinthians 12:7).  Only God is omniscient.

David was a prophet, yet he had prophets through whom he also heard God (1 Chronicles 21:9-11; 2 Samuel 12:1); and they all respected one another, each one knowing their prophetic limits and limitations (1 Kings 1:23-24; 2 Samuel 12:13).  Philip had four daughters who were veritable channels of the prophetic, yet God still sent a prophet into that home, to deliver a message that had not been sent through any of the four resident voices (Acts 21:9-11).  They were humble and mature enough to not say to the prophet, “Go away. We also hear God.  We do not need your prophecy.”   Somebody else might have arrogantly taken the visiting prophet’s mission to mean that he was proudly suggesting that they no more hear God themselves; that God would have spoken to them ‘directly’ or through any of the four voices since there, before the prophet came.

Although I do not carry the title, I am respectfully called a prophet by many who have followed over the years, yet I know where the fences are in my terrain. The Father knows, too, and does not condemn me for not exerting my voice where or when or how He has not ordained.  I am not inferior for knowing how much I do not know and lending an ear to who has the part He did not give to me.   Others are neither less for seeking me for the cherished part that He has bestowed to my critical stewardship.  It is “the wisdom of God.”

Sometimes God will speak to me through another so that there would be a witness either to what He said to me or to the fact that He spoke to me.  God respects jurisprudence.  That condition prominently describes Ezekiel’s prophetic mission.  God warned Ezekiel early, that He was being sent to “a rebellious nation,” and whether they believed him or not, they would at least “know that there hath been a prophet among them” (Ezekiel 2:3-5; 33:33).  In other words, God was sending Ezekiel as a witness.  In future, they could not say that God never gave them a chance.  There would be witnesses, even if it were the sand from the soles of the feet of the messenger (Mark 6:11).

The Bible says that truth is usually established in the mouth of two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6).  So, the sent prophetic witness might be for the purpose of vindicating God in the end, or reinforcing a truth already received.  Even Jesus once asked His disciples about what the social media of the time was saying about Him.  He had no doubts about Himself, but their reports were a critical earthly validation before there was to come the next heavenly validation on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matthew 16:13-17; 17:1-5).  By the mouth of the two earthly and heavenly witnesses, or the witnesses from both the earthly and heavenly realms, the truth was established.  He was the Son of God.

Even when God has directly spoken to someone, He sometimes still sends another prophet to confirm the message already received.  Again, Agabus and Paul come into the picture.  Prophet Agabus met Apostle Paul in the home of Evangelist Philip where there were four daughters who prophesied.  Agabus announced to Paul that danger awaited him on his Jerusalem mission.  The interpretation of that message by everyone at that meeting was that Paul should therefore not proceed to Jerusalem.  They all heard correctly but were wrong in interpretation.  Paul was not shocked by the prophecy as if he had got that message for the first time.  He told everyone that he was going ahead on the mission, prepared for whatever it held, even death.  By the third-party prophetic voice, God reinforced a word that had come previously to the recipient (Acts 21:8-14).

Reinforcement is important because even prophets have their moments of doubt.  For example, God told Prophet Jeremiah to buy a plot of land.  Even though he obeyed, he seemed to have had his doubts, until something else happened in an encounter with a third party.  His nephew met him with the same proposal for the same land, and this is how Jeremiah responded: “Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD” (Jeremiah 32:8).  The implication of “then I knew” is that until “then,” he was not very certain about the voice of God that he had heard, even though he had obeyed.  So, even great prophets could have their doubts sometimes.  In His wisdom at such times, God sends a reinforcement.  That belittles neither the recipient nor the sent.

Another case in point is Elisha who plainly confessed about a matter: “the LORD hath hid it from me, and hath not told me” (2 Kings 4:27).  That tells the occasional human limitations even of the doubly anointed mighty prophet.  He is still a man, after all, not a spirit.  Any prophet therefore who claims that God always shows him everything about everybody every time is not correct.  I do not wish to be diverted with why God hid that information from Elisha on that occasion, but suffice it to know that He does.

No matter how great a prophet might be, he does not know everything.  If that is the case with the great prophet, how much less the little flock?   Paul says, “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9).  Paul was a man who had been to the third heaven, who had had rare supernatural encounters, yet he admitted, “we know in part,” and further, that even the best prophetic declaration is merely ‘part’ of a whole that we might never know; a whole that could stretch over many years and many people.

A fragment though it is, whatever ‘part’ God grants is good enough for the time.  The other ‘part’ could come from another prophet, at another time.

God sent Prophet Samuel to the house of Jesse with only a part of a message.  The other part was to follow later from interactions with third parties (1 Samuel 16:1-13).  Peter had an encounter on the rooftop while he was at a private retreat.  Remarkable as it was, it was only a part of the whole.  The other ‘part’ followed later, from encounter with third parties (Acts 10:9-17; 11:1-18).

Saul met God on the road to Damascus and had an unmistakeable dialogue with the Almighty.  During that interaction, Saul asked, “What wilt thou have me to do?”  God would not answer that specific question directly but referred him to a third party from whose ‘secondary’ “mouth” that ‘part’ of the whole truth was to be received (Acts 9:6).  If Saul were to have spoken arrogantly like some of us, insisting that he did not need another person to hear God for himself because he already enjoyed a hotline with God, he would have been the loser for it.

Someone might argue that Saul was after all a young convert at the time.  Even then, it does not take away from the fact that that event showed that there are matters and moments when God speaks to someone through a third party rather than directly to them, and that it is not spiritual inferiority to receive a message from another about oneself.  Whether Saul went enquiring after the prophet or the prophet came to Saul, is a different issue.