UNDERSTANDING OPPOSITE PROPHECIES

A few months ago, the United States of America went through what has been adjudged one of its most intense presidential elections, between President Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden.  There were prophecies on opposite sides, all claiming to have been the voice of God.  In the end, when Biden got sworn in, some of the prophets offered a public apology in the ostensible belief that they had given a false prophecy.  Did they indeed give a false prophecy?

At the moment in Nigeria, there are also prophecies of an opposite nature, one category threatening irredeemable doom for the veritable abominations of the nation, and the other predicting the expiration of the present tribulations and the ushering in of a great revival.  Each category has credible prophets, so the people are sincerely confused about which of the opposite prophecies to believe.

We may find an answer to this riddle in Deuteronomy 30:19 where Prophet Moses revealed that, at that moment in history, God had placed the opposite options of Life and Death before the nation of Israel.  However, the prophet was not going to leave the people there.  He proceeded to urge them to make a right choice, a choice for Life: “THEREFORE choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”  It was an open cheque from God with the possibility of either fulfilment – Life or Death, each of the options no less ‘from God’ than the other.  It was optional opposite divine possibilities awaiting human endorsement and then ‘fulfilment.’

According to Apostle Paul, the prophet knows only a “part” of the mind of God; his prophecies merely a “part” in a much bigger prophetic ‘whole’ (1 Corinthains 13:9, 12), which makes it imperative for the humble prophet to always seek what else God could be saying through other vessels apart from himself (Daniel 9:2; 2 Chronicles 36:21).  It might be pride or naivety for any prophet to consider himself so great that he does not care to know what more God could be saying on a matter through other vessels.

Prophecy is like a montage or a jigsaw puzzle.  It usually takes a putting together of the ‘parts’ to get a more holistic view than any of the individual parts would offer, no matter how large and magnificent the ‘part’ might seem (1 Corinthians 14:27-31).  Even in the Bible, no single prophet, for example, said all the things that needed to be known about the birth of Christ or about the end times.  Some prophets spoke of His virgin birth, others of His messianic mission, others still of His death and eternal throne.  Every Bible student learns to put the ‘parts’ together to get a better view than any single prophet provides, no matter how great the prophet.

Like artists drawing an object from different perspectives, each true prophet usually reports the mind of God based on his relation or position to that Mind of God.  In the Deuteronomy 30:19 case, Moses seemed to have been standing in a more advantaged position from where he could see the two options of Life and Death being offered to the people of Israel.  He advised them “therefore” to choose Life.  One part of the prophecy was the voice of God, saying, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing.”  The other part was the voice or counsel of the prophet of God, arising from the voice of God heard and declared, saying, “Therefore choose life.”  Prophet Moses’ ‘addendum’ of an advice was not in itself The prophecy.  It was only the prophet’s ‘remarks.’  Depending on how the ‘addendum’ is phrased, somebody could have taken it to mean that Moses was ‘prophesying’ that although Death was imminent, the people were going to vote for Life, or that Life was going to win the popular votes.  If that didn’t happen, such naïve ears were bound to have judged Moses a false prophet.

Whereas Moses, in the present case, was privileged to see the two possible popular votes of Life and Death, another lesser prophet standing at a different angle to the same matter could have been seeing only one of the two options.  Such a prophet might prophesy, for example, “I see Death coming upon the land.”  He will be as right as another prophet standing at the other side of the options, who says, “I see God offering us Life.”  The ‘positive’ prophet might proceed to make his intellectual ‘addendum’ to his vision, and say, “I see God offering us Life, ‘therefore’ none should fear.  Nobody will die.”  If eventually this does not become the case, and there is Death, the problem would not have been in the Part A but in the Part B of the prophecy; in how the frail Man of God had handled the sure Word of God; it could have been in the wordings of his ‘addendum’ and the prophetic ineptness of the ears that had heard him. Not always is the prophet’s addendum introduced with an obvious “therefore,” for which discernment between the Word of God and the ‘clause’ of the messenger might sometimes be confused.

When situations like this arise and opposite prophecies appear to be emanating from the throne of God, it is not God speaking from ‘both sides of the mouth’; it is men reporting the ‘part’ of the prophetic ‘whole’ that THEY are able to see, or the part that GOD has chosen to show to them; it is mortals displaying their inability to analyse prophetic parts or comprehend the prophetic whole.  Any of the two options could be fulfilled without the opposite predictor being a false or wrong prophet.  Both Death and Life would be a valid message from God, and a valid fulfilment, but whichever of the options gets fulfilled will have depended not on God or the prophet of God but usually on the choice of the people.  Note: the people, not a person, not the prophet.  Strangely, the Almighty God respects the corporate choices of feeble mortals in matters concerning them (1 Samuel 8:7-22; Matthew 18:19; Genesis 11:6).

There are passive and active choices.  A voice is a choice; so is silence.  When God warned Eli that trouble was coming to his household for the sins of his children the Associate Priests, he could have gathered everyone and repented before God, but he did nothing (1 Samuel 2:27-29; 3;18).  That was a choice.  When David was confronted with his adultery and murder, he promptly cried out to God (2 Samuel 12:13).  That, too, was a choice.  One was a passive choice; the other, an active choice.

When God warns that trouble is coming, but the people prefer to ignore the warning, it could be a vote for Death.  It is a passive choice.  If they should say, “We do not believe such ‘negative’ prophets and their ‘prophecies of doom.’  No harm shall come to us.  We shall continue in our ways,” it is an active choice.  If they should gather themselves to penitently seek the face of God, like Nineveh, it is also an active choice, but a positive active choice.  Choices are not always active; sometimes they are passive, but they are choices all the same.

Sometimes we actually choose, by sheepish ‘political correctness,’ to not choose between radical options.  In other words, when we choose not to choose, because we wish to be politically correct, it is still a choice, and God has always respected the choices that people make – from the Garden of Eden, through Samuel and Saul, to Nigeria and America, and now, you.

Jonah predicted that God was going to destroy the city and the people of Nineveh in forty days.  He was very persuaded that it would be so.  He never knew that he had seen merely one ‘part’ of the prophetic ‘whole’ about that matter.  The other ‘part’ was that, if the people should hear the warning of the prophet and repent, the imminent Death was going to be promptly averted and replaced with Life.  Jonah took a fight with God when things did not turn out according to the ‘part’ that he had seen and predicted.  If Jonah had been an American, he might have been mocked and cajoled by the press and social media until he apologised and confessed to being a false prophet (Jonah 1-4).  Unfortunately, about one hundred years after Jonah, when all his mockers may have died, the same prediction of disaster still came upon Nineveh (Nahum 1-3; Zephaniah 2:13).  Today, that famous ancient city is a set of mounds along the banks of the Tigris River in Iraq.   Suppose the apologizing American prophets were right after now, and they had only missed the time, not the matter, in their ‘addendum’?

Even when it might not be a case of opposite options, as with Jonah and Moses, sometimes a prophet errs by mistaking his mind for that of God.  The great prophet, Samuel, got to that place when God sent him to anoint one of the sons of Jesse as new king of Israel (1 Samuel 16:6-13). Repeatedly, Samuel kept being distracted by his physical eyes which were at odds with his spiritual ears.  His prophetic ears kept hearing something different from what his physical eyes had been seeing.  The prophet was wrong, but he was not false.  In other words, there is a difference between false prophecy and wrong prophecy.

Wrong prophecy or the wrong prophet is one who makes a sincere mistake but is a true servant of God, like Samuel.  A false prophet, on the other hand, is a messenger of Satan pretending to be an angel of light; he is a deceiver or a “deceitful worker,” who ‘transforms’ himself into what he is not, carrying the title of an Apostle of Christ when he is actually the apostle of Satan (2 Corinthians 11:13-15).  Even if such a ‘prophet’ makes a prediction that comes to pass, he is no prophet of God.  Even if his prophecies were ‘accurate,’ he still remains a false prophet, according to Deuteronomy 13:1-5, just as the wrong prophet remains a prophet of God despite the mistake he might make in his ‘addendums’ to the prophetic ‘part’ entrusted to him.  Apart from false and wrong prophets, there are also fake prophets, who are inspired neither by God nor Satan but are charlatans tricking the gullible.  The true prophet of God is constituted by much more than miracles and the fulfilment of predications (John 10:41; Luke 7:28).

Open thou mine eyes, O Lord, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law (Psalm 119:18). Amen.