The Prophet's Tongue

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Luke 4:21-30

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.” 1 Corinthians 13:1-2

“Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church.” Ephesians 4:14-15

Prophecy is probably one of the most misunderstood of divine gifts. Early in my ministry when I declared my intentions to seek ordination, I had to take a gifts assessment test to determine my strengths and my weaknesses. For the most part I was comfortable with the assessment results, but the one portion in which I scored highly was in my gift of prophecy; this I was not at all comfortable with because of my limited knowledge at the time of what such a gift entails. Even today I remain skeptical.

When we think of biblical prophets, we see persons who seem to have a direct link to the Divine through which the future is foretold: “prophecies”. We in the Christian faith speak often of the OT “prophesies” of the coming Messiah whose life and ministry had been “foretold”. Those who spoke and wrote of such prophecies were certainly preachers of their time, but this image of “rubbing a crystal ball” is somewhat other-worldly. It is a realm far removed from our own. In our contemporary time, any who make such claims as being a prophet is met with disbelief and even ridicule. In fact, I am one who is extremely cynical toward those who claim to possess prophetic authority.

John Calvin had his own idea of how prophecy is defined and how best this divine gift can benefit the church: “By the term prophesying I do not mean the gift of foretelling the future, but as in 1 Corinthians 14:3 the science of the interpretation of Scripture, so that a prophet is the interpreter of the divine will... Let us understand prophesying to mean the interpretation of Scripture applied to the present need.”

“Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy. For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit. But everyone who prophesies speaks to men for their strengthening, encouragement, and comfort. He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself, but he who prophesies edifies the Church.”
1 Corinthians 14:1-4

For the Lord’s purposes and for the sake of the Church, then, it seems make more sense that prophecy is best utilized for the moment and is not necessarily restricted only to teachers and preachers and is certainly not for “forecasting” purposes. I would surmise that this is a gift, as Paul says, that we should all desire regardless of where life finds us. Even if we possessed such a gift as being able to foretell the future, we would then stand to be in direct conflict with the Lord God Himself because Jesus reminded His disciples that the Day of the Lord, that Day of Judgment, is for NO ONE to know. Jesus Himself reminded the disciples that even HE didn’t know when that day would come. So how would such a gift serve any useful purpose for the contemporary Church? Even the prophecies which seem to have foretold of the coming Messiah never seemed to pinpoint a specific date or time, only that it was to be and that it would be a glad day for the faithful.

None of this is to say that all preachers are prophets or that all prophets must be preachers. One writer, Cecil Robeck, defines New Testament prophecy as “a spontaneous manifestation of God’s grace, received by REVELATION (sometimes as a vision, sometimes as impressions or thoughts) and spoken by the Spirit through a Christian who has been given the gift of prophecy, in the language of those who hear the prophetic word spoken.”

But even if the gift is “spontaneous” and given only by the grace of the Lord as a manifestation of that which can only come from him, can this mean that suddenly a non-believer can be transformed and convicted at once? Yes, I think so. Just as surely as one who wears the mask of piety and can be suddenly convicted of his pretense and deceit, surely one who has no basis of knowledge in the Lord can be fully and firmly convicted of His presence, in fact, His existence. That is, if we truly believe that “with God, nothing is impossible.”

Appreciating the gift of prophecy for the purpose it seems fit to serve may mean that everything must be in the context of how the Church as a whole will benefit from such a gift. It is not that one who has been granted such a gift is especially favored of the Lord because, as it is written, the Lord does not show partiality. It is a gift, however, that is granted not when the individual is ready to use it but, rather, how desperately the Church needs it. It would seem, then, that when the gift of prophecy is timed well and we are intently focused on the will not of ourselves but of our Holy Father and the written Word, the Church will be functioning as it was intended to.

The commission that Jeremiah receives is met with his futile resistance to the Lord that he is “only a boy”, his objection perhaps a reflection of his perceived lack of credibility with the people because of his relative youth and inexperience. Jesus is obviously unafraid to say what needs to be said, but His own lack of credibility with the people seems directly related to the fact that He grew up among these people and that they actually KNOW Him! They’ve known Him all along and it is perhaps for this very reason that they are angry at His words. Perhaps in their minds, Jesus should be more tuned in to what would please them rather than what might upset them.

We should know that deliberately seeking to upset and alienate people will do little to establish any sense of credibility with the people we seek to serve, but at the same time there is a certain truth which we must strive for and seek to serve while understanding that there will always be those who will not be receptive to what we should be offering.

Speaking the “truth in love” will no doubt be the prophet’s greatest challenge. We certainly have to have a love of and for the Lord God that we are willing to alienate ourselves from family and friends for the sake of the Truth, but we must also have enough love for humanity that we possess a genuine concern for the state of their souls, a genuine concern for their eternal well-being. Absent this, it might be best for all concerned if we would just maintain our silence lest we do more harm than good.