The
prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him
to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.
And if you say in your heart, 'How may we know the word that the Lord has not
spoken?’ – when a prophet speaks in the
name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a
word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously.
You need not be afraid of him.
Beloved,
do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from
God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the
Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the
flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from
God.
Deuteronomy
18:20-22 & 1 John 4:1-3
When I first became a Christian, I was taught that any
person who claimed to speak a prophecy was a false prophet if what he or she
said did not come exactly true. Had they lived in ancient Israel, they would have deserved
to die. No distinction seemed to be made between a sincere but mistaken
minister and a charlatan! It was a long time before I came to understand the
distinction in the above passage from Deuteronomy.
I do not believe that the spiritual gifts that St
Paul writes about in the New Testament faded out following the death of the
apostles or when the New Testament was collated into its present form. That,
however, does not mean that I necessarily believe everything said by someone
displaying a prophetic insight. Everything should be ‘weighed’, even things
said by people whose theology or style we might not quite be comfortable with.
It is not necessary to agree with the general
theological position of a Christian in order to accept either a theological
or a prophetic insight; moreover, any subsequent ideological shifts or moral
failings do not necessarily invalidate what was said. Of course, the exposure
of a serious sacrilege, odious ideological or moral failing would, if it was
pre-existing and on-going at the time of the insight, be good cause for
re-examining it but we need to tread carefully: after all, we would
not want to delete from the Psalms everything David wrote before he committed
adultery with Bathsheba! The litmus test is, as St John explains, whether the
person ‘confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh’.
God does not give people these sorts of insights to
satisfy our curiosity about the future but to prepare us for what is coming. I plan to continue this series next weekend.
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2013.
Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright
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