As we enter into the month of November, we are also entering more deeply into the biblically story on Sunday mornings. We have seen God make promises to his people and his people wandering from those promises and chasing after something else. We have also seen that God’s response to that is not wrath but grace. He comes and offers new beginnings time and time again. We have been chosen by a wonderfully faithful God to be his people. It is our prayer that we can respond in faith each day.
Now that we are deeply involved in the story we seem to have reached a point were God does not speak directly to a group of people. Rather, God has chosen to speak through prophets. The month of November will be dedicated to looking at a few of these prophets–some successful in their calling, others not.
But, what in the world is a prophet? We hear the word thrown out quite a bit, but what does it mean? The New Oxford Dictionary gives us this defination,:
prophet |ˈpräfit|
noun
1 a person regarded as an inspired teacher or proclaimer of the will of God: the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah.
They will also go onto describe it as, “someone who makes or claims to be able to make predictions about the future”.
This last definition is the one that we most often, it seems, associate with the role of the prophet. We look to those who seem to be able to predict the future as prophets. But, to see this as the primary function of a prophet in the bible would be to miss the point. The prophets primary role is exactly as the first (and, it seems, less well known) definition points out. A prophet in the biblical sense is one who proclaims the will of God. Period. End of story. Do they tell what the future will be. Yes. But, they tell it in the sense of what the people will be walking into if they continue on their current path. It is similar to telling a child if they put their hand on the stove burner they will burn themselves. If they do it and burn themselves, it doesn’t mean the parent can see into the future in some magical sort of way. It only means the parent can see what the future will look like if the child acts in this way.
The role of prophet has remained the same. But, with the coming of Christ, the task of being a prophet has fallen on all who believe. We are to take our abilities, whatever they may be, and let others know of God’s will to give to us and the whole world his son as our Savior.
Join us as we journey through the prophets in November and prepare for the fulfillment of all things in the birth of Christ, the Will and Word of God made flesh. The one that we as modern day prophets point towards!
