Twelve Fortune-Tellers

Week of Monday, June 3, 2002

When I became a Christian the summer after my junior year in high school, I remember reading a book that the New York Times called “the number one non-fiction bestseller of the 1970s.” The book, which even today still carries that blurb, was by Hal Lindsey and was called The Late Great Planet Earth. First released in 1970, today it has sold over 15 million copies. Unfortunately, for many people like me it was their introduction to the world of Biblical prophets and prophecy. I say “unfortunately” because although the book fostered my spiritual enthusiasm and zeal, it retarded whatever Christian enlightenment I might have gained on such an important part of my Christian discipleship.

I know I am not alone, too. Even today far too many Christians listen to those who purvey Biblical prophecy as an exotic, arcane and alarmist connect-the-dots form of prognostication. Harold Camping is a fine example of how the merely goofy (he predicted that Christ would return on September 6, 1994) can quickly morph into the truly dangerous (he now urges Christians to leave their churches and listen to his Family Radio for their spiritual sustenance).

The Biblical tradition of the prophets is a far different matter than Lindsey, Camping and their kin would have it. In my next twelve essays I want to explore what the twelve Minor Prophets of the Old Testament might speak to us today.

When you look at your Old Testament you discover that it contains four books known as the Major Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel)—major because of their size. Then the last twelve books of the Old Testament comprise what since about the fifth century Christians have called the Minor Prophets. The Hebrew rabbis referred to these books simply as The Twelve, and it is probable that they existed as a single book so that none of these very brief treatises would be lost. These seers ministered to Israel across a 400 year period, from about the ninth to the fifth centuries BC.

A prophet was a person with a specific call from Yahweh. One dared not appoint himself to the task, and, in fact, to do so was a clear sign of a false prophet, one who called himself to the task and spoke his own vain imaginations rather than a true word from God. Some of the prophets were prominent statesmen with remarkable literary skills; others like Amos, who claimed to be a farmer and not a prophet, were simple people from small towns called to a divine task.

It's true that part of the prophetic task involved prediction, foretelling, or telling the future in some sense. When you read the book of Matthew, for example, he repeatedly prefaces his quotations of the Old Testament by using the phrase “that it might be fulfilled,” indicating some clear connection between the Old Testament predictions and their fulfillment in the Christ event. Or again, in the last chapter of Luke Jesus appears as a stranger to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Noting their confusion about all that had happened, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). One of the fascinating and frustrating aspects of Old Testament prophecy in this sense of “foretelling” the future is untangling whether and when the prophets were referring to the first or second advent of Christ. At any rate, perhaps the chief role that prophecy in this sense serves us today is captured by Peter. If all these events are to unfold as Christians believe, “you ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming” (2 Peter 3:11–12). The parables of Matthew 24–25 put it even more crisply: be ready, be faithful.

For us today, however, I think the real payoff of the prophets is not their predictions about the future but their proclamations about the present, not their foretelling but their forth telling. By God's grace the prophets of Israel stood in the gap between Yahweh and the nation Israel, interpreted their history, divined the signs of those times, and spoke with unusual candor and awareness about what was truly happening. Thus the Hebrew word “seer”—that is, one who interpreted the signs of the contemporary day. In modern parlance, I think of them as bringing to bear the Good News of the kingdom with the Ordinary News of their everyday lives, of speaking to God's people, if you will, with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other hand.

Part of prophetic forth telling was a thankless but necessary task, a sort of bad cop role. The prophets spoke words of warning and confrontation, and at times this called for dreams, visions, poetry and even bizarre symbolic acts or parables, like marching naked through the streets (Isaiah 20), shattering pottery as people came into the temple (Jeremiah 19), or marrying a harlot (Hosea). Imagine the audacity of speaking harsh words of truth to political power (Amos), of telling an exiled people to plant houses and bear children in the land of their enemies because they were going nowhere at all for a long, long time (Jeremiah), or of struggling to understand and convey to Israel how in the world God could ever let an evil nation like Babylon demolish his elect (Habakkuk). But Israel needed this bracing confrontation, and I venture to say that at some time or another most all of us today need something similar.

Prophetic forth telling also had a good cop aspect. The prophets also proclaimed a message of solace, encouragement and assurance of God's love to a beleaguered nation, and, remember, a nation beleaguered by and large by its own doings. Some of the most poetically beautiful and spiritually moving words of comfort come from these fire brand prophets. Think of Isaiah. True, Israel was a nation “loaded down with guilt,” its cities burned to the ground and its fields stripped bare (1:4, 7). But after the salutary rebuke came the invitation of solace: “Comfort, comfort my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins” (Isaiah 40:1–2). Thank God for the prophetic vinegar, but even moreso for His balm and honey for sick sinners.

In their role of forth telling the present, then, the prophets “admonished the unruly and encouraged the fainthearted” (1 Thessalonians 5:14). Which raises an important question: are there Christian prophets today? The New Testament seems to indicate so since prophets are mentioned numerous times, but the key question is what one means by a prophet or a prophecy. If by that we mean people who receive special revelations from God that, like the Old Testament prophets, one would have to place on the level of the Christian Scriptures, then I think the answer is no. But if we mean people of unusual insight, inspiration, bravery and clarity in the way that they bring the unchanging Good News to bear on a constantly changing world, then I think the answer is yes.

Every Christian in North America should read Ron Sider's “prophetic” book called Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. Os Guinness says that he understands his call to be to explain the church to the world and the world to the church, which description to my mind has a distinctly “prophetic” feel to it. Tony Campolo, to take another example, clearly longs to bring a prophetic type word to the contemporary church. For many people Francis Schaeffer was a prophet of sorts who fully engaged the world and tried his best to understand it—film, art, music, politics, science, university intellectuals, social ethics, etc. At a more heady level there is the French sociologist Jacques Ellul who wrote over 40 books. Half of Ellul's books explored biblical and theological themes, while the other half were social-scientific studies of issues as varied as technology, politics, propaganda, the state, and so forth. All five of these modern “prophets” deserve our attention, and I commend them to you.

Prophets, then, are fortune-tellers of sorts. Yes, sometimes they predicted Israel's future fortunes. But perhaps more importantly, they spoke forcefully to her present fortunes and issues of the day. God grant us eyes to see and ears to hear their special word to our own time and place.

The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2002 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.