Last fall, we were talking about messianic prophecy - about how prophecy was used by the authors of the New Testament to make their case that Jesus was the promised Messiah. For the next few weeks as we begin the winter session, I thought it would be interesting to look at the prophets themselves and about the nature of prophecy in general. What are prophets and what do they actually do? I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about prophets and prophecy that tend to dominate how people think about this subject. In very broad terms, for example, I suspect that if you asked the average person on the street what prophecy was, they would say that prophecy is predicting the future, and so, prophets are people who predict the future. I didn’t see much of this at the turn of the calendar a few weeks ago, but sometimes as one year passes into another the airwaves are filled with so-called prophets who make predictions about the year to come. But while that might be a popular understanding of prophecy and prophets, it’s not a biblical understanding. In the Bible, a person who could predict the future was called a “soothsayer” - and the Law of Israel was not kindly disposed to soothsayers. So you find these words in Deuteronomy 8: “No one shall be found among you who makes a son or daughter pass through fire, or who practices divination, or is a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer. … Whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord.” The Old Testament makes it pretty clear that soothsaying is not something Israel is to engage in. It’s a practice of those who follow foreign gods. I suspect that the strong reaction against soothsaying was simply that it represents a lack of trust in God. God’s people are to trust God with the future. Even Jesus said to worry about things one day at a time and leave the future to God. So that popular notion of prophecy and prophets today is actually unbiblical.
Prophets don’t “predict” the future, although they may speak of the future. Basically, the prophet acts under the inspiration of God, speaks for God, brings God’s word and judgement to bear on the issues of the day, engages in social analysis, looks at trends, and talks about what the consequences will be if things continue to go on the way they going at the present time. Prophets tend to be anti-establishment, because they’re critiquing the way things are, and the way things are usually tends to favour the establishment of the day. Prophets have a tendency to rise in times of difficulty or chaos. If things are going really well, there’s not too much need for prophets. That actually may be too bold a statement. There might be a huge need for prophets when times are good, actually, because good times can make a society lose sight of the way of God, and the role of the prophet would be to call the people back to God. So perhaps it’s better to say that in good times people are less inclined to listen to prophets.
There’s been a rise in the number of people who call themselves prophets in recent years - or maybe the rise is in the attention they get. I think there are a couple of factors that have led to that rise. First is the pandemic. Covid has the feel of an Old Testament style disaster that has rocked all of society. The second I would suggest is the rise of Donald Trump. He became (in ways I don’t fully understand) the voice of a lot of people who had felt voiceless. He represented a constituency that often felt powerless and that latched on to him. Perhaps they really believed he would help them or maybe it was just his rejection of all the social and political norms that the establishment had played the game by. But there’s certainly been a (to me) very uncomfortable blending of religious fervour with the Trump movement, with Trump being seen almost in messianic terms by some and with the rise of many self-proclaimed prophets who have come forward to defend him or promote him. But these two phenomena I think have contributed to the rise of “prophets” in the modern world. Prophets question authority, and if I Google prophets today I find a whole range of people, most of whom are either promoting conspiracy theories about the pandemic or conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. Most of these prophets I reject because they’re self-proclaimed. If I understand prophecy correctly in the Bible most prophets really don’t want to be prophets. They’d rather do anything else. Sometimes they ask - even beg - God to let them off the hook. People who latch on to the title “prophet” and aggressively promote themselves as prophets perhaps explains why the New Testament warns Christians to beware of “false prophets.” Just because someone says they’re a prophet doesn’t mean they are a prophet! That’s why I think this might be an ideal time to really try to understand the nature of prophets.
For this week, I asked you to do some reading from two prophets. The first reading was the introductory passage of the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah was an important figure for Israel. So who was he? Like most of the Old Testament prophets, we actually know very little about him aside from what he reveals about himself. In his introductory words he identifies himself as the son of Hilkiah, and establishes that Hilkiah seems to have been part of a priestly family. So Jeremiah would have grown up surrounded by the religious practices and problems that were being faced by God’s people at the time. He then places himself within history by identifying the kings who reigned. He specifically mentions Josiah, Jehoiakim and Zedekiah. Josiah was a faithful king who tried to promote Israel’s religion. He tried to lessen or even remove the influence of followers of other gods and he was a player in the work of compiling some of Israel’s Scriptures. His problem was what we today would call foreign affairs. He became king when the region was in turmoil. Israel and Judah had separated and were relatively weak. The Assyrian Empire had been the dominant power in the region for a long time but it had collapsed and been conquered by the more aggressive and expansionist Babylonian Empire. Babylon had then conquered Egypt, leaving Israel and Judah basically surrounded and hopeless. The other two kings mentioned - Jehoiakim and Zedekiah - are declared in 2 Kings to have been “evil kings.” There were also two other kings who reigned only for a few months combined (Jehoahaz and Jehoiachin.) The point is that this was a time of religious and political upheaval with Israel and Judah both under threat from both within (religiously from foreign gods) and from without (invasion by foreign powers.) This is exactly the environment you would expect prophets to rise in: chaos, turmoil, fear, religious and political upheaval. Sound familiar?
God calls Jeremiah to be a prophet. Jeremiah’s calling seems to have been pre-determined. It wasn’t anything Jeremiah had done that made him God’s choice to be a prophet - it was simply that God chose him. Remember my caution about self-proclaimed prophets? You don’t declare yourself to be a prophet; God calls you to be a prophet and the people recognize God working through you. Those who have to constantly try to convince people that they’re prophets have a questionable calling. Verse 5 talks about Jeremiah’s calling from God: “Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” You will hear anti-abortion activists take the words “before I formed you in the womb I knew you” out of context and use them to argue against abortion rights. I don’t want to get into that subject except to say that these words have nothing to do with abortion or with a fetus in the womb (in fact, it refers to “before I formed you in the womb.” All these words are doing is saying that “I [God] chose you long before you were even born.” This is a statement of destiny and of calling - not a political statement against abortion. Jeremiah resists the call - which is not out of the ordinary (we’re going to talk about that in more depth next week) - by saying that “I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”We don’t actually know how old Jeremiah was when he began prophesying, but there’s no reason not to take this at face value. He received his call when Josiah was king. We don’t know how far along in his reign Josiah was at this point, but Josiah reigned for 31 years and Jehoiakim and Zedekiah reigned for 11 years each. So Jeremiah’s call came well over 20 years before the exile to Babylon (which happened at the end of Zedekiah’s reign) and it’s likely that his prophecy continues well into the exile, so he must have been young when God called him. Jeremiah also wrote the Book of Lamentations, which is exactly what it sounds like - it’s a lament about the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon. Jeremiah’s prophecies are also described as being to “the nations” - so not only to the Jews, but to the Gentiles as well. Through Jeremiah (among others) God is established not as a tribal god of Israel but as THE God of all the world who speaks to all the world. So we actually learn a lot about prophets and prophecy from these opening 10 verses of Jeremiah.
I also asked you to read the entire prophecy of Habakkuk. It’s a fairly short prophecy (only 3 chapters long) but it adds to our understanding of what prophets do. We know very little about Habakkuk - to be honest, we know almost nothing about Habakkuk the person except that he was a prophet. The Book doesn’t mention his father, his hometown, what tribe he belonged to or anything else about his background. There are some extra-biblical stories about Habakkuk bringing bread to the prophet Daniel during the time that Daniel was in the lion’s den, but that’s obviously myth. His name is interesting, because it’s not a Hebrew name. It seems to be an Akkadian name (not Acadian French, but an ancient language spoken at the time by non-Jewish inhabitants of a region in the holy land called “Akkad and it probably means plant or perhaps more specifically “fruit tree.” Make of that what you will.
The thing that intrigues me the most about Habakkuk’s prophecy - and the reason I asked you to read it - is because I have always been intrigued by its structure, and I think the way it’s structured helps us to understand something about the dynamic at play between God and the prophet. The prophecy is set up as a conversation (which may be too mild a word actually) between the prophet and God. It isn’t always clear exactly when Habbakuk is speaking and when God is speaking. It’s also noteworthy that it’s Habakkuk who challenges God in the prophecy and God who gets put in the position of replying. The first four verses are a series of questions from Habakkuk that seem to establish (much like Jeremiah’s context) that the people are falling into chaos. “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous - therefore judgement comes forth perverted.” Habakkuk represents, I think, every person who has ever believed in God, because no matter how strong our faith eventually something happens that makes us look at God and say “Why?” It’s as I said earlier, prophets (real ones or false ones) arise during times of crisis and turmoil when people are looking for answers or solutions but not finding any.
God then replies from verses 5-11 and God’s reply gives us historical context, but it’s also unsettling. The historical context comes in verse 6: “For I am rousing the Chaldeans, that fierce and impetuous nation, who march through the breadth of the earth to seize dwellings not their own.” “Chaldeans” is another name for “Babylonians.” So, again, Habakkuk’s prophecy is set probably as Israel and Judah are about to be conquered. (We talked a lot about the exile to Babylon in the fall and how it led to messianic expectation - you simply can’t ignore that the exile of Israel and Judah to Babylon was a formative moment in their history; it impacted everything about their culture, their religion, their traditions and it gave rise to the age of the prophets.) Habakkuk is like any other person living in that nation at that time. Terrified, angry - wanting to know “why is this happening?”
At verse 12, Habakkuk then stops challenging God, and becomes more reflective in his approach. He talks about God’s attributes; God’s actions in the past. My sense is that God has caused Habakkuk confusion by saying that he would be working through “the Chaldeans.” Why? Were the Jews not God’s people? Should God not work through them, take care of them, help them? Habakkuk doesn’t understand, but comes to a decision: “I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint.” In other words, Habakkuk decided that he couldn’t understand God’s ways, and his only recourse was to sit back, and watch and wait. Years ago in a different church I once preached a sermon on the Book of Habakkuk that I entitled “How To Pass Time On The Watchpost” - about the frustration of waiting for an answer from God, and how answers come in God’s time and not ours.
We don’t know how long it took for Habakkuk to get his answer, but it does finally come. Habakkuk is instructed to write it down - it’s not just an answer to him, but to all of God’s people who had been crying out “Why?” in the midst of the disaster unfolding around them. And God provides a long list of reasons that this is happening to Israel. God comes across as disappointed with the people, even as angry with the people. To me, the most gut-wrenching part of God’s reply is verse 8: “Because you have plundered many nations, all that survive of the peoples shall plunder you - because of human bloodshed, and violence to the earth, to cities and all who live in them.” In other words, what goes around comes around; you’re getting back what you gave. The end result of it all is that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” Somewhat similar to Jeremiah being told to prophesy to all nations, this prophecy establishes that God works through all nations. Israel may have been chosen for a particular purpose, but God was the God of all nations, not just Israel. In the end, for all Habakkuk’s (and the people’s) disappointment and anger that God will not save them from the Chaldeans, there can still only be one response to what God has revealed: “But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him!” Jews, Gentiles - it doesn’t matter. All the earth is awestruck by God; dumbstruck; silenced.
Habakkuk’s prophecy ends on a strange note. Chapter 3 is called a prayer of the prophet Habakkuk. It feels like a later add-on. It has the feel and sound of a psalm, right to the end when it’s declared to be “to the leader: with stringed instruments.” This implies that this prayer or psalm is a form of hymn that’s to be used in the worship of the people. That has led some people to believe that Habakkuk was a priest, but he’s never identified as a priest; only as a prophet. The prayer declares God’s praises, describes God’s power and establishes that we can only be humbled before God. And even in the midst of the unfolding tragedy, there remains only one viable response: “yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights.” The overwhelming message of the prophecy that’s left with the people is that no matter what things are happening, God is there to strengthen God’s people and to see them through their troubles.
I said when I started that one of the roles of the prophets is to speak for God. The primary reason I asked you to read Habakkuk is that this prophecy expands on that. This prophecy is a kind of dialogue between Habakkuk and God. Habakkuk doesn’t just wait for God to fill him with words. Habakkuk - and likely all prophets - speaks not only for God; the prophet speaks with God. It’s an ongoing dialogue that inevitably, on the part of the prophet, requires a lot of patience and a willingness to wait for God’s will to be revealed.
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