The Bible is full of prophets and prophecies, but so is YouTube.  What is the difference between the prophets of the Bible and many modern-day people who claim the gift, and how can you tell who is a true Biblical prophet and who is a false prophet?  This issue is more important for us today than ever before as event after event seems to point towards the nearing end of our world, and more and more people keep coming out of the woodwork claiming to be able to make predictions about the next disaster.  Unlike many Christians, I do not discount the idea of modern prophets.  However, I also advise people to proceed with caution, study their Bibles for themselves, and make informed decisions.  Unfortunately, many Christians are confused as to what a prophet is and how to discern true from false prophets.

The first area of confusion that needs to be cleared up is the idea that a prophet always foretells the future.  This is just one area of a prophet’s duties.  Basically, a prophet is someone who has been specifically called by God as a spokesperson.  Prophets are not born to their position like the ancient Levitical priests of the Hebrew temple.  Prophets do not study and graduate from prophet school.  Instead, they are chosen by God Himself.  Isaiah 6 and Jeremiah 1 have some interesting examples of a prophet receiving a call.  One important characteristic of a prophet that these examples reveal is that the prophet is not presenting his or her own thoughts.  Instead, the word of God comes to them directly, and then they are to present the information to the people in the manner in which they are told by God or an angel from God.  The key point is that the prophet’s message is not simple inspirational insights or messages given by the Spirit for an individual’s private edification.  Instead, the messages are given to the prophet to present to other people.  Thus, a prophet speaks with authority when delivering a message from God and accepting that message is critical to a person’s spiritual and physical well-being.

In the Bible, prophets receive messages from God in various ways.  Sometimes, prophets have visions where they are awake, but they see sights and/or hear sounds that people around them do not.  This happened to Daniel at least once.  “And I, Daniel, alone saw the vision, for the men who were with me did not see the vision, but a great trembling fell upon them, and they fled to hide themselves” (Daniel 10:7).  This also happened to Paul on the road to Damascus in Acts 9 where the men with him heard a voice but did not see Jesus.  Other times, angels speak to prophets.  Daniel experienced this form of communication also when Gabriel came to explain a vision to Daniel in chapter eight.  At times, God speaks directly to the prophet as He did with Samuel and Jonah. Prophets also receive messages in dreams as they are sleeping in their beds.

The prophet’s job can include foretelling the future, but there are other functions that a prophet fills.  A prophet may be asked to interpret past events in the light of God’s interactions with His people.  Moses did this when writing Genesis.  Another function of a prophet is to correct error and bring people to repentance or to making right choices.  For example, God sent the prophet Nathan to David to convict him of the depth of his sin with Bathsheba in chapter twelve of Second Samuel.  Even when the prophet is foretelling the future, his function is to guide people into choosing the right path.  For example, Ezekiel had vision after vision warning the Jewish exiles of the fall of Jerusalem long before it happened.  These messages from God were meant to show the exiles that Yahweh was choosing this course rather than being defeated by the Babylonian gods and to bring the exiled Jews to repentance.  Most of all, a prophet was to reveal God to the people.  For example, Jeremiah opens up God’s heart to his rebellious people in chapter nine.  “Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people! Oh that I had in the desert a travelers’ lodging place, that I might leave my people and go away from them! For they are all adulterers, a company of treacherous men. They bend their tongue like a bow; falsehood and not truth has grown strong in the land; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 9:1-3). 

While all the books of the Bible were written by prophets of God since they are direct messages from God to His people given through inspiration to the authors, not all prophets wrote their messages and not all written prophetic messages were included in the canon of the scriptures.  For example, Paul wrote a letter to the Corinthians that is not included in the Bible.  We know about it because he refers to it in First Corinthians 5:9.  In the Old Testament, Second Chronicles mentions three such books.  “Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, from first to last, are they not written in the history of Nathan the prophet, and in the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, and in the visions of Iddo the seer concerning Jeroboam the son of Nebat?” (2 Chronicles 9:29).  These messages from the prophets were just as inspired by God as those included in the Bible.  The difference is that the Bible includes messages that are for all times while prophets whose messages are not recorded in the scriptures were giving truths that were relevant to the specific time and situation that they were living in.

Prophets came from many different backgrounds.  Some were farmers while others were priests and still others were from royal families.  Both men and women were called to be prophets.  Isaiah speaks of his wife as the prophetess, and Luke 2:36 speaks of a prophetess named Anna.  Acts 21:8-9 tells of one of the deacons whose four daughters were prophets.  “On the next day we departed and came to Caesarea, and we entered the house of Philip the evangelist, who was one of the seven, and stayed with him. He had four unmarried daughters, who prophesied” (Acts 21:8-9).  Prophets could be children.  Samuel was called to deliver messages from God while he was still quite young.  On the other hand, prophets could be quite old.  Moses was 120 years old when he died.  The age when a person was called to be a prophet also varied.  As mentioned previously, Samuel was called when he was still a boy.  On the other hand, Ezekiel was thirty years old when he was called to be a prophet to the Jewish exiles.

There were times in history where there were few messages from God through prophets.  First Samuel points this out. “Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the LORD in the presence of Eli. And the word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision” (1 Samuel 3:1).  At other times, there were groups of prophets working and living together.  Second Kings chapter two speaks of a guild of prophets that included at least fifty men.  Messages from prophets seem to come more frequently when God is about to act and when the people need guidance or to repent.  Thus, there were quite a few prophets in the early church to guide people through the many changes happening around them while there had been a scarcity of prophets for about four hundred years from Malachi until John the Baptist.  During the Babylonian captivity, God strategically placed Daniel in the empire’s capital city of Babylon, Jeremiah in Jerusalem, and Ezekiel in a settlement of Jewish exiles, and all three men received messages that helped to guide the course of events and to point the people towards the best course of action.

There have always been false prophets, as well as true prophets.  For instance, Jeremiah had to contend with such false prophets who contradicted the message that he was presenting to the king in Jerusalem.  With all the variety associated with prophets, how can we know which prophets are truly from God and which prophets are false?  Unfortunately, we cannot always tell by behavior.  David committed adultery and murder, yet his psalms prophesying the Messiah contain some of the most haunting insights into Jesus’ feelings and sufferings in the whole Bible.  Jonah ran from God in disobedience before finally delivering the message that God wanted him to present to the people of Nineveh.  The Bible gives several guidelines for true prophets.  First, the prophesies should come true.  “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” (Deuteronomy 18:21-22).  However, care should be taken with this test of a prophet since many prophecies are inherently dependent upon human reactions to the prophesy, i.e., they are conditional.  For example, Jonah prophesied that Nineveh would be destroyed, but when they repented, they were not destroyed because God granted them mercy.  Thus, even though Jonah was a true prophet of God, his initial prophesy did not come true.  Isaiah has several prophecies that would have come true if Israel had remained true to God, such as Assyria and Egypt being allies with Israel.  However, because of the lack of faith and idol worship of Jews, these prophesies did not come to pass.  A more dependable test of a prophet is in Isaiah.  “And when they shall say to you, Seek to the mediums and to wizards who peep and mutter; should not a people seek to their God, than for the living to the dead? To the Law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this Word, it is because no light is in them”  (Isaiah 8:19-20 MKJV).  The best way to know if someone is a true or false prophet is to know your Bible.  Then if someone claims to be a prophet, you can compare their words to the Bible itself.  If they claim to be able to change the Bible, you can be sure that they are speaking falsely.  If they claim to have seen visions that are the opposite of Biblical truth, especially as revealed by Jesus, then there is no truth to their visions.  Remember, Jesus was the ultimate revelation of God’s character and actions, so anyone who claims to speak for God should give messages that reveal the same principles of God’s love for humanity as Jesus did.