The validity or veracity of a prophecy doesn’t hinge on peer reviews, how many bear witness to it in their spirit, or how popular the individual delivering it is, but only on whether it’s in harmony with God’s Word. Does it do what prophecy is meant to do, which is to edify, exhort, comfort, warn, foretell some future event, correct, rebuke, and draw the individual toward repentance, righteousness, and sanctification?
Any supposed prophetic word that doesn’t fall into one of
these categories can be dismissed outright, no matter who insists that they are
hearing from the Lord. How does someone knowing my dog’s name edify, exhort,
comfort, warn, correct, rebuke, or stir repentance in my heart? How does their
knowing the name of the street I live on, or my long-dead great-grandmother’s
name, do any of the aforementioned things we know, biblically, prophecy is
supposed to do?
If you’re looking for parlor tricks, plenty of mentalist
shows in Vegas do that. If you want to be impressed by someone’s knowledge of
your family tree, plenty of websites will tell you where your people originate
from, how they migrated to where they ended up, and everything in between.
On the conservative end, the Old Testament contains over
three hundred prophecies about the birth, life, death, burial, and resurrection
of Jesus. Other, more generous estimates number closer to 550. It took over
four hundred years for the last prophecy regarding the birth of Jesus to be
fulfilled, and close to a thousand years from the first.
It boggles the mind and humbles the soul of man to consider
such a thing, but what gets overlooked in the grandeur of some 48 prophecies
being fulfilled by His birth alone, and over 300 throughout His life, is that
those contemporary with the generation in which Jesus was born knew the
scriptures well enough to identify them, harken back to them, and acknowledge
their fulfillment.
Know your Bible. Know what it says for yourself, not what
others say the Bible says, whether regarding prophecy, the end times, the
supremacy of Christ, the last days, or how a believer ought to conduct themselves
as strangers in a strange land, because in knowing what Scripture says, you
will more readily be able to identify when someone speaks a thing which the
Scripture does not say, trying to pass it off as the truth.
Those who claimed to be prophets of the Lord had the bona fides
to back up their claims, from possessing the authority granted to them to
prophesying events that came to pass, to living lives honoring to the God they
served.
It was never about image, popularity, or consensus; it was
about faithfully delivering the message they were tasked with delivering, and
more often than not, to their own personal detriment. If you stood before a
king or someone of great authority, it doesn’t take a genius to deduce that you
would more readily be received and honored if you were to prophesy that their
kingdom would grow and flourish rather than that God would snatch it out of
their hand and all that they’d built would come to ruin.
The men of courage and boldness whom God called to prophesy
in the Old Testament knew full well that they would stir the ire of individuals
who had the authority to make their lives miserable, and even end them
violently if they were to deliver the words they received unredacted and
unfiltered, yet they did it nonetheless.
We often refer to the words of prophecy Elijah, Jeremiah,
Isaiah, Amos, Zechariah, or any of the others delivered, but rarely consider
what it personally cost them to do so. For faithfully delivering the word of
the Lord, Isaiah was placed in a hollow tree and sawed in two at the order of
King Manasseh. For speaking the word of the Lord as instructed, Jeremiah was
put in stocks, publicly humiliated, beaten, and thrown into a muddy dungeon,
only to be stoned to death in Egypt. Zechariah was stoned to death by King
Joash for his unflinching faithfulness, and Amos had to flee for his life for
preaching against Israel’s idolatry, meeting his end when he was tortured to
death by a priest of Bethel.
If you want to prophesy thinking it will bring you honor and
accolades, look back on those who came before you and realize the only ones
that were esteemed, honored, elevated, and praised by the people were the false
prophets who tickled ears and promised all would be well even though the people
had strayed from God and gave themselves over to idols.
Those who delivered a true word from the Lord, whether a word
of warning, judgment, or the insistence that they must repent and cast aside
their idols lest the wrath of God come upon them, were not as readily embraced,
because killing the messenger, thinking it would invalidate the message, has
always been a viable option for those unwilling to submit themselves to the
will, purpose, and authority of God.
By using the Biblical litmus test, and seeing how true men of
God were treated throughout, we can rightly deduce that most of what passes for
prophecy today isn’t, and most of those insisting they are prophets aren’t.
That’s not to say true prophecy does not exist. Wherever the
counterfeit, or the false, exists, the true, authentic, and real will also
exist; if there wasn’t true prophecy, there would be no need for false prophecy.
The US dollar is counterfeited because it exists, is real, and serves as legal
tender. If it didn’t, then anyone could point to it, laugh, and conclude that
it was funny money.
The purpose of a counterfeit is to create something almost
identical to the real thing, so much so that you could pass it off for the real
thing. If you’ve held enough dollars, whatever the denominations, you will know
the counterfeit by feel. Those in doubt can always avail themselves of the
counterfeit detector pens, those things that grocery stores are fond of checking
large bills with, because even if you might have been tricked by the feel of
it, the pen doesn’t lie.
The Bible works like the money marker pen. It is the counterfeit detector. You may feel something is authentic or true, but if the pen tells you it isn’t, then it isn’t, no matter how close it may be to the real thing.
With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea, Jr.
.jpg)
