“The” Prophetic…

Ever hear this phrase? We all understand it to mean that someone operates in “the” prophetic, or some gifting of that kind.

Soooo….what’s a prophetic and why is it called a “the”? It’s like a noun or something now. It’s an item, a thing. It’s spoken of as something to get in your possesion and use as you wish, when you wish, however you wish. It’s become a thing to be possessed or a tool that is wielded.

I’d like to suggest that you never once find the phrase the prophetic in the bible because it isn’t a “the”.

Ask yourself this: haven’t we turned a way of life and speaking into something that is now an impersonal force, like from Star Wars? It’s something that just is and we need only avail ourselves to this mysterious thing called “The Prophetic”. Sort of like saying, “May the force be with you; May the prophetic be released”. What’s the difference?

So what is prophetic? I’ll try as best I can to sum it up.

The base of the word means literally “forth speak”, or to speak out the word of God as it is given and made known. But what kind of man (and the occasional woman) is it revealed to? What elements make up the character of the man, what’s his background, his life, his history with God? What hardships, sufferings and such have gone into making him the kind of man who confidentley knows that he’s heard from God and can confidentley speak what he has received in the secret council of God? I’d like to tie a thread through all the prophets as their many situations come to mind. I’ll not name them by name but only their hardships. These things are part and parcel of what makes a man/woman a truly prophetic one.

They leave comfortable lives and locations to go to places they know not of. They are imprisoned and falsely accused. They are betrayed by family members. They go about in goat and camel skin garments. They live only on daily provisions as they come, with no stores built up to rely on. They are fearless in the face of kings who hate them. They expose publicly the fraudulence of their prophetic contemporaries and that of the priesthood. They are hated by the popular and elite who claim to be right with God. They hate sin. They preach against it openly and leave no wiggle room. They have the word REPENTANCE branded on their souls and can speak no other thing when it’s time. They live in caves, they wander as nomads, they sleep with one eye open and grieve over the sleepyness of God’s people. They tell pagan kings to repent, though such a word might cost them their lives. They have an acute sense of their own sinfulness that they carry about with them. They feel the most unworthy and the most unqualified….oddly enough this is exactly what qualifies them. They finish the half done jobs of backsliden kings by hacking in pieces those who should have been killed by the King (like many pastors today). They don’t see the performance of biblical things as good enough when they know that the collective heart of the people is away from God and that what they perform is but a dead religious function that angers God. And when they see this they blow the whistle, and that publicly and aren’t afraid to name names. As a result they are put on a “list” of those deemed unfit to live.
The world is not worthy of such. They live with eternity as their number one and in most cases their only consideration in life on earth.

It is because of things like this and much more that such a one as this can be trusted with the very oracles of God. This man is broken down and knows that if God will not give His Life to him that he’ll have no life, no utterance, no sustenance, no-thing in this world worth having. This man will have the right to speak words of comfort and blessing because he has born the disgrace and reproach of having borne the unsavory word(s).

So there’s a prophet, in a very, very small nutshell.

So I have to ask myself, “do they walk in the prophetic or do they walk with God in obedience and in the fellowship of His sufferings and demonstrate prophetic reality, which is God’s way of seeing what is unseen?”. I believe it is the latter.
Prophets weren’t men who walked in “the prophetic”. They were men who walked with God and could be trusted with “forth speaking” His thoughts. They didn’t use the prophetic, they were used by God and what came forth was prophetic.
The Prophetic wasn’t a tool used by them, they were tools used by God. I believe that this distinction is muddied due to the new age influences that have come to us over the last few decades through so-called prophets and psuedo-apostles. That’s why we take pagan ideas into things like this. And maybe it’s not so overtly pagan. It’s simply our American utilitarian way of percieving life. The pagan world, however, views the spirit world and spirits themselves as being available for our benefit and we need only “tap into it” to use it. This idea then colors our christian thinking by tricking us into viewing God the same way. For the sake of our discussion here we’ll limit it to how we view prophetic reality and prophetic men and speaking. It becomes a force that is like a moving stream that one need only tune in to, sort of tune their “consciousness” to get into the prophetic “vibe”.
In essence, it becomes a the.

This is where certain schools of minstry get their ideas for so-called prophetic training. (See this article for a deeper analysis of quasi prophetic guessing games)
No longer is holiness and devouring the Word the primary means of developing a prophetic character. No, you just guess whatever pops into your head after tuning yourself into “the” prophetic. This is no different than the New Age approach to the Force, or Stream of Consciousness. It ultimately sidesteps true propheticness and creates prophecy slot machines.

Well, this is short but that gets this off my chest. It’s been bugging me for a while. I may add to it later or something.

So what do you guys think? Similar experiences, thoughts….what?

mark jr.