Prophecy

Prophecy Under this head we propose to treat of certain general aspects of the subject of permanent interest, reserving for the head of PROPHET what relates more personally to the organs or media of true prophecy, as found in the Bible. In doing so we combine the Biblical elements with the best results of modern criticism and discussion.

I. Design of Prophecy. — In this respect we would define prophecy as "God's communication to the Church, to be her light and comfort in time of trouble and perplexity." Vitringa defines it as "a prediction of some contingent circumstance or event in the future received by immediate or direct revelation." Dr. Pye Smith speaks of it "as a declaration made by a creature under the inspiration and commission of the omniscient God relating to an event or series of events, which have not taken place at the time the prophecy is uttered, and which could not have been certainly foreknown by any science or wisdom of man." Other writers say, "Prophecy is nothing but the history of events before they come to pass." Dean Magee dissents from this popular but erroneous view. In a lecture on the uses of prophecy he defines a prophet as "the religious teacher of his age, whose aim is the religious education of those whom he addresses." To have received a call and message direct from God, and to deliver it, is the essence of prophetism. The Jewish lawgiver in delivering moral and ceremonial precepts received from God, and our blessed Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, were prophets just as much as when they predicted the future of Israel (M'Caul, Aids to Faith). As a reaction from the general body of writers on prophecy, who exalt the predictive and neglect the moral element of God's communication to man, there have arisen in Germany, and to some extent in our own land, writers who speak exclusively of the moral stream of light flowing through prophecy, and deny altogether its predictive character. Both errors will be avoided by bearing in mind that the word of prophecy was profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction, to the first recipients of the message, as well as for succeeding ages.

The usual view of prophecy as anticipated history virtually excludes from the roll the great Prophet who was its theme and author, Moses his distinguished prototype, John the Baptist his eminent forerunner, Elijah, Samuel, under the old covenant, as well as the apostles and prophets under the new. According to this view, prophecy is virtually limited to what the Spirit saith unto the churches in the four hundred years between Hosea and Malachi. and by the beloved John, the writer of the Apocalypse. But if we agree to regard the prophet as the forthteller, possessing the munus praedicandi — rather than the foreteller, possessing only the munus praedicendi — we see at once how the very highest place is assigned to our Lord and to Moses; how John the Baptist was more than a prophet, as he stood within the actual dawn of the day of Christ, and as a religious teacher did really more for the religious training of those whom he addressed than any of the prophets of the old covenant. We see, too, how naturally and clearly the earlier prophets were subordinate to Moses, so that the test of their commission was conformity to the lawgiver; and how appropriately the term is applied to the apostles of our Lord and Saviour, as charged by Christ with the whole ordering and establishing of the Church in its institutions, government, and progress. In fact, students of prophecy perpetually use the word in a non-natural sense. Hence the variety and discordancy of their interpretations. Our attention must be rigidly fixed on the natural and proper sense of the terms, if we would gain any satisfactory results.