The prophets

A prophet in the Bible is not primarily someone who predicts the future. A prophet is someone who carries God's own words to people who often do not want to hear them. Prediction is sometimes part of the job. Confrontation almost always is.

The pattern starts with a promise. Moses told Israel that God would raise up a prophet like him from among their own people, and that this prophet would speak everything God commanded (Deuteronomy 18:18). That promise set the shape for every prophet who followed, and Christians have long read it as pointing all the way forward to Christ.

Samuel is the first prophet whose call is told in detail. He was a boy sleeping in the temple when God called his name three times before he understood what was happening. His answer became the model prayer of a prophet's life: speak, Lord, for your servant is listening (1 Samuel 3:10).

Being a prophet rarely meant an easy life. Elijah, after his greatest victory over the prophets of Baal, ran for his life and told God he was the only faithful person left in the whole nation (1 Kings 19:10). Isaiah's call came with a vision so overwhelming that he cried out, then still answered when God asked who would go: here I am, send me (Isaiah 6:8).

Jeremiah is perhaps the clearest picture of what the calling actually cost. God told him before he was even born that he was set apart to be a prophet to the nations (Jeremiah 1:5). Jeremiah tried to stop speaking God's word because of how much trouble it brought him, but he said the word was like a fire shut up in his bones, and he could not hold it in (Jeremiah 20:9). Ezekiel received a similar commission, sent to a rebellious people whether they would listen or not (Ezekiel 2:3).

Amos makes the point that being a prophet was never about pedigree. He was a shepherd and a farmer, not trained in any prophetic school, but he said plainly that the LORD took him from his flock and told him to prophesy (Amos 7:14). When the priest at Bethel tried to run him off, Amos did not budge. The prophets as a group carried this same conviction, stated almost like a law: the LORD does nothing without revealing it first to his servants the prophets (Amos 3:7).

Not every prophet ran toward the call. Jonah ran the opposite direction from Nineveh, trying to escape God's assignment by ship (Jonah 1:3). God did not let him go, and the story ends with a stubborn prophet still arguing with a patient God.

Jesus placed himself in this same long line of rejected messengers. He said his own hometown would not accept him, because no prophet is welcomed in his own country (Luke 4:24), and he told his followers that the world had persecuted the prophets before them for the very same reasons it would persecute them (Matthew 5:12).

The writer of Hebrews sums up the whole prophetic era in a single sentence: God spoke to Israel's ancestors at many times and in many ways through the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken through his Son (Hebrews 1:1). Every prophet's word pointed somewhere beyond itself. Jesus is where all of it was pointing.