ONCE UPON A TIME, someone in my local Church cried out: “I need a word from God!” … I then heard a staff secretary down the hall, saying under her breath, “Read your Bible.”
I couldn’t help myself… I chuckled profusely.
Today it’s evident that with the ease of uploading videos to YouTube, everyone with a ‘word’ from God is prophesying as they please on public YouTube forums.
However, you will find that specific prophecies are few and far between, —instead there are usually mass uploadings of opinions and generalizations given as prophecies.
If you’re a student of the Bible, take note of the many opinions uploaded as a ‘word from God,’ when, if you carefully listen to them they are opinions from the imaginations of the speakers.
The ease of uploading to YouTube has caused many of these preachers to be careless, and none fear of accountability for their words.
Go to the Tree of Knowledge. Pick up your concordance dust it off and use it if you haven’t in a long time. For example, with current events in mind, I did a simple concordance search for:
“Prophecy” and “Prophesy.”
I chose to zero-in on the word “prophesy“…
In Jeremiah 14:14, God was displeased… Here, Yahweh spoke directly to Jeremiah:
The Lord said unto me, The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I did not send them, neither have I commanded them, neither spake I unto them: they prophesy unto you false vision and divination, and a thing of nothing and the deceit of their own heart.
This rebuke could very well be aimed at today’s prophets. Those who prophesy “nothing” are simply prophesying from of their own imaginations.
Indeed, I’ve yet to see one of these various Youtube prophecies subject to any kind of scrutiny. All are accepted at face value by the listeners.
The thing is, if you know in part and prophesy in part (as per 1 Corinthians 13), —then even that partial word from Yahweh must be true…
…Suppose it’s the case for someone that: “God only showed me this much information” … Okay; that’s valid. But if anyone claims to speak for God, he must be circumspect in his language.
In large corporate settings there appears to be an expectation by those in the pews for excitement and swinging on the chandeliers as it were, so that a burden is put on the minister with this bias. That’s too bad. After all, what if God instead wants the pulpit sermon to be repentance from sin to those in the pews?
(Of course the doctrine of repentance has fallen on hard times with the masses. It’s easier to scratch itching ears).
Another branch of the Tree of Knowledge took me to Jeremiah 23:16. Here Jeremiah spoke sternly to his own brethren:
Thus says the Lord of hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord.
This is very remarkable. It’s unthinkable to me that prophets would speak words that are not from the mouth of God. What then was the point of their prophecies? (a rhetorical question).
➤ A modern-day example of this remarkable phenomenon:
In 2020 there was a prophecy given within a popular American Church that was uploaded to Youtube where “judgment on covid-19” was “pronounced” and the virus outbreak was declared “over”… However, following the prophecy covid variants appeared.
➤ A second modern-day example of this remarkable phenomenon:
Another prophet, encouraged in his imagination, used a historical event from the Old Testament to predict that the 2021 Jewish Passover celebration was going to be a “true passover” of the covid-19 virus. This prophecy which gave vain hope to the listeners is also on the Youtube public forum. But nothing changed. The virus did not pass over.
These examples and others like them eventually brought to my mind that:
➤ No prophet had the ear of the President of the United States to forewarn the nation of this apocalyptic pandemic.
➤ Indeed, no prophet had credible foreknowledge of the appearance of this worldwide pandemic that brought the entire world to a standstill and shut down Christian fellowship.
Some may think the Old Testament is a collection of experiences that only concerned the ancient Israelites.
If you consult the Old Testament, you’ll see that God sometimes chose to use disease and calamity to visit judgment on people. At other times God chose to install evil rulers, and in still other cases Yahweh brought His own people under captivity to cause humiliation for repentance.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
If you also consult the New Testament epistles, Paul, too, warns of Christian communities having corrupt influences of false prophets and false teachers.
Saints, take Bible-literacy seriously. The Bible is the best standard to judge prophetic declarations—use the hindsight of history from God’s Tree of Knowledge. And if you need a “word from God” first consult your Bible.
/St. George of Hyperlink ☦️
GeoCalifornian 