I wrote a song a year or so ago with the refrain,
Every prophet I heard
took me firmly
by the hand …
to shifting sand.
The point of the song is that we live in a time when certain people speak as if they have all the answers to life (or at least some specific aspect of life) and others look to them as having the answers to all their needs (and therefore don’t bother to, or take the time to, discern the truth for themselves). Unfortunately, this applies to many, many Christians. Most Christians, for example, take the teaching of their pastor or favorite radio host at face value and do not read the Bible and pray for God to directly teach them. This keeps Christians in a Nicolaitan (clergy-laity) relationship which God condemns.
Another great travesty among Christians is that some believe they have (and I think some actually do have) a strong prophetic gifting and, based upon certain things that the Holy Spirit shows them, they say outlandish things and make great predictions that never (and I mean NEVER) come to pass. There are whole websites and ministries filled with these thousands of failed prophecies.
What makes this even worse is that many of these so-called prophets or talking sages cannot even discern good and evil. I know one who listened for years to his side-kick prophet spout sexual euphemisms about Florida and Uranus and talk about the exodus as if it were God’s people leaving Mars (Cydonia). To my knowledge he never rebuked him; he just attended more conferences with him as a guest speaker. I know another, often considered the greatest evangelical Christian in America, who made himself rich off of his listeners, yet never even counseled them to take their kids out of the pagan public schools. How could he? He might offend them and lose their donations!
This is what Hebrews 5:10 means when it says that we have become “dull of hearing.” We have selective hearing. We have a thought. We see an event. We think it’s a sign and we concoct some elaborate theory about how God is going to do this or that. It doesn’t happen when we expect, so we cry, “the Hezekiah factor,” and expect that perhaps ten years later it will happen. Or, we see real evil in the world, say in our public school program that’s trying to get our kids to try witchcraft, or homosex, or Islam, and we fail to warn those who might listen to us to get their kids out while they still can!
God calls His people to exemplfy His rightousness in the earth. He exhorts us to be holy as he is holy. He commands us to leave the camp, to quit sitting in the seat of the ungodly, in order to do that. Trying to predict the rapture does not do that. Trying to make the two-income family that sends their kids to public school feel good about themselves doesn’t do that.
