These false prophets are controlled by evil spirits, and their goal is to turn people away from the truth of God’s Word. No prophet, speaking by the Holy Spirit, can give utterance to anything that contradicts Divine revelation as found between the covers of the Bible. But Satan’s lies come to us in the form of prophecy which is not Biblical, and his predictions always contradict what God has said. It was thus when our first parents sinned. God had said, But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the dccy that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die (Genesis 2:17). Satan followed up with his false prophecy, and said, And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die (Genesis 3:4). Eve believed the false prophecy, even though she was in possession of the true prediction from God. With the presence of lying prophets in the world, it is essential that the Christian test every teacher and his teaching by the Scriptures. One should always bear in mind the fact that while Satan has a prophetic program, along with prophetic teachers to carry out his program, all true prophecy originated with God. The God of the Bible is the commencement of prophecy’s existence. He brought it into being. II. The Occasion of Prophecy What opened the way for the introduction of the prophetic office? No one who has read the Bible with an open mind will deny the necessity of prophecy, nor the fact that it has served, and still serves, most acceptably the people of God. John Skinner, in his book, Prophecy and Religion, said, “ Old Testament prophecy is a phe nomenon to which the history of religion affords no real parallel. It cannot be classified with any other literature of the soul.” Prophecy and the prophets belong in a class by themselves. They cannot be matched. It is true that all religions have had something that closely resembles Bible prophecy, something that purports the idea of a supreme being on whom man’s destiny depends. But in all the religious writings of all time, Bible prophecy stands out unique in its content, consistency, and cul mination. The prophets themselves excelled as poets, teachers, statesmen, reformers, interpreters of life in their day; and, above all, in their own sight as in that of God, they were men who received their message directly from God. Surely an office so majestic as this is not without plan and purpose, and we are impressed with the importance of that purpose as we see the influence of the prophetic writings upon our own times, long after the conditions that produced the writings, as well as the prophets themselves, have passed away. Carl H. Cornill, in The Prophets of Israel, said that prophecy is one of the great est spiritual forces that the history of mankind has ever witnessed, and that there is nothing that can be com pared in the remotest degree with it. We conclude that the prophets and their prophecies did not just happen by accident or chance. Their Divine origin must of necessity have been preceded by a definite occasion. First, Bible prophecy was introduced as a preventive. It was given expressly to God’s people as a warning and guide. After Israel’s flight from Egypt, the people were to go to their new home in Canaan. This was the Land of Promise set apart by God for them. Let us turn, once again, to Deuteronomy, chapter eighteen, commencing at verse nine:. When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations (Deut. 18:9).
Two things we can learn from this verse are that Israel had not yet entered the land when God gave this message through Moses to the people and that when they did arrive in Canaan they were to find certain abominable practices of the Canaanites that God forbade His children to touch. He then proceeded to list those abominations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a con- suiter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necro mancer. (Deuteronomy 18:10,11). The practices listed here were all associated with the spirit world, the unseen, and the future. The abominable practices were the pagan sources of information concern ing future events. The desire for such knowledge is intuitive so that wherever man is found, however savage he may be, there is attached to his religious beliefs some method of getting answers to those questions pertaining to time beyond the present. Before Israel entered the Land, she must be warned that her new home on this earth would have as its background all of the super stitions of the false prophets. Such sources of informa tion were declared by God to be an abomination. Nine superstitious practices are enumerated, all of which must be avoided. And then, to assure His children that there would never be a need for them to resort to false proph ets, God gave them a promise. If they believed the promise and behaved accordingly, they would be pre vented from going astray. The Lord thy God w ill raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him y e shall hearken; (Deuteronomy 18:15). The first thing that God’s children must learn in any dispensation is that the course of their lives, both in time and for eternity, in this present life and in the life to come, is in the hand of the Lord. We, too, are for bidden to attempt to find out the future apart from the divinely revealed Word of. God. It is true the Christian is not under the Law; however, the principle enunci ated in Deuteronomy must surely apply to us. And if that one admonition is not sufficient, the warnings we have just considered in the New Testament should re strain every believer from going outside the bounds of the Bible. Certainly he is not to go to the false prophets of religion, to the tea cup, the crystal ball, the ouija board, or the palm reader. These are abominations in God’s sight and can bring only harm to those who dabble in them. If we stay close to the prophetic Scriptures, they will serve as a preventive against every form of error. “ False prophets are gone out into the world,” says the Apostle John. Our Lord warns, “ Beware of false prophets!” Secondly, Bible prophecy was introduced as a pre ceptive. A preceptive consists of precepts or moral instructions to govern moral behavior. A precept is a prescribed direction for a given course. In the Biblical usage a precept is a charge or command given judicially by God to keep His children from error. The word is used in Psalm 119 no less than twenty-one times and, in each instance it means God’s instructions to guide His people aright. The New Testament usage of this word shows the importance of the preceptive Scriptures. When the Pharisees questioned our Lord about Moses’ precept on divorce, Jesus said, “ For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this p recep t’ (Mark 10:5). The Book of Jonah illustrates preceptive prophecy. Nineveh was a wicked city whose wickedness displeased CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE ^
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