Theopedia

Prophet

“I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.”

— Deuteronomy 18:18

Definition

A prophet is one whom God appoints and sends to speak his words to his people; the Hebrew nabhi designates “one who comes with a message from God to the people,” and the New Testament’s prophetes means not one who speaks beforehand but one who “speaks forth” from God.1 Where a priest represents the people before God, a prophet represents God to the people, his messenger and the interpreter of his will.2 The line of Old Testament prophets, beginning with Moses, pointed forward to one final prophet the New Testament identifies as Christ (Deut. 18:15, 18; Acts 3:22-23).3

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to the prophetic office as its own topic. It names Christ “the Prophet, Priest, and King” among the three offices of the Mediator, the same threefold office set out in Threefold Office of Christ.4 Its opening chapter states how God used prophets as the instrument of that revelation before it was written down: “it pleased the Lord at sundry times and in divers manners to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his church; and afterward for the better preserving and propagating of the truth… to commit the same wholly unto writing.”5

Biblical Basis

What Scripture means by a prophet

Besides nabhi, the Old Testament uses ro’eh and chozeh, both stressing that a prophet receives revelation, “particularly in the form of visions.”1 Other titles, “man of God,” “messenger of the Lord,” “watchman,” mark the prophets as men in God’s own service, watching over his people’s spiritual interests.1 Scripture requires two things of the office at once: the prophet first receives a divine word, by dream, vision, or direct speech, and then delivers it, whether by preaching or by prophetic action; receiving without speaking does not make a prophet, since Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar both received revelations without being called to proclaim them.6 Their duty was not chiefly to predict the future but to “reveal the will of God to the people,” through instruction, exhortation, and rebuke, protesting formalism and recalling Israel to the law when it strayed, while also holding out God’s promises for the future.7

Testing a prophet’s claim

Because a true prophet speaks for God, Scripture gives Israel two tests rather than leaving the claim unchecked. The first concerns where a sign leads, regardless of whether it comes true:

“If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a miraculous sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder of which he has spoken takes place, and he says, ‘Let us follow other gods’… you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The LORD your God is testing you.”8

The second concerns whether the message comes true at all:

“If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken.”9

Both tests measure a new claim against what God has already revealed, rather than treating the claim as self-certifying: a prophet’s own words “are confirmed on the basis of prior inspired revelations of God,” the same principle the Bereans later applied to Paul’s own teaching by searching the Old Testament (Acts 17:11).10

Fulfilled in Christ

Moses himself promised that God would raise up a prophet “like me” from among Israel’s own brothers, one to be heeded on pain of judgment (Deut. 18:15, 18-19). The earliest Christians cited this promise directly of Jesus (Mark 9:7; John 6:14; 7:40; Acts 3:22-23; 7:37): “early Christians believed that Jesus was not another prophet, but the prophet.”11

Historical Development

Instituted at Sinai

The office receives its founding charter at Sinai, in the same Deuteronomy passage that promises the coming prophet: Moses tells Israel that after him God will raise up further prophets, tests their claims, and warns that presuming to speak in God’s name without his sending, or speaking in another god’s name at all, is punished as false prophecy (Deut. 18:15-22). The office as Scripture describes it, dedicated messengers who receive and deliver God’s word rather than incidental recipients of a vision, dates from this institution rather than from any earlier, informal practice.6

Ended in Christ

The prophetic line reaches its terminus in the one it had always pointed toward. Hebrews opens by setting the prophets and the Son in sequence rather than parallel: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1-2, KJV). Jesus fulfills that line as the one it anticipated, holding the prophetic office as one of three he bears as Mediator.

Opposing Views

Whether the New Testament gift of prophecy (1 Cor. 12:10; 14:1-5) continues in the church today or ceased with the apostolic age divides otherwise orthodox believers into continuationist and cessationist camps, a dispute over that later gift rather than over the Old Testament office itself.

Objections and Responses

If both a true and a false prophet can perform a sign, or make a prediction that comes true, how can anyone tell them apart? Scripture answers that neither a sign’s occurrence nor a prediction’s accuracy is decisive by itself. A sign that comes true but leads toward another god disqualifies the one who gave it regardless of its accuracy (Deut. 13:1-3), because the content of the message, not the display of power behind it, is what marks a message as God’s own.8 Conversely, a message that fails to come true disqualifies its speaker outright, however sincerely delivered (Deut. 18:21-22).9 Both tests work the same way: a new claim is checked against what God has already revealed, not treated as authenticating itself.10

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 343. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 347. ↩

  3. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 5, “The Apostolic Origins of the Canon.” ↩

  4. A Confession of Faith (London, 1677; commonly known as the Second London Baptist Confession, adopted 1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 1. ↩

  5. A Confession of Faith (London, 1677; commonly known as the Second London Baptist Confession, adopted 1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩

  6. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 343-344. ↩ ↩2

  7. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 344. ↩

  8. Deuteronomy 13:1-3, 5 (NIV). ↩ ↩2

  9. Deuteronomy 18:21-22 (NIV). ↩ ↩2

  10. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 4, “The Divine Qualities of the Canon.” ↩ ↩2

  11. Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 2, “The Origins of Canon,” 52-54. ↩