Re(Tro)View: What Does It Profit a Prophet

What Does it Profit a Prophet The life of a prophet was not a fun one.  Sure, performing miracles and having private conversations with God almighty isn't without its appeal but the general lifestyle was one of personal deprivation and general conflict with society at large. Being labeled a prophet was almost certainly going to lead to something less than pleasant (prophets tended to die horrible deaths) because having a prophet around almost always lead to conflict between God and the populous. So, when Jesus raises this person from the dead it is unsurprising that the first reaction was fear:  "fear seized them all..." Luke 7:11-17 Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him.  As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother's only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, "Do not weep."  Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you, rise!" The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.  Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has looked favorably on his people!" This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country. Worse yet, once you are labeled a prophet the assumption is that you will perform miracles on demand and miracles don't always come when you want them. You see a prophet's job is not what people tend to assume. Sure there is tons of miracles and the occasional bear mauling (2 Kings 2:22-25) but all in all the job is really just a glorified messenger service.

When God needs to get a message to his people, especially when they are busy NOT listening, he chooses some obedient human whom he can send with a message.  Usually the message goes like this:  "Stop it!".   Yes, being a prophet usually involves telling people to stop doing things they ought to know not to do.  Either that or it involves telling people to do things they ought to know that they should be doing. Basically being a prophet is almost exactly like being a parent.

You spend all your time telling people to do things they obviously should know to do (honestly, turn out the light when you leave the room), telling people not to do things they obviously should not do ("Stop licking the window!" is a phrase I have actually had to utter repeatedly in my 17 years as a parent), or refusing to perform the impossible on demand (no, I do not have a cookie with me, so you may not have one...really). This is the life of a prophet as well.  God has messages, but none of those messages tend to be startlingly new.  In fact, as a rule, they are reminders of old messages. One message from God consistently turns up in all prophets messages and it is the same one Jesus lived out time and time again....

Chick Publishing, the heretical pseudo-Bible tract publishing house, frequently portrayed God the Father as a faceless, furious, murderous, damning, white giant. Unfortunately for so many people when they think of God they really are thinking of the version of God that people like Jack Chick and Johnathan Edwards seem to be determined to foist off on an unsuspecting world.  But the God of the Bible is far from the furious, faceless, white giant.  Time and time again God sent his prophets in a desperate attempt to save his children from themselves.  Prophets were always trying to pull God's people back from the brink of self-destruction. The God of the Bible is a god who loves and cares for his children. He is a God who would give anything and everything to save them, and in fact, eventually did give exactly that in the person of Jesus Christ.  The God of the Bible that the prophets try to convey to the people is a God of love and grace.  Even hateful, evil, corrupt, foreign, non-God believing, Nineveh got the compassionate God treatment when God sent the prophet Jonah to warn them of their coming self-destruction. The messages of the prophets could always be summed up simply by saying that God is loving. God is not the angry, faceless, white giant.  God is the person of Jesus who is hailed as a prophet  because he did exactly what God always seeks to do.  He saved a child...just as God seeks to save you and me, his children, from ourselves. God's prophets often speak hard truths, but it is because we need so much to hear those truths.  The truth saves us.  The truth sets us free.  The truth is that God loves you. God loves me.  God loves the person you have never met halfway around the world. And God wants to save us all.