“For the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets. The lion has roared; who will not fear? The LORD GOD has spoken; who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:7-8, ESV)

***When you study the lives of the prophets of God, they shouldered staggering amounts of theological weightiness and truth for the people of God. And the world hated both these messengers of truth and their messages.

When Amos was writing about judgments that would befall the northern kingdom of Israel, the people largely retorted that judgments were for other nations, but surely not their own. And in 722 B.C. Assyria would topple Israel, just as the prophet Amos had written.

Again, I would argue, when you study the lives of the prophets of God, you see that they shouldered staggering amounts of theological weightiness and truth for the people of God. And the world hated both these messengers of truth and their messages.

So much depends on the receptivity (or lack thereof) of the prophets’ messages of truth.

It’s the same principle Christ taught when He spoke of the different soils. He even had to stoop to such a level as to break it down into bite-sized nuggets of truth for some people to understand:

Hear then the parable of the sower: When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was sown along the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty. (Matthew 13:18-23, ESV)

Reminders for us: The prophets God raised up in the Old Testament are no more in the sense that Christ has come. Judgment was executed upon God the Son at Calvary for all who will be redeemed. But I would argue that God still sends prophetic voices to His creation in at least one sense–namely, in the form of discerning teachers-shepherds. One of the battles involves helping people to see the reality, to see a message, if you will, that God continually teaches in Scripture: wisdom/discernment.

Here are just a few examples:

• “Be wise, my son, and make my heart glad” (Pr 27:11a, ESV)
• “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil” (Eph 5:15-16, ESV)
• “How much better to get wisdom than gold!/To get understanding is to be chosen rather than silver” (Pr 16:16, ESV)
• “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm” (Pr 13:20, ESV)
• “. . . but I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil” (Rom 16:19, ESV)

Encouragement: No matter how many times one reads through the Scriptures, he finds that the Scriptures actually read him. They are where wisdom resides, in God’s revelation to us of what we are really like, why we are in the conditions we’re in, and why the macro-level issues are what they are. This is a post-lapsarian world, that should be obvious to all. But God sends us prophetic voices still in the form of wise teachers-shepherds. May we be a people who discern the genuine ones, so that we may get a heart of wisdom.