Prophets

Used with permission from Jamin Bradley's book, Supernatural Justice.

Throughout the Bible, we catch glimpses of Yahweh calling his heavenly family together to meet with him. In such meetings, Yahweh’s family members might report on the affairs of earth that they had witnessed (Gen. 18:20–21; Job 1:6; Zech. 1:10; Matt 18:10), or they might help Yahweh arrange earthly judgments (1 Ki. 22:13–23; Dan. 4:17), or they themselves might experience judgment for their own actions (Ps. 82).

Occasionally in Scripture, humans would find themselves in one of these divine council meetings. Take Isaiah, for example, who was caught up in a powerful vision of Yahweh's throne room (Is. 6). There he saw Yahweh on his throne, protected by his seraphim bodyguards. Yahweh had called his court into session because he was eager to deliver a message to Israel.

This meeting seems a bit odd since Yahweh’s heavenly family is filled with messengers who could have done this. After all, the Hebrew word for messenger is mal’āk. When we’re referring to a human messenger, we simply translate mal’āk as messenger. But when we’re referring to a heavenly messenger, we translate mal’āk as angel, which God’s throne room is full of.

“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (Is. 6:8), Yahweh calls out to the council. Perhaps Isaiah looked around at the myriad of angelic messengers, waiting for someone to respond, when suddenly it dawned on him that he was probably there for a reason. Humans aren’t just brought into the divine council every day.

“Here I am!” Isaiah responded. “Send me” (Is. 6:8).

Yahweh accepts Isaiah’s proposal and commissions him as the mal’āk that will carry his message to humanity. In this light, Isaiah has just become angelic, though he is human. He went into the realm of the angels, received a message from God, and was sent back to earth. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that the word mal’āk can be applied to the different humans Yahweh entrusted with his messages (2 Chron. 36:15-16; Hag. 1:13; Mal. 3:1).

Such humans are Yahweh’s anointed angelic-like messengers—or what we call prophets. These prophets have been taken up into Yahweh’s throne room to hear his declarations and they have brought them back to us. They are Yahweh’s messages wrapped up in earthly skin. They are people of the Spirit (Ho. 9:7).

But as these Holy Spirit-infused women and men returned to earth with Heaven’s messages, they were met with a most upsetting response: people rarely wanted to listen. And not only that, but people often oppressed the prophets for the messages the Holy Spirit stirred up in their hearts. They shunned Yahweh’s human mal’āk, put them in the stocks, and even killed them (Mt. 23:29-35).

Though we consider prophets to be holy people of great renown, they are never treated that way. Their messages and works may become famous in time, but few people in their own generation or hometown ever listened to them (Mt. 13:57). Jeremiah, the most emotive prophet in the Bible gives us a glimpse of what it felt like to serve as an ambassador of Yahweh.

Cursed be the day on which I was born! The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, “A son is born to you,” making him very glad. Let that man be like the cities that the Lord overthrew without pity; let him hear a cry in the morning and an alarm at noon, because he did not kill me in the womb; so my mother would have been my grave, and her womb forever great. Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame? (Jer. 20:14-18)

How many worship songs do we sing and prayers do we pray where we beg Yahweh to speak to us, telling him we’ll listen? The Bible is historical proof that this has rarely been the case and convincing evidence that it rarely will be the case this side of the resurrection. While the prophets have plenty to say, the truth is that the world doesn’t want to hear it—and Yahweh’s people are no different.

Nobody wants to hear the prophets because they have entered Yahweh’s Kingdom of Heaven and returned with a critique of the gods’ Kingdom of Babel. Such a message is especially annoying to the rich and powerful, for Babel has benefited them quite well and they do not desire an alternative way of doing things. Indeed, they assume it must be going so well for them because they have divine favor, so who are these human messengers telling them otherwise? They’re probably just poor, bitter people who are sad that it hasn’t worked out so well for them.

But the prophets can’t stop prophesying. The message of Yahweh overwhelms their hearts like a fire in their bones (Jer. 20:9). They have to speak. They must speak. If they don’t, they’ll explode. And so out of their mouths pour the convictions of Heaven, which come flowing out in the form of judgment. Justice is at the heart of Yahweh’s words, for the world was built for justice and Yahweh feels passionately about injustice. As he sees the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized, he cries out on behalf of the Kingdom of Heaven. If injustice should not be found in the gods, then it should not be found in humans either! In the same way that the gods use their power to oppress humans, humans with greater status use their power to oppress other humans—even though they’re all made in the image of Yahweh. The sons of God were not supposed to do this. Humans were not supposed to do this. Babel is not allowed to do this—it is a perversion of the kind of kingdom Yahweh desires to bring to the earth.

Yahweh is patient, but we must change our ways quickly or face the consequences. This dynamic put the prophet in a bit of a catch-22. As Yahweh revealed to Jeremiah, Yahweh can always choose to dismiss the consequences of his prophetic declarations (Jer. 18:5–11). So if he speaks judgment and people repent, he will remove the prophesied consequences, just as they hoped he would. But because no consequence then happens, his messengers suddenly look like false prophets. “Was anything ever going to happen in the first place?” many would question.

But the prophets know what they’ve heard whether people believe them or not. And even if they somehow hadn’t heard Yahweh correctly, their message of justice would be no less the prophetic message of Yahweh, for his concern for the poor never changes, whether he specifically anointed someone to say it or not. Just as we cannot be wrong when we proclaim Yahweh’s love, so we cannot be wrong when we proclaim Yahweh’s desire for justice, for these themes belong together.

And so the prophets try to serve as a bridge between Heaven and Babel, with the hope of overriding the ways of Babel with the ways of Heaven. They try to work over their society in every conceivable way. They proclaim their messages. They write poetry and fiction. They put on performances. They become living parables. They call out the rich and they defend the poor. And they participate in politics, reporting their heavenly messages to kings who are supposed to listen but are often not open to their critique.

Bad kings especially didn’t want to hear the prophets and instead surrounded themselves with yes-men in the guise of prophets. For example, when King Ahab wanted to go to war, he inquired of 400 of his own personal prophets who all gave him the answer he wanted to hear. Ahab was then pressed to ask an actual prophet of Yahweh, which he did not want to do. “I hate him,” he said. “For he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil” (1 Ki. 22:8).

The prophets are clearly not in this line of work to be popular, for there is no such perk. If you wanted someone to tell you what you wanted to hear, there were hundreds of false prophets you could ask. If you wanted someone to actually check in with Heaven on your behalf, you could ask one of the real ones. But a heavenly response could cause the prophet to face jail time or death; for Babel, its gods, and its kings have little space for truth-tellers, Yahweh’s messengers, or Heaven’s politics.

The earthly messengers of Heaven were more likely considered infamous than famous, for they were known to poke the beast.