I am reading Jesus for President, this has spurred some thoughts about false prophets or prophets in general...
I guess the first question is does God still use prophets in this day and age or did they die off with Biblical times? I'm not sure how to answer this... I firmly believe God still uses people to spread his message to the world, but are they really prophets? What is a prophet? The ones labeled or given the title of prophet in the Bible were people who were directly appointed by God and sent forth with messages for the people given to them directly from God. Interestingly enough, false prophets in order to gain respect and be listened to claimed that thier message was also from God. So, really we only know who was a prophet and who wasn't based on the recorded text in the Bible.
In the day and age of the prophets - people had to take what the supposed prophet was saying and decide whether or not it meshed with what they knew of God... in the same way we need to do that today... This is where it gets tricky... God's message isn't always easy to decipher especially when you consider the number of outside influences that have come together to form a person's experiences and beliefs... anyway I fear this post is just getting rambling and bring about more questions and further confusing the issues...
My main question is this - false prophets vs prophets - how to tell the difference... it seems like nothing is really black and white anymore... of course I don't think it was ever really black and white - maybe during the times when the laws in Deutronomy and Levticus were taken seriously - but even then you could find some grey areas...
Anyway, if false prophets really bring about death and destruction as we warned - then this is a serious matter... one false belief or teaching can spoil the whole thing (see the parables about yeast and weeds)... so how do we go about determining what is true and what is false?
So - my poor readers who suffered through this post - any thoughts on the subject? just as confused as i am?
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