The sinful world is famous for rejecting God’s prophets. Unfortunately, the church today often sides with the world in marginalizing the prophetic voice. Morally and spiritually, our culture is drifting dangerously toward the point of no return, and more than ever it desperately needs to hear what it desperately tries to avoid—the call to repentance. As believers, we must decide, and decide today, if we will stand with the world or behind the prophets. That will be a tough choice if you have grown accustomed to coddling what God is condemning.
Going Deep // Focus: 1 Kings 14:4-7
Jeroboam’s wife went to Ahiujah’s home at Shiloh. He was an old man now and could no longer see. But the Lord had told Ahijah, “Jeroboam’s wife will come here, pretending to be someone else. She will ask you about her son, for he is very sick. Give her the answer I give you.” So when Ahijah heard her footsteps at the door, he called out, “Come in, wife of Jeroboam! Why are you pretending to be someone else?” Then he told her, “I have bad news for you. Give your husband, Jeroboam, this message from the Lord, the God of Israel…”
Thank God for the prophets! No really, thank God for the prophets—they are his gift of last resort.
Prophets with harsh messages never fare well in popularity polls. They deliver bad news—bad from the perspective of those who are being called to account for their sin, and those who stand with them, either actively cheering them on or silently disapproving but going along to get along. Bad news prophets are usually not all that lovable anyway; they are not the warm, cuddly types. God has called them to a difficult assignment, and to pull it off, they best develop a thick layer of skin.
We need prophetic voices like that in our day—men and women who will fearlessly declare God’s truth about the condition of this culture of ours that has drifted far from God. And just as importantly, we who call ourselves people of faith must quit rejecting the words of the prophets out of hand—as if the Lord doesn’t’ speak through the prophets today. Of course, there have been so-called prophets who are anything but, who have blown it for the good prophets by offering dates for the Lord’s return, who traffic in books that make boatloads of money for themselves, who flock to the Christian airways with hairdos like Elvis and suits like Liberace. But the all-too-public showmanship of the faux prophets must not condition us to reject the message—and the messengers—of the true prophetic word. God still speaks today. And given the drift from biblical morality of a nation that was founded upon scriptural values, God is probably speaking with increasing urgency through the prophets.
In 1 Kings, God began to call the nation to account for their spiritual and moral drift. He allowed much time to go by—which totally frustrates those of us who would prefer that God show up and out an immediate end to evil leadership and corrupt culture. In the present chapter, wicked Jeroboam reigned for twenty-two years in Israel and wicked Rehoboam ruled for seventeen years of Judah. They were followed by mostly evil kings who led the two nations into greater and more inventive ways of evil for decades, even centuries. Graciously and mercifully, God gave his wayward people more time than we would have to see the error of their ways, repent, and return to him. But he never left them without prophetic voices that courageously spoke his word.
Yet the kings and the people continued into deeper expressions of rebellion. As a result, they began to suffer the natural consequences of the law of sowing and reaping (Galatians 6:7) as well as the divine insertion of judgment from time to time to get the nation’s attention. In the case of Jeroboam, the young son of this wicked king became deathly ill, so the king who had rejected God sent his wife in disguise to the man of God who has prophesied that he would become king. Even in the depths of his sin, the king knew the truth—and he knew Ahijah the prophet was the truth-teller. Yet, absurdly, he thought he could maneuver the word of God about his sick son by manipulating the man of God.
Before the king’s disguised wife arrived, the Lord had already given a word of knowledge to the prophet. So he exposed her false intentions right away, and quickly followed it with the hard word the Lord had given him for evil king Jeroboam. Sadly, there was no repentance on the part of the boy’s mother when told her son would die, nor did the king turn from his wicked ways. They, along with the nation, were hell bent on doing evil.
Sadly, so is our culture—or so it seems.
And God is sending us prophetic voices to call us—the culture and the church within the culture—back to his heart. He is calling us to acknowledge our evil, repent of it, and return to the ways in which he has called us to walk. These voices are not well received by our culture—sinners stop their ears and kill the messengers, so to speak. But even more concerning, much of the church sides with the culture in rejecting the prophetic word because we fear guilt by association—that is, few hear that our culture will be uncomfortable with the church because of the church’s messengers.
We need true prophetic voices more than ever as we see our culture approaching the moral-spiritual point of no return. God has never lifted judgment from a non-repenting people, and we, too, are headed there without national repentance. So it is time we open our minds to the prophets, be willing to do the hard work of separating the false and fake voices from the authentic, then stand behind the real ones as they deliver God’s loving rebuke to a wayward nation.
Perhaps if we get behind the prophets in large enough numbers, our culture will be forced to take notice. Maybe not, but I think we owe it to the nation we love and the God we serve to give it a try.
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