Part of the occupational hazards of being a member of the Church of God culture is the fact that one is constantly bombarded with gloom and doom from prophetic hobbyists who either make frequent and bogus prophecies of the end times or keep up a steady and pessimistic stream of vague but insistent warnings of bad times shortly ahead. Because of this mistaken approach to prophecy, for a long time I had the (mistaken) impression that I did not care for prophecy much at all.

But that is not the case. I am deeply interested in prophecy—at least prophecy as it is genuinely recorded in the Bible—though I remain deeply bothered by the habit of would-be prophets to continually send out gloomy and doomy rags that continually bombard readers with depressing messages of the world and offer speculations about the identity of the beast power or various biblical personages. What I would like to do today is examine what is wrong about such prophetic hobbyists and also examine the genuinely biblical approach to prophecy that is somewhat lacking in much writing that I am familiar with on the subject.

Many would-be prophets are fixated on the individual players of prophetic warnings. They want to know (or think they know) the identity of the two witnesses, the Elijah who is to come, the beast, the false prophet, the king of the North, the king of the South, and so on. Their concern is with people who fill the various roles within the cosmic drama of the end times, as if they were in central casting for a B-movie Christian horror film about the Great Tribulation. Their concerns are with people and personalities.

In contrast, the Bible is more concerned about widespread societal behavior and systems of evil than it is about evil people individually. If you read a book like Amos, its villain (Amaziah the false priest of Bethel) is dealt with colorfully in a few short verses, but the sins of Israel as a whole, including their sins of social injustice, sexual immorality, and their business corruption (their desire to profit on the Sabbath and exploit the poor) are discussed in vivid detail. The overweight middle class of Samaria were compared to fat cows of Bashan, something that could be said about many people in the West. Few prophets nowadays would care to connect the obesity crisis with an overall lack of moral sensitivity towards the poor, but that’s the message of the social prophets of the Bible.

Likewise, while prophecy hobbyists are quick to connect the Roman Catholic church to various biblical beasts and harlots, they forget that part of what makes the Roman Catholic church so evil is its rigid hierarchy (see Matthew 20:25-28) and that they themselves, or their organizations, often advocate the same satanic system of rule that is to be found in the Roman Catholic Church, and so they condemn themselves (without knowing it) as being the daughters of that harlot. By the same standard you judge, you will be judged.

This points out a larger problem that exists with many religious hobbyists today—they simply fail to understand the basis of prophetic messages of judgment. For many prophecy buffs, part of the fun of prophecy is the almost pornographic display of God’s harsh judgment on starving and brutalized and terrorized people, the Basil Wolvertonesque faces of horror and suffering on the ungodly. For the Bible, judgment is something that God does not desire to do, but does out of his sense of justice, because mankind is flagrantly and unrepentantly disobedient to His law—from the Sabbath to standards of sexual morality to the concern for the well-being of the poor and strangers (i.e. immigrants and foreigners) to disapproval of foreign alliances with ungodly nations to pious and sanctimonious hypocritical religious practices. God’s law is non-partisan, it attacks both the heresies of the left (powerful and corrupt governments, lax standards of sexual purity) and the heresies of the right (exploitation of the poor, views of Israelite or American exceptionalism, viewing the physical constitutions and laws as being somehow on the same standard as God’s law).

Not only do many prophecy buffs themselves fail to understand the grounds of prophecy as a covenental lawsuit against an ungodly and exploitative society (not just its evil leaders, who are but a product of the larger corrupt society we all are a part of), and not only do they tend to selectively judge some sins and wink at or approve others, but they fail in the primary task of someone who has the burden of prophetic oracles laid upon them—they fail to serve as the watchman warning the people of their specific sins for which they will be judged if they fail to repent.

Of course, if they do repent the judgment is reversed or delayed, as happened with Jerusalem during the times of Micah and Isaiah and with Ninevah during the time of Jonah. Incidentally, such judgment was eventually fulfilled in the time of Jeremiah for Jerusalem and in the time of Nahum for Ninevah. God will hold prophetic hobbyists responsible for joyfully picturing doom and gloom without giving the people God is judging specific warning on what they did to offend God’s sense of justice and morality in the first place.

Another common thread among prophetic hobbyists is their attention only on a few areas of the world. For example, prophetic hobbyists will look at a European Union, at Russia and China, at the Middle East, and at the United States. Perhaps they will also lump in the other “English-speaking” nations of the world like Canada or Australia or New Zealand or South Africa. And that’s about it. They do not recognize, for example, that legitimate biblical prophets focused on the larger world. One of my favorite prophecies, for example, is a prophecy in Isaiah given to Dumah, an obscure Arabian trade city that was celebrating the “Arab Spring” of liberation from Assyrian tyranny, only to be warned that the night of Babylonian oppression was coming [1] (see Isaiah 21:11-12). Even more strikingly, Isaiah calls on this Arabian city to repent if they wish to avoid their judgment, which shows God’s love and concern for even obscure Gentile peoples.

This sort of prophecy is extremely relevant for our times, and also very rare. For all of our talk about the four horsemen of Revelation who will make famine and disease and war and scarcity reign over the earth during the Great Tribulation, if you are are a resident of much of Africa, the four horsemen have been running rampant for decades. And largely prophecy buffs have ignored such famines or droughts in Ethiopia or Somalia or Sudan or Chad because such areas are not inhabited by important biblical peoples (except for Cush, perhaps?). God is the God of the whole world, and all human beings, no matter which people or tribe they belong to, are created in His image. And God cares about the well-being all of all, not willing that any should perish, but that all should repent and honor Him. Therefore we too ought to love and care for the entire world, not just that part of the world where we live or that we see ourselves as related to by blood or ties of kinship.

Additionally, many prophecy hobbyists are able to preach doom and gloom so consistently because they think of it only affecting other people. They themselves believe that they will be protected from any of the suffering they describe for the ungodly, so they are emotionally distant from the pain they see the wicked suffering from God’s righteous judgment. Part of this springs from their own (often incomplete) understanding of biblical symbolism, and ascribing merely to futuristic fulfillment what has preterist, historicist, futurist, and spiritual fulfillments. And, for the most part, they do not understand that most of the prophets were the “righteous remnant” who endured the suffering of captivity. Jeremiah, who preached doom and gloom against Jerusalem, had to suffer through the siege himself. Ezekiel was himself also a captive in what is now Iraq. Daniel, the prophet of God, was (probably) made into a eunuch (see Daniel 1:9-11), as was Nehemiah (see Nehemiah 1:11). These were all godly men—and they suffered as a result of the prophecies they gave. They too shared in the pain of exile and captivity, and in the privation of sieges. They were not ivory tower prophets who were whisked away from suffering by God after they had pronounced doom on their wicked societies. Far from it. We must at least accept that the same may be true for us as it was for them.

A lot of prophecy hobbyists as well are all too quick to point finger. They love to say that such-and-such a group is Laodicean and they are Philadelphian. I do not have such privileged knowledge nor is it any of my own personal business to judge the hearts and spiritual maturity of anyone else (the question of my own spiritual maturity is a serious enough matter for me to deal with that it leaves me without the time or energy to condemn others). We would do well to read Revelation 2 and 3 a little more closely, though, before we go around saying that others are Laodicean. For one of the biggest problems of the Laodicean was the (incorrect) presumption of their own wealth and wisdom and godliness and an unawareness of their true and decrepit spiritual state. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Additionally, let us note that the Laodiceans were still members of God’s church, despite the severity of their problems. The message to the church of Philadelphia, though, contains a warning against the synagogue of Satan, who say they are Jews and are not, showing that some who believe in the Sabbath and who consider themselves Christians and obedient to God’s law will be found to be in league with and in the assembly of Satan themselves. Let us take heed to ourselves so that we may avoid this fate—I would prefer to be a Laodicean a million times over being found, to my horror, that I was counted among the synagogue of Satan.

And let me note one more aspect of prophetic hobbyism that I find extremely distasteful. It has the aspect of “the boy who cried wolf.” If one is pronouncing all the time that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and that God’s judgment is approaching, one will eventually be right. But it will be after numerous false alarms, after much vagueness in judgment that ultimately does not help the hearer actually take the steps necessary to avoid God’s judgment, or at least be delivered safely through it as part of a righteous remnant.

For the societies of the west are inviting God’s judgment. We have lived beyond our means (I speak not only collectively here but personally—this is a personal problem of my own). We have insulted and exploited the poor, foreigners who have come to our shores seeking a better life (and who ought to be protected by our laws). We have committed grave sins of fornication, inciting others to lust through our clothing, through our language, or through our writing (I speak again of myself here), besides those of homosexuality or bestiality, or cohabitation with concubines we prefer to sleep with than to marry like honorable gentlemen. We have done this in the church just as the world has done around us. We are no better than they. We have eaten off of the fat of the world, engorging ourselves while others starve, while priding ourselves on being blessed by God and not responsible for setting a godly example of charity and generosity. We have fasted for strife and to advance our political ambitions. We have profaned God’s holy feasts with our drunkenness and our revelries. And we stand to judge the world? We ought first to repent and ask for God’s mercy so that we ourselves might escape His judgment first before he metes out His judgment on a wicked world that does not know better, while we do. For if we wish to be prophets to the world we must first be cleansed of our wicked tongues and our wicked hearts before we will be competent to stand as witnesses against our corrupt and wicked world. And perhaps, if we ourselves are made right with God, we may encourage others too to repent of their sins, so that God will be merciful to withhold judgment from our generation. For God does not delight in the destruction of the wicked, and so neither should we.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/watchman-what-of-the-night-the-prophet-as-town-watchman-in-isaiah-2111-12/