Saul Among the Prophets
1 Samuel 10:1–16
Opening Prayer
“Our Father, it is a wonderful privilege we have to know You. We know You because of Your grace—that You took the
initiative from eternity past to plan a perfect salvation for us that would
involve sending Your Son to enter into human history and to go to the Cross to
pay the penalty for our sins. That is exceptional news, great news, that we can
have eternal life.
Though we live in this horrible pit that has been corrupted by sin, we
know that one day it will be redeemed, that we will be with You, and there will
no longer be any sorrow, tears, pain or suffering because all of these things
will have passed away. But in the meantime, we are to learn about You and learn how You provide for us and how You sustain us
to learn of Your integrity.
We pray that we will not lose sight of that - that this is to be our
primary mission. And we need not be distracted by the cares and the
vicissitudes of life that we face every day. We pray that we might keep our focus
on You. In Christ’s name, Amen.”
Open your Bible with me to 1 Samuel 10. We are continuing in this second
section with Saul. This is one of those fun passages that I like to study
because it is one of those passages that if you are reading through your Bible,
if you are following the Bible
challenge, like Ray Mondragon’s, I think you ought to be almost through
with Exodus 10. You are going to run into a few things here and there, and even
in Exodus, where it may cause your eyebrow to go up just a little bit. You
wonder what in the world does that mean (?).
This is one of those passages. When you hit it, you really wonder what
in the world does that mean (?). It just seems to not fit with certain other
things that you know about prophets and prophecy. It is important for you to be
aware of that. We will get into this. It is the episode with Saul among the prophets.
There is a similar situation in 1 Samuel 19.
These events that we are studying are all taking place down here around
Ramah. This is Samuel’s hometown. And just south of Ramah is Gibeah, which is Saul’s hometown. North of there is Bethel,
which later on will be a major site in Old Testament history. This is almost
like a ridge-line. In fact, the major highway in
Israel today goes right up this route past Bethel, Shiloh, all the way up to
Shechem and further north.
Just to familiarize you a little bit with what is going on here, that is
the background. This is where Saul has been led by the Lord
working behind the scenes, not overtly. God did not say, Saul you need
to go to Ramah and meet Samuel. But God worked providentially in the background
through various circumstances.
The she-asses that were owned by Saul’s father wandered off. Saul was
sent on a mission to find them. He could not find them no matter what he was
doing. But God was using that to bring him into Ramah.
In the previous lesson in 1 Samuel 9, we saw how God worked through His
servant. Saul was ready to go home. But his servant knew that Samuel lived in
the area, and suggested that they seek him out as a man of God that might be
able to give them some guidance.
The fact that Saul is ignorant of Samuel, ignorant of Samuel’s presence
in Ramah, when Samuel is the most significant leader in Israel at the time, is
the first foreshadowing of the fact that Saul is
spiritually uninterested. He is spiritually ignorant and dense. That is going
to play out in a couple of different ways as we go through the passage.
In terms of the structure, what we have looked at in the beginning, is that the Lord is selecting and anointing Saul
to be king over Israel.
This is really an odd situation. A lot of things come out as we study
this and think about what happens here.
I want to pick up with 1 Samuel 9:27. If you recall, as we finished up 1
Samuel 9, they had spent the night. They rose up early in Ramah, 1 Samuel 9:26,
and at the dawning of the day, Samuel went to call Saul.
Saul is sleeping up on top of the house. This would have been the
coolest place to sleep. Often in the warm periods of the year, heat rises and
the upper room would be a warm place to sleep. The upper room was usually a
guestroom. Often in the summer they would sleep up on the roof.
I remember when I was a little boy, my
grandmother had a lake house up on a lake just outside of Gonzales, Texas. This
house was probably built back in the 1930s. It had a very large screened-in
porch, and there were probably six or seven chaise lounges that would fold down
into a bed on the porch. From the late spring to the early fall, when we would
go out there, we would end up sleeping out there. There were ceiling fans, and
that is how you kept cool at night.
I remember back before air-conditioning, often when it was really sticky
and warm at night, my mother would soak a sheet in water and wring it out to
slightly damp, and you’d go to sleep under that. Evaporation is a cooling
process, so that would cool you off at night. That is how old-timers, before
all this modern technology, would survive the warm humid summers in Gulf Coast
Texas.
So Saul was sleeping up on the roof. Samuel calls him to wake-up and
come down. They left, and as they were going down to the outskirts of the city,
Samuel says in 1 Samuel 9:27, “Tell
the servant to go on ahead of us.” That is going to leave Samuel and Saul
alone. The servant goes on ahead. And Samuel says to Saul, “But you stand here awhile, that I may
announce to you the word of God.”
We read in 1 Samuel 10:1, “Then
Samuel took a flask of oil and poured it on his head, and kissed him and said:
‘Is it not because the Lord has anointed you commander over His inheritance?’
”
A couple of things that we need to observe here:
After the servant goes on ahead, Samuel says to Saul that he has
something to tell him. He said, “you stand here awhile,
that I may announce to you the word of God.” This is the Hebrew word shama, the basic
verb in the qal stem, the basic stem of any verb. It means “to hear” or “to
listen,” but in the hiphel stem this is a causative
stem. It means “to cause to hear” or “cause to listen.”
Basically what Samuel is saying is, “I want to cause you, Saul, to
listen to this. I want to give you a message.” This is an important word
because as we get down into the core of this section, and we are talking about
Saul, he runs into these prophets who are singing. It says that Saul prophesied
among the prophets.
Our frame of reference when we read this is that prophecy is announcing
the Word of God. We think, from our background, that a prophet is an individual
who has been gifted by God, who is going to speak as God’s spokesperson to the
people.
If you come to the Word of God from some background—and many who are
from liberal backgrounds, who do not necessarily have a trust in the inerrancy
and infallibility of God’s Word, and many who have been influenced by
subjective mysticism miss this, because they are immediately reading something
into the text that is not there—this shows us that the role of the prophet was
not mystical. It is not ecstatic.
Ecstasy has nothing whatsoever to do with how God reveals Himself to His
people in any dispensation. I had one pastor one time make the comment that
ecstasy would be normative in the Millennial Kingdom.
Ecstasy is not normative at any time because ecstasy is the modus operandi of paganism. It is subjectivism
and mysticism. It has never characterized a biblical prophet.
A biblical prophet does not change its meaning when you get into the
Millennial Kingdom.
We get this mentality that somehow there is something that is like the
theme to Twilight Zone. There is
something weird going on. It is mystical. If you start with the text of
Scripture, you will not find that.
When in the life of Samuel, in these eight chapters, have we ever gotten
a sense that Samuel, functioning as a prophet, is going into some kind of a
trance state, some ecstatic state, or some kind of mystical irrational state
from God?
God objectively spoke to Samuel.
Remember when Samuel was a little boy and he is in the tabernacle, and
God speaks to him? Samuel talks back to God in a rational, logical
conversation. This is not some sort of trance like mysticism that you see, for
example, among the plains Indians at the time of the American west in the 19th
century.
Now I love reading. There is a great book that came out a couple of
years ago, Empire of the Summer Moon,
dealing with the Comanches. Great book. Tremendous
book. It was all about the Comanches and the wars against
the settlers in Texas. It specifically focused on their great war chief Quanah
Parker.
It just so happened that the very first person that I worked for after I
got out of college and was teaching in Channelview, running an in-school
suspension class, it was under the authority of the
counseling department. I had this short round red-headed Irishman named Gene
O’Quinn who was my boss, except that Gene took after his father. His mother was
the youngest daughter of Quanah Parker.
Gene O’Quinn was an interesting guy. He had all these pictures of his
grandfather in the office. He said, you know, all these pictures were taken the
same day. All the chiefs in the tribe had been sitting around in the peyote
tent chewing on the peyote button. Chief Quanah was the first one to get it. He
would chew it and chew it and chew it. He would get the most of the
hallucinogenic drug. Then he would give it to the next guy. It would go all the
way down the totem pole to the lowest guy in the hierarchy.
Gene said that if you look closely at those pictures you will see that he is just as spaced out and as high as he
could be. You can see that glazed look in his eye.
That is mysticism. That is going into an altered state of consciousness
in order to somehow get in touch with the divine, get in touch with God, or
whatever it is you want to call it. That is what they did, but that is
paganism.
That is not what biblical prophets did.
This shows us, as an example of what I will say when we get down to that
section of passage, Samuel’s methodology. He is not dancing. He is not taking
drugs. He is not getting high. He is not getting into an altered state of
consciousness. He is not trying to get Saul to come along with that. Samuel
says, “Let me cause you to hear. Let me announce to you. Let me communicate to
you the message of God.”
Samuel explains to Saul that God has chosen him to be the king of
Israel. Samuel takes the flask of olive oil, pours it on his head, and kisses
him showing great respect and grace orientation to God’s choice. Samuel says, “Is it not because the Lord has anointed you
commander over His inheritance?”
The word that is translated “anointed” is the Hebrew word mashach, which is
converted into a noun as mashiach, which is where we get the anglicized
form messiah, that
means simply someone who is anointed, or appointed to a task.
It does not mean necessarily that the person is a believer, although I
think Saul was a believer. But the mashiach does not necessarily indicate someone who is a
believer. We have run into this word before.
In 1 Samuel 2:10, interestingly enough, the verb is only used two times
prior to this. In Leviticus 7:36 Israel is anointed by God.
They are appointed to a specific mission as a priest nation to all the nations.
And in Numbers 7:1, there is furniture that is anointed. That is non-personal.
Anointing is not too dissimilar from a word study on holy, kadosh/qadosh. If
a vessel, a bowl, a wooden box can be “holy,” then it does not have a
connotation at its core that relates to its relationship to God. That is why
“holy” does not refer to moral purity because it is applied to a lot of
inanimate objects that cannot be moral or immoral. They are simply set apart to
the use of God.
Anointed is the same thing. It is appointed to be used
by God for a specific purpose. Anointing does not say anything one way or the
other about the spiritual status of the person that is anointed. But we see it
used with reference to “The Messiah” in two places:
Again, this is a reference to The Messiah-King. These are subtle
illusions in 1 Samuel 2.
A verse where this word mashiach is used and applied to a non-Jew in the Old
Testament is Cyrus. I have heard some people say that because he is stated as
God’s “anointed” that Cyrus must have been saved. He might have been
saved, but not on the basis of this verse.
Being anointed or appointed to a divine task does not mean you are saved
or unsaved. It just means that God chose Cyrus for a specific mission. That was
to send the Jews back to the land, to authorize their return to the land. This
was a prophecy given in Isaiah 45:1 some 100 years plus, almost 200 years
before Cyrus was present on the earth.
Isaiah 45:1, “Thus says the Lord to Cyrus His anointed,
whom I have taken by the right hand, to subdue nations before him and to loose
the loins of kings; to open doors before him so that gates will not be shut.”
Samuel, after anointing Saul, which shows that
he is appointed to a specific task, to rule Israel, then gives him specific
instructions. Why does he give these instructions?
He gives these instructions because the “anointing” is a very private
ceremony. Remember, he told the servant to go on ahead. It is just Saul and
Samuel.
A principle that I have been trying to drill into y’all all the way
through this, because it shows the error of mysticism, is that God does not
speak in private without giving an objective public validation of what He does
in private.
This happened to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus—that this is a
private experience where the Lord Jesus Christ speaks to Saul of Tarsus, and
Saul becomes a believer. But it is confirmed because God said for Paul to go
into Damascus, and you are going to meet a man named Ananias. He is going to
restore your sight. There is objective validation and verification of something
that otherwise could have been simply a subjective psychological experience.
Trust me, critics of Christianity come along all the time and say that
is all it was: that Paul had a subjective psychological experience due to his
guilt complex from having murdered so many Christians. But that denies the rest
of the evidence in the text.
What happens now in 1 Samuel 10 is that God through Samuel gives Saul
instructions so that there will be objective evidence validating the private
act of anointing, showing to the nation that Saul is indeed God’s choice to
rule the nation.
1 Samuel 10:2, “When you have departed from me today, you
will find two men by Rachel’s tomb in the territory of Benjamin at Zelzah ...” This was just down the road
from Ramah. “… and
these two men will say to you …”
I want you to notice something here. When we talk about biblical
prophecy, this is not about the kind of prophecy that you go to when you see
the house where it says: “Spiritual Readers,” “Spiritual Advisor,” “Tarot Card
Reader,” Palm Reader,” where you go in and you get somebody who is very
intuitive and makes several guesses, reads your body language, makes certain
guesses, and makes you think that they have really figured out what is going on
in your life.
The gullible and the easily duped are just convinced that this person is
able to tell their future, but those situations are always couched in very
general-type terms.
Unlike biblical prophecy that is very precise. In fact, there are
passages like the passages we saw in Isaiah 45:1. Almost 200 years prior to the
arrival of Cyrus on the historical scene, he is identified by name by Isaiah
the prophet.
We have the same kind of thing happening in 1 Kings where this unnamed
prophet comes up to Jeroboam. Jeroboam is sacrificing to a false god as he is
setting up these false altars at Bethel and in Dan. This unnamed prophet says
that a king named Josiah will come. He will destroy this altar. That again is
not for another 200 years plus, and Josiah comes.
There is specificity in biblical prophecy that goes beyond people like
Nostradamus and all these other quacks that people go to saying there are other
people who make prophecy. Not like the Bible.
In 1 Samuel 10:2 Samuel says there are going to be “two men.” Not three men, not one man, not a man and a woman, but “two men by Rachel’s tomb.” That is how
you can identify them. They will tell you that the donkeys are okay. Those
she-asses are just fine. You do not need to worry about them anymore. Your
father is not worried about them anymore. They have been taken back and
everything is fine. You can go on about God’s mission without worrying about
your other tasks.
1 Samuel 10:3, “Then you shall go on forward from there and
come to the terebinth tree of Tabor.”
Go back to the map [slide 4]. Tabor is up here just north of Jezreel. Mt. Tabor would be just at the north edge of this
particular map. There is some discussion that maybe there is another village
named Tabor near Bethel.
By the way, that is the name of the assault rifle that the Israeli army
uses, the Tabor. It is spelled tabor,
but the way you pronounce it is tavor. The b is pronounced like a “v.”
It is probably a village that is nearby. I do not think that Saul would
have been going as far north as Mt. Tabor.
1 Samuel 10:3, “… you will come to the terebinth
tree of Tabor. There three men going up to God at Bethel ...” Bethel is very close. This would
be the village that is there. Three men of God “going up to Bethel will meet you, one carrying three young goats,”
not two, not an old one, not a ewe, “three
young goats, another carrying three loaves of bread,” not two, not three,
not four, “and another carrying a skin of
wine,” not two. See the specificity.
This relates to the doctrines of bibliology,
inerrancy, and infallibility, the specificity of prophet, because if Samuel was
wrong in any detail, it is the death penalty. He does not get the chance to say “oops, I just kind of misread the leaves. One got under
the cup a little too far. I said three, and it should have been four.” He is
right on the target because according to Deuteronomy 13 and 18, if he is wrong
it is the death penalty.
Samuel goes on to say in 1 Samuel 10:4–5, “And they will greet you
and give you two loaves of bread, which you shall receive from their hands.”
They will keep one for themselves and give you two. “After that you shall come to the hill of God where the Philistine
garrison is. And it will happen, when you come there to the city that you will
meet a group of prophets coming down from the high place with a stringed
instrument, a tambourine, a flute, and a harp before them; and they will be
prophesying.”
You have a small orchestra, a small ensemble that has been up at this
high place worshiping God. But what happens is that we have got a view of
prophecy that fits what Samuel said to Saul back in 1 Samuel 9:27–10:1 that
does not fit this.
What does it mean that Saul is going to be prophesying with them? Later
it will become proverbial that Saul is going to be numbered among the prophets.
We read in 1 Samuel 10:6–7, “Then the Spirit of the Lord will come
upon you …” I want you to notice that it is not “in you.” The prepositions
here in the Hebrew are very important. The Spirit of the Lord is going to “come upon you.”
This is from an external viewpoint. “The
spirit of the Lord will come upon you and you will prophesy with them and be
turned into another man. And let it be, when these signs come to
you, that you do as the occasion demands; for God is with
you.”
If you will look at this from the vantage point of your background and
the vantage point of our culture, then it looks like this is some kind of
subjective, ecstatic experience—that this fits a pattern that we would see that
is similar but different among pagan prophets and priests.
In fact, this is basically the contention of a number of liberal
theologians that interpret this. This liberal scholarship has influenced a
number of evangelicals. I have never really heard anybody else teach on this,
but I was fortunate enough to have had a professor in seminary recommend an
article by Leon Wood.
Leon Wood was a very well-known Baptist Bible
teacher. He taught at Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary. He wrote a commentary on
Judges and Daniel. I think he died in the 1970s. He was a very good thinker in
terms of Old Testament studies. He wrote an article in the Journal of the Evangelical
Theological Society called “Ecstasy and Israel’s Early Prophets.” It was
not a very long article. But he was so clear in his analysis of what was going
on in Israel. He was making the case that what was going on in Israel among the
prophets was not to be compared with the ecstatic operations of the prophets of
the pagan religions.
Let’s just start with a couple of definitions to understand what ecstasy
is:
1. First of all I am going to give you Leon Wood’s definition where he
is talking about the different ways in which these prophets are described and
analyzed:
“One is by ecstatic frenzy. In ecstatic frenzy the subject seeks to
withdraw his mind from conscious participation in the world so that it may be
open to the reception of the divine word.”
In other words, the individual is trying to clear out his mind. This is
like Eastern mysticism as well. You empty your minds so that something will
fill that vacuum, expecting that somehow if you empty your mind that you will
come in touch with a divine message.
“To achieve that ecstatic state, poisonous gas may be employed
...”
There is a very famous place in Greece where the priestess would sit
over this hole. The gases would come up. She would go into this altered state
of consciousness. As a result of that she would actually speak in glossolalic, in ecstatic utterance. This kind of thing
entered into the Greek culture by way of Asia Minor.
In Asia Minor you had the mystery religions of the Cybele and Attis cults and the Dionysian cult. As a result of that,
this spread westward into Greece. It spread southward into what we would say
now is Syria. But this is sort of a northern Canaanite type of culture.
It influenced the Phoenicians, Baal worship, and all
of the fertility cults were influenced by this. It also spread somewhat
eastward.
This was the idea: that poisonous gas might be employed, or arrhythmic
dance. This would also happen in the Dionysian religion. The Maenads that were
involved would dance. They would drink wine, because they are worshiping the
god of wine. They would use wine to get into this altered state of
consciousness. That is why you have to understand that background to catch what
Paul was talking about in Ephesians 5:18, when he says, “Do not be drunk with wine.”
Paul is not talking about being drunk. That is how most people with no
understanding of the background interpret that, which is understandable. But
see, alcohol, wine, was being used in the worship of Dionysus in Ephesus, as
well as over in Greece, as a way of getting into this ecstatic trance so that
the god could enter into your body and could speak through you in ecstatic
gibberish. That was thought to be the voice of God.
As you can understand, this is a background for understanding the confusion
that occurred in Corinth over speaking in tongues. It was through dancing and
through narcotics that the individual would lose all rational contact with the
world and have this so called rapport with the spirit realm.
I am going to take you from Leon Wood’s definition to give you another
definition that is very similar to that, which is found in the Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible.
2. In the Baker Encyclopedia of
the Bible we read:
“The ecstatic prophet achieves a trance-like state by self-induced
means. The most common devices used to achieve a state of ecstasy were musical
instruments, such as the harp, tambourine, flute, and lyre [then they cite this
passage] (1 Samuel 10:5).”
See, what they have done is gone to this view and assumed that what is
happening in the Bible is the same thing that was happening in these other
cultures. They go on to say: “Among the prophets of Baal, self-flagellation was
another means of inducing ecstasy (1 Kings 18:28, 29).”
Let me read what they say next from Baker
Encyclopedia of the Bible: “The kind of prophetic ecstasy was usually
practiced by groups of prophets (1 Samuel 10:5), and such ecstasy was
contagious.” [That is how they are going to explain what happened to Saul. It
is “contagious.”] “And when Saul met a band of such prophets, the Spirit of God
came upon him and he too began to prophesy, a phenomena which occurred
repeatedly to various messengers sent by Saul on a later occasion (1 Samuel
19:20–22.) Then Saul also prophesied in his ecstatic behavior described in 1
Samuel 19:24).”
What is going on here? What we see is you have to ask the chicken and
the egg question:
You ask another question:
Even if the Bible is not written until 1400 BC, what Moses is
writing down in 1400 BC is not something that evolved from polytheism, from animism and spiritism to polytheism and eventually to monotheism, and
all of a sudden Moses has this great new insight. That is what I was taught in
Western Civilization many years ago in college. That is what is still taught.
That is the world’s view of the evolution of world religions. It does
not believe that the Bible is an objective, historical revelation of God, Who
created the heavens, the earth, the seas and all that is in them, to man. It is
man’s recording of his religious experiences. That is liberalism. This
dominates liberal scholarship.
Their starting point is an anti-supernatural bias.
For them, when they look at history, they see that in the area of modern
Turkey or Asia Minor, in the period from 1000–2000 BC, this kind of
mystical trance-like behavior developed. It influenced the Greeks, Canaanites,
Phoenicians, and the Syrians to the south, and it enters into Israel’s history
at that point, so that Israel develops these prophets that really are following
the MO, modus operandi, of the
pagans.
These liberals are seeing that there is no difference. The Jewish
prophets are not any different from the other prophets. They just have a higher
moral standard as a result of the Mosaic Law. We always have to question this
kind of thinking. This is their basic viewpoint.
Leon Wood has a quote here from an article called “Prophecy” in a book
called Record and Revelation, by an
Old Testament scholar of a previous generation. This book was published in
1938. This is how they describe what is going on in 1 Samuel 10: “These persons
are pictured as moving through the land in rather wild bands, chanting in loud
voices, and making ecstatic inquiry for people upon request. The people are
thought to have accepted them as holy because they did conduct themselves in
this manner, considering their ability to achieve the ecstatic state a badge of
their authority.”
This is charismania transported back into the
ancient world. It often went along with the fertility religions. Fertility
religions were just the older and antiquated form of prosperity theology. It is
like how do you want to be healthy, wealthy, and prosperous in an agricultural
environment? You have got to somehow go placate the gods of fertility, which
means that you go emulate sexual acts in the temples of Baal and the Asherah in order to try to get them to get the point of
making the crops fertile. A very primitive idea.
It is easy to see how this happens when our starting point is our own
experience. Then when we read something like this in the Bible, we read our
experience back into what we read in the Bible. If you have seen something like
this in other religions, then you just think, well the Bible is just doing what
these other people did. No. These other people represent a degenerate form of
what was originally practiced in relationship to God.
Another example of this that you will see is the example of 2 Samuel
6:14 talking about David dancing before the Lord. We read in 2 Samuel 6:14, “Then
David danced before the Lord with all his might; and David was wearing a linen
ephod.”
Two verses later we read in 1 Samuel 6:16, “Now as the ark of the Lord
came into the city of David, Michal, Saul’s daughter, looked through a window
and saw king David leaping and whirling before the Lord; and she despised him
in her heart.”
If you grew up in a post-Elvis Presley rock-and-roll world, which I
think applies to everybody in this audience, then when you read this, your
frame of reference is what you did at a sock-hop, or what you did at a dance,
or what you did just standing up at a rock concert in the 1980s or1990s.
You are just doing your own dancing and gyrating to the music without
any regard to what anybody else is doing. You are just doing your own thing. It
is purely a self-oriented form of dancing. There is no structure, no
guidelines, and no organization. That is our frame of reference.
If you saw the film with Richard Gere of King David (an image I wish I could get
out of my head) when he is interpreting this and he is dancing before the Lord,
his ephod is more like a big diaper. He is out dancing and tumbling, gyrating,
and all of this as his interpretation of this. But look at the verbs that are
used:
Whirling and leaping does not necessarily interpret to mean some sort of
subjective freeform praise dancing. You would use those same words to describe
Baryshnikov or Nureyev. You would use those same terms if you recently have
been to the ballet. You could use those terms to describe any of the dances
going on that are very structured and very disciplined and have order to them.
Even a lot of contemporary dance is also that way. It is very
structured, organized, and orderly. It is not just whimsical and random. But
people will read this into the text. This is a problem. We cannot read our
experiences into the text. This is not how these cultures function.
What we have to do is look at the biblical evidence of prophets. How did
prophets function? Do we have an image of irrational, ecstatic, trance-like
conduct in the prophets that are mentioned in the Scripture?
Let’s run through some of the evidence:
1. The first thing we ought to look at, in terms of the evidence that
would contradict this liberal view of ecstasy, is the evidence of Moses
himself.
Remember, Moses is the preeminent prophet of the Old Testament. In
Deuteronomy 18:15_–18, he is the one who said there will
be a prophet like me who will come. That is a messianic announcement of the
future Prophet. Moses is the preeminent standard of a prophet. He calls himself
a prophet.
In the Hebrew this is nabiy. Moses uses nabiy to describe
himself and to describe the supreme preeminent Prophet of the Messiah who will
come in the future. But when we look at the evidence of Moses he is not
ecstatic.
Not only does Moses not do it at all, but if you look at Deuteronomy
18:9–14, he specifically warns the people against following the practices of
the idolatrous nations around them—including all of their sacrifices and the
way they approach their gods.
Moses is contrasting the way God spoke to him, and God’s relationship to
him, a unique relationship where God spoke to him face-to-face, mouth-to-mouth
as it is stated literally. It is totally contrasted. It is 180 degrees
different from the methodologies of paganism.
Let me remind you of a couple of really basic obvious rules that seem to
escape a lot of people. Someone once said that there is one thing about common
sense. It is that it is not common. A lot of the reading of the text needs to
be just common sense, but it is very uncommon because people are always trying
to find something hidden in the text.
Moses speaks directly from God. He speaks in sentences. He does not
speak in gibberish. He makes it very clear what he is speaking about, and he
makes this contrast, 180-degree contrast, between what he is doing and what the
pagans do. What we have in modern liberalism is that they want to blend the
two. All religion is the same.
What happens is that if you have a presupposition that all religion is
the same, and we all worship the same god? Do you know what happens? You know
what the end result of that is? It is going on right now in Europe. You have
roving bands of North Africans and Middle Eastern young males who are raping
women left and right because in their view, to worship Allah means that these
Christian women are just there for their own personal pleasure.
Yet, neither the news media or the politicians
have the courage to tell us what is going on because it violates their deeply
held presupposition that all religions are the same and Allah, Yahweh, and whoever you worship are all
the same. There is no difference.
It is a religious ignorance that is going to self-destruct on western
civilization. There is a radical difference in the Bible, in the Torah, between how God communicates
through the Nevi’im,
the prophets, and how the gods of the pagans work with their prophets.
Who is the first person who is identified as a
prophet in the Bible?
The first person identified is identified by God as a
prophet. It takes place in Genesis 20. In Genesis 20
we have a situation where Abraham has once again not been totally honest about
his relationship with his half-sister Sarah, to whom he is also married.
When he comes into the Philistine city of Gerar,
the Philistine leader’s name is Abimelech. That was probably his title. Abraham
does not want to cause a problem because his wife is so beautiful. Abraham
tells Abimelech that “this is my sister.”
Abimelech thinks that if this is his sister, then I will just make her
part of my harem. He is going to bring her into his harem, but God is going to
protect her womb because the Promised Seed is going to come through Sarah. God
comes to Abimelech that night in a dream and basically threatens his life—that
if you touch Sarah, you are going to die.
But in the process He says in Genesis 20:7, “Now therefore, restore the
man’s wife;” talking about
Abraham “for he is a prophet.” That he is a recipient of divine
revelation, who will then pass it on to others.
What we do see is God in His initiating grace, which I talked about
Sunday morning—that we respond to God only because God
initiates to us. We do not find God. God finds us. This is exactly what
happened in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are not looking for God. When God
shows up, what did they do? Did they run to Him and throw their arms around Him
and say, oh, we really messed up? No. Adam and Eve ran and hid in fear.
God is the One who is seeking them out. We do not see that in Abraham.
Abraham is the recipient of God’s initiation to seek out Abraham. Abraham has
already believed in God. God is seeking him out to take him to another level in
terms of His plan for Abraham, which is not related to his salvation. That is
what happens with Abraham. You do not see that ecstatic evidence there.
2. The next time we see the word mentioned is in Exodus 7:1–2.
This is interesting because God is speaking here. Moses has said, “Lord do not send me to Pharaoh.” He is
kind of whiny and to play up the stuttering part he is probably saying
something like L-L-L-LORD, I s-s-s-stutter. And the Lord says, we will give you a spokesperson.
He is going to be your brother Aaron. But you will be to Pharaoh like God, and
Aaron will be to Pharaoh like your prophet. God gives us a really clear
understanding here of the relationship between the prophet and the pharaoh: Exodus
7:1, “So the Lord said to Moses: ‘See, I have made you as God to Pharaoh, and
Aaron your brother shall be your prophet.”
The next verse tells us what a prophet does. Exodus 7:2, “You
shall speak all that I command you. And Aaron your brother shall tell Pharaoh
to send the children of Israel out of the land.”
How does prophecy work? It is just communication. “I am going to tell
you what you are supposed to say. You will communicate it to Aaron and he
communicates it to Pharaoh.” It is basic communication. There is nothing there
that indicates some sort of trance-like state, getting into an altered state of
consciousness, or anything else like that.
3. The next example is an interesting one because it throws your whole
paradigm and the normal Christian paradigm of a prophet completely screwy.
This is in Exodus 15:20–21. Miriam, Aaron’s and Moses’
sister. Exodus 15:20–21, “Then
Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took the timbrel
in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels
and with dances.”
This sounds more like 1 Samuel 10 than the other examples. There is
music involved. There is dancing involved. “And Miriam answered
them: ‘Sing to the Lord.” There
is singing involved. “ ‘… for He has triumphed gloriously! The horse and its rider He
has thrown into the sea!’ ” This
example of Miriam prophesying does not fit the other examples.
But is this ecstatic or is it something else? Let’s keep looking.
Numbers 11 is one of the three passages that the pro-ecstatic crowd goes
to support their position: Numbers 11; 1 Samuel 10;
and 1 Samuel 19.
Certainly, Deuteronomy 18 does not fit their scenario; neither do the
other passages.
This is a simple situation related to the seventy elders that Moses
identifies. God gives him guidance in order to appoint them, so they will help
to lead the nation. We are told: Numbers 11:25, “Then the Lord came down in
the cloud, and spoke to him, and took of the Spirit that was upon him (Moses),
and placed the same upon the seventy elders …” The Spirit of God is now going to be working through these seventy
elders. “… and
it happened, when the spirit rested upon them, that they prophesied, although
they ever did so again.”
It is evidence. What did they do, whatever that was? We will figure it
out in a little bit. It has to do with authenticating their new position of
authority, leadership, and the fact that it is the result of the ministry of
the Holy Spirit of God.
There were two men of the seventy that did not make roll call. When it
came time to form up, they were still sleeping in, so they are back in the
camp:
Numbers 11:26, “But two men had remained in the camp; the
name of one was Eldad, and the name of the other Medad. And the Spirit rested upon them. Now they were among
those listed, but who had not gone out to the tabernacle; yet they prophesied
in the camp.”
Whatever that is, they are doing it back in the camp, and they kept
doing it.
Numbers 11:27, “And a young man ran and told Moses, and
said, ‘Eldad and Medad are
prophesying in the camp.’ ”
This young man thinks it is a problem because he says this can lead to a
problem with your authority and insurrection. This did not, but insurrection is
coming in the next couple of chapters in Numbers.
Numbers 11:28–29, “So Joshua the
son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, one of his choice men, answered and said, ‘Moses
my lord, forbid them!’ Then Moses said to him, ‘Are you zealous for my sake?
Oh, that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put His
Spirit upon them!’ ”
Moses said this is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. But, what is
this thing about prophecy?
In Judges 4:1 we have Deborah, a prophetess, like Miriam, a prophetess.
Judges 5:1, “Then Deborah and Barak the son of Abinoam sang on that day …”
This is like what goes on back in Exodus 15 with Miriam—singing to the
Lord.
The next one to look at is Samuel. This is what Leon Wood says in his
article. “Samuel is repeatedly portrayed, and never shows ecstatic traits.
Indeed, scholars who hold to the ecstatic idea for other prophets, readily
assert that Samuel was of another type, the ‘seer’ (roʾeh)”
[from the Hebrew verb raah,
meaning “to see”].
But we saw earlier that “seers” were called that before. Later on they
were called prophets. That is what the text explains. Leon Wood says: “Seers,
in contrast to prophets [according to the pro-ecstatic crowd], are said to have
been quiet persons, waiting for inquirers to come to them. But moving through
history further, we find the same, non-ecstatic manner of prophecy with Nathan
(2 Samuel 7:2; 12:25), Gad (2 Samuel 24:11), Ahijah
(1 Kings 11:29; 14:2–18), and others. Though not much is stated regarding any
one of them, never are they depicted in a way to suggest any kind of
irrational, ecstatic behavior to their prophetic activities.”
They are not mystical. Mysticism and ecstatics
go hand and hand. So what is going on here?
There appear to be two different concepts or meanings going on in
prophecy. So we will close with this, 1 Chronicles 25:1–3. Very few people
read through Chronicles for their devotions. They get started and the first nine
chapters are just name lists. They get bored and go read something more
exciting, like Zechariah or Haggai.
1 Chronicles 25:1, “Moreover David and the captains of the army
separated for the service some of the sons of Asaph …”
These are priests that are going to serve in the tabernacle worship and
later in the temple. It is just called basic organization. We are going to
divide everybody up into groups, and people are going to serve at different
times in the tabernacle. There is going to be a structure. Everything is done
orderly because God is a God of order.
He separates “the sons of Asaph, of Heman, and of Jeduthun, who should …” What are they going to do? They
are going to “prophesy with harps,
stringed instruments, and cymbals.”
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel did not do that. What is going on
here? They prophesy with musical instruments through an orchestra. This is not
some sort of ecstatic rambling, somebody playing and doing a little impromptu
musical reflection. They had a very well structured orchestra. This is listing
some of the various instruments in the orchestra. They were skilled men
performing their service.
1 Chronicles 25:2, “Of the sons of Asaph:
Zeccur, Joseph, Nethaniah,
and Ashareiah; the sons of Asaph
were under the direction of Asaph, who prophesied
according to the order of the king.”
This is not extemporaneous. This is planned according to the order of
the king.
1 Chronicles 25:3, “Of Jeduthun, the sons of Jeduthun: Gedaliah, Zeri, Jeshaiah, Shimei, Hashabiah, and Mattihiah, six,
under the direction of their father Jeduthun, who
prophesied with a harp to give thanks and praise to the Lord.”
This is where we get the meaning of the word “prophesy”—to give thanks
and praise to the Lord.
Prophesy is
not limited to communicating God’s objective Word of condemnation or judgment
to Israel, but it is also related to giving thanks and praise to God.
When we look at 1 Samuel 10, we can read it with understanding. There is
a group of prophets coming down from the high place. They have their musical
instruments with them, and they were prophesying. They were giving thanks and
praise to God. They were singing hymns, the psalms, to God.
1 Samuel 10:6, “Then the Spirit of the Lord will come upon
you, and you will prophesy with them.”
You will start singing the psalms with them. You will be a part of their
worship to the Lord.
“And let it be, when these signs
come to you, that you do as the occasion demands; God is with you.”
It goes on from there. This is what happens in 1 Samuel 19. It is not
some sort of mystical trance where suddenly they start speaking in tongues or
some kind of ecstatic revelation. They are expressing thanks to God and
worshiping Him on the basis of the revealed truth that they have. That is what
it means to prophesy.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for the opportunity to study these things this
evening, and to help us to understand what Your Word says, that if we interpret
Scripture in the light of Scripture we understand the uniqueness of Your Word.
This is not like any other religion, because You are
not a God like any other god. You are the God who created the heavens and the
earth and the seas and all that is in them. You are the God that planned a perfect
plan of salvation that would provide for the payment of the penalty of sin that
we might have eternal life simply by trusting in Jesus Christ as Savior. Not by
works, not by working ourselves up into some kind of revelatory situation, not
by sniffing gas like the Oracle of Delphi, but by just reading and
understanding Your Word through the ministry of God the Holy Spirit
enlightening our souls to the truth and responding in faith alone. We pray this
in Christ’s name. Amen.”