Minister's Message
Bible reading: Deuteronomy 18:15-22.
The words of Moses:
“The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet. This is what you requested of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said: ‘If I hear the voice of the Lord my God any more, or ever again see this great fire, I will die.’
“Then the Lord replied to me: ‘They are right in what they have said. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command.
“You may say to yourselves, ‘How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?’ If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; do not be frightened by it”.
Message.
On October 22, 1844, about 100,000 Christians gathered on hillsides, in meeting places and meadows, throughout the northeastern United States. They had come together because they believed the prophecy of William Miller, a Baptist farmer from upstate New York. His study of the Bible had convinced him that this was the day when Jesus Christ was going to return to earth in glory. Who would want to miss that?
But nothing happened. The waiting crowds kept looking upwards but there was no sign of Jesus. People became anxious as day turned into night. Finally midnight struck and Christ had still not appeared. Slowly and sadly everyone dispersed and went home. One person, recalling that night, wrote: “Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before … We wept, and wept, till the day dawned”. The event became known as “The Great Disappointment”.
People reacted to the Disappointment in several ways. Some claimed that Jesus had indeed come, but not to the earth; in fact he had moved to the heavenly Holy of Holies to begin his “investigative judgment” of Christian lives. This became a doctrine of the Seventh Day Adventists. Other folk returned to the churches which they’d come from, probably embarrassed to have believed something that had been proved wrong. Miller himself – who’d already revised the date of Jesus’ return from 1843 to 1844 – gave up his prophetic studies and died five years later.
Here’s another story.. By the start of the last century, people knew that Halley’s comet – long thought to be a harbinger of doom that had predicted the Anglo-Saxons’ defeat at the Battle of Hastings – was merely a natural phenomenon which came round every 76 years. But there was panic before its appearance in 1910 when, as scientists calculated, its lengthy tail would sweep across the Earth. A French astronomer called Camille Flammarion was worried. He said that, if the tail contained hydrogen, that might combine with the oxygen in our atmosphere, suffocating life on earth. Another possibility was that it might reduce the amount of nitrogen in the air, and the human race would perish in “a paroxysm of joy and delirium”.
When spectroscopic analysis of Halley’s Comet detected traces of cyanogen, Flammarion was quick to suggest that this lethal poison “would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet”. This led to a brisk trade in “comet pills” and gas masks. Of course, nothing untoward happened – but, months after the comet had passed, it was still being claimed that “obnoxious” gases in its tail had caused the outbreak of a virulent new strain of influenza.
Distinguishing between true and false prophecy isn’t always easy. After all, the distinguished scientist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, stated categorically that “aeronauts” ought to stick to balloons as heavier-than-air flying machines would never be practical; the Wright Brothers flew their first aeroplane less than ten years later. Equally, Albert Einstein was sure thar atomic energy would never be possible as splitting the atom could never be achieved; eleven years later the first atom bombs were detonated and nine years after that the first nuclear power station came on stream. William Miller may have been a poor Bible student, Camille Flammarion may have been an over-imaginative astronomer, Thomson and Einstein may have misread the science. But I don’t think any of them were charlatans; they genuinely believed in their predictions, as have so many other people.
What, of course, muddies the waters as far as prophecy is concerned is when someone claims to be speaking, not in the name of scientific research, but of God. This has been a constant problem in religion, and not just Christianity as it’s certainly present in both Judaism and Islam. In the Old Testament we read about Balaam in the book of Numbers, Zedekiah and his colleagues in 2 Chronicles, and Hananiah in Jeremiah. In Ezekiel’s time God said that there were prophets of Israel declaring peace for Jerusalem when there was none. Moving to the New Testament, Acts tells us of Barnabas and Saul encountering a false prophet named Bar-Jesus, while Peter gave a general warning in his letter: “Just as there were also false prophets among the people, so there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies”. Just to round things off, let’s remind ourselves that Jesus predicted the arrival in the Last Days of “false prophets and christs who will rise and show great signs and wonders”.
This must have already become an issue in Judaism by the time of Moses, because he tackles it in his final speech to the Hebrews before they enter the Promised Land and before he dies (did you realise that Moses never got there himself?). Claiming divine authority, the great Jewish leader sets out some basic principles. One is that a true prophet speaks in the name of Yahweh, the Jewish God, rather than as a mouthpiece of pagan ones, although of course it’s hard to know if they are genuinely conveying divine words. Another precept, which Moses mentions in Exodus rather than here, is that a prophet should prove their credentials by doing miraculous signs – although this too is no guarantee; even in our own time there have been charismatic preachers who have faked miracles (yes, the camera can lie). But the main test, says Moses, of a true prophet is to see if what they predict – especially about an allegedly supernatural event – comes to pass.
None of these tests was 100% foolproof; people still had to weigh up the credibility of a prophet, relating it to what they already knew about God, to the purported prophet’s lifestyle and also (if I can call it that) to their past performance. Mind you, it took courage for a person to claim God’s authority for their words as the penalty for speaking presumptuously was death. That would have made anyone think twice before opening their mouth and declaring, “Thus saith the Lord”!
By now you’re probably thinking, “This is really boring and totally irrelevant to me. Why should I have the slightest interest in what Moses said well over 3000 years ago?” That’s a good question, so let me answer it, first with some words by Robert Wilson, the Professor of Old Testament at Yale University. He says, “The possibility of false prophecy is inherent in any society that tolerates the existence of prophets. This is because prophecy is essentially a process by which an intermediary (the prophet) facilitates communication between the human and divine realms … However, the prophet’s audience can never be sure that they are accurately reporting the divine message. Therefore, the reliability of any prophecy can be questioned, and the threat of false prophecy is always present”. In other words, there must be a question-mark hanging over anyone, in any religion, who says that they are speaking in God’s name. Genuine mistakes or deliberate deception are always possible, so let hearers beware!
Did you notice that both Professor Wilson and I have been speaking in the present tense? That’s because prophecy – and the potential for false prophecy – haven’t gone away. Indeed, aided by social media, they have exploded in recent years. Here are three examples.
The first is from America where Jeremiah Johnson (you couldn’t make that up, could you!) predicted that Donald Trump would win the last Presidential election. A huge number of social media followers took comfort when Johnson shared a dream of Trump stumbling while running the Boston Marathon, until two frail older women emerged from the crowd to help him over the finish line. To Johnon’s credit, he accepted Biden’s victory and wrote: “I was wrong, I am deeply sorry, and I ask for your forgiveness. I would like to repent for inaccurately prophesying that Donald Trump would win a second term as the President”. As a consequence he received a huge backlash, multiple death threats and “thousands upon thousands of emails from Christians saying the nastiest and most vulgar things I have ever heard”. He was also accused of being “a coward, sellout, and traitor to the Holy Spirit”. Despite this failure, it’s been said that thousands of American churches are “awash” with “prophetic misinformation”.
Let’s turn to Nigeria where T B Joshua, who died in 2021 was a huge Pentecostal televangelist, faith healer and pastor. Since his death many people have come forward alleging that Joshua raped, tortured and abused several of his followers over a period of 20 years. It is also said that he faked his miracles; he certainly became extremely rich. Nimi Waraboko, the Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University and himself Nigerian, gives several reasons for Joshua’s popularity and immunity from criticism. He suggests that “the seemingly effortless performance of miracles appeared to have excused his frailties”. He also notes that many Pentecostal churches are led by “big men” or “big women” who dominate their organisations and are rarely accountable to anyone else. In fact they tell their members not to question them, quoting Psalm 105:15: “Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm”. That, to me, sounds very dangerous.
My third example of modern false prophecy comes from Britain. In the late 1980s and early 90s the Christian scene became excited by the arrival of an American evangelist called John Wimber – a fascinating character who’d been a rock musician before becoming a pastor. He had a huge effect on many Christian leaders and churches; in particular the influential Anglican church of Holy Trinity, Brompton and its Vicar, Sandy Millar, came under Wimber’s spell. However one critic at the time felt the Bible’s central position in many churches was being subtly usurped by the rise of so-called charismatic gifts.
By 1990 Wimber had “taken on board” a group of men that came to be called the “Kansas City Prophets”. Millar invited two of them, Paul Cain and Bob Jones, for two weeks of meetings at HTB. They thrilled people with prophecies of a mighty Christian revival that would break out in November of the year. But the revival never came, and a few months later Wimber contracted cancer of the throat which hampered the rest of his ministry. Before he died in 1997 he expressed regret at his support for the so-called “Kansas prophets”. Cain died in 2019; he’d fallen from favour in America after predicting that Bill Clinton would be the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln, and for saying that the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was a good man who’d been greatly misunderstood and unjustly treated.
Of course there have been secular (or non-religious) prophets who’ve got things badly wrong. In February 1962 there was an alignment of five planets, the moon and the sun, and a total solar eclipse. People panicked, stocking up bomb shelters in the United States and holding huge prayer vigils in India. Of course nothing happened, as planetary alignments are in fact quite frequent and totally harmless. Nevertheless some folk claimed that the alignment was responsible for the following year’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Then, at the end of 1999, we were all dreading the so-called “Millennium bug” which would cause the world’s computers to crash. We were told that planes would fall from the sky, banking systems would collapse, there would be widespread blackouts. In fact, things seemed normal when we got up on New Year’s Day. Had the “bug” been a false prophecy? Or was it a real threat, averted by computer technicians working day and night to fix it? I’m honestly not sure – but, then, I’m no technology geek!
There is so much more I could say, but I must close. Of course there are two great prophecies around today. One concerns global warming and climate. This was introduced in the 1970s, along with the “Gaia” theory which says that our planet is a kind of super-organism, by the scientist James Lovelock. This was once dismissed as New Age quackery, but no more. Worryingly, before he died 5 years ago, he predicted that places like Britain will be 6 degrees warmer by the end of the century, that much the planet will be uninhabitable, and that the world’s population will be a tiny fraction of what it is today. In a nutshell, the human race is doomed. Is he right? He was right before.
The other prophecy is about Artificial Intelligence. Is this a useful tool which will enable us do many tasks better and with fewer errors, or is it, as Oxford professor of philosophy Tim Ord says, “the greatest risk to human survival”, developing its own ability to outwit and overpower us? The jury is still out on that, and the potential benefits of AI may have been exaggerated. But how do we distinguish between its sensible prophets and those who are dangerously false? I can’t!
I believe that our God is a God who spoke in the past. That is why we have the Bible, the primary resource book for our faith. I believe, too, that he speaks today: through Christian writers and preachers, and also (perhaps without them even realising it) through secular prophets such as scientists or sociologists. These people may not declaim God’s message in dramatic terms, beginning, “Thus saith the Lord” (in fact, I’m rather suspicious of folk who do that!). But I’m convinced that we’ll always need them to prod and cajole us, to do all they can to shake us out of our complacency, to warn us of coming disaster if we don’t take action now – in the world and in the Church.
So we need to listen to them, assessing their credibility and sifting out what is false. But that’s not enough: we then need to do whatever is necessary to bring us to our senses – and back to God.
