A friend online this week posted a post about how to tell true prophets from false prophets. The conclusion the post came to was “false prophets are unable to predict the future with 100 percent accuracy.” I would go along with this to a point. The problem with this is time. We know, having read the Scriptures from our vantage point in time that Isaiah was accurate over and over and over again. That being said, his contemporaries may have assumed him to be false because those prophecies that we look at in the rear view mirror of history, and see as incredibly accurate, took seven hundred years to come to pass.
The reality is there is a wider definition of prophet that has very little to do with predicting anything. These people merely bring messages from the Lord. This could be as simple as a Sunday morning sermon when the preacher has sought the Lord for His message. This is much easier to discern. You merely need to compare what you hear with the word of God. Even this comes with a danger though. We need to take the full counsel of Scripture. The Bible can be misused when we take verses out of context, and so at times a deeper dive is required. What do the Scriptures as a whole have to say about the message brought forth? It might take some work, but what is more important than understanding the Word of God?
When it comes to all of this stuff I am reminded of the Bereans. Do you remember them? The apostle Paul came into their area and began to preach. Now we know Paul as the guy who wrote at least a third of the New Testament, but the Bereans didn’t know him from Adam, if you’ll pardon the pun. So what did they do? They didn’t just write Paul off, nor did they just take him at his word. No they got out their Bibles (probably scrolls) and compared what he said to the Bible. Check this out. Acts 17:11 “Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” In other words, these people did their homework and are commended in the Scriptures as an example to be followed.
Now you might wonder what this has to do with the scope of this blog, creative arts ministry. It’s simple really. We are people who have been given gifts to spread the Gospel. We get to get creative with the mode of the delivery of God’s Word and that is an awesome privilege, but check this, it’s also an awesome responsibility. There is a limit on our creativity. We are allowed to change the mode of delivery, with a painting, or a writing, or a play, or whatever. What we dare not tamper with is the message itself. This means we need to make sure that nothing we are teaching in what we do is false, and that means we need to preempt the Bereans. In other words, we need to check ourselves against the Word before they do. This is especially urgent for two reasons. First because an awful lot of people will not be good Bereans. They might just take you at your word, so your word better reflect well on The Word. Secondly the Bible tells us, Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. (James 3:1) This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach, but that when we teach, we need to be sure that our teaching is true and not false.
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