How to Discern Truth Amid a Sea of False Prophesies
Four years ago, my friend Fred Wright, the founding coordinator of Partners in Harvest church network, was discussing prophetic ministry with me when he lamented, “If something isn’t done soon, the prophetic movement is dead in five years.”
I knew what he meant.
How many of us have struggled with the failed prophecies of recent years? How about the prophetic frenzy that swirled around the Y2K computer crisis that never materialized? How many remember the Lakeland Revival and the leading prophetic voices declaring it to be “the big one” that would sweep the country and transform the culture? Significant moral failure brought that revival to an ignominious end.
Lately, prominent voices have prophesied words concerning national and world events that would seem to be at odds with one another. For instance, some prophesy an imminent and catastrophic economic crash, while others have prophesied a season of economic prosperity, especially for Christians.
What is a believer to do when well-known prophetic people speak conflicting words? How can we sort the true word from the spirit of error?
Nothing New Under the Sun
The early church had a similar problem. For this reason, the apostle Paul instituted a structure for testing prophetic words spoken in the public assembly. First Corinthians 14:29 says, “Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others pass judgment” (NASB).
The word for “pass judgment” in the original Greek means “to separate or discriminate,” implying that New Testament prophetic people didn’t always deliver 100 percent accurate words and that their words therefore needed evaluation to separate the good from the bad.
A false prophet is one who teaches Israel to go after false gods, as established in Deuteronomy 13:1-5. In the absence of that kind of violation, and in light of 1 Corinthians 14:29, then, an inaccurate prophecy doesn’t render the prophet himself false, it just makes him wrong in that instance.
It follows that prophetic words, whether spoken in the public assembly, promoted through electronic media or published in print, must be tested and that we believers therefore carry a responsibility to sort out what we hear. Obviously, we don’t always have access to a 1 Corinthians 14 prophetic presbytery. Ideally, every one of us should be involved in a fellowship of discerning brothers and sisters with whom we can weigh such things, but circumstances too often leave us on our own to figure it out for ourselves. How, then, can the individual believer test what he hears with or without a group of friends to help do it?
While I know of no foolproof method for discerning the accuracy of any given prophetic word—aside from obvious violations of Scripture—I can certainly offer some helpful guidelines. Even when testing by the Scriptures, however, we often come up with differing interpretations and applications of the passages we use. As I heard John Wimber once say at the height of the controversy over the prophetic movement of the 1980s, “The only word God is obligated to fulfill is this Book!”
With so many changing variables, then, we need an unchangeable answer. We must build our lives on the person of Jesus and His Word rather than on prophecy delivered by any human agency.
At the same time, prophecy isn’t a human idea, it is God’s. He is the one who gifted the church at large with this instrumental operation of the Spirit. Because of that, if we are to include it as a healthy part of both the corporate church and individual believer’s lives, then we also need to broaden our understanding of the primary functions of prophecy.
For starters, we must recognize that prophecy is far more than just predicting future events. In contrast to our tendency to give prediction the greatest emphasis, prediction is actually a minor function. The Greek word actually means “to speak forth,” not necessarily to predict.
True prophetic ministry calls us to pure and undefiled devotion to God, sealing our hearts to Jesus while sorting the precious from the vile. It brings a revelation of His nature, tearing down what is not of God and then releasing, establishing and building up that which is from God (Jer. 1:10). Even in words of judgment, the predictive element should prepare God’s people for things to come, release power for destiny, inject hope and strengthen the body of Christ (1 Cor. 14:3).
