False prophets have been a recurring issue since ancient times, and this episode unpacks their presence and roles across history. In a world yearning for apocalypse over prophecy, how should we discern messages of divine inspiration from reckless chatter? Ronald L. Dart discusses the challenges of recognizing true prophetic voices, emphasizing the importance of historical anchoring and moral clarity in any prophecy. Through biblical examples, we examine why modern prophets are often assumed silent and the consequences this has on faith and society.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 03 :
I honestly don’t know what people expect in terms of a profit. I don’t think many people even know where to look for one. You’d certainly be making a mistake if you looked in the pulpit of a church somewhere or maybe in some stadium where you’ve got an evangelist speaking to 60,000, 70,000 people. You’re not likely to find a real prophet in those environments. One ancient prophet, for example, was a sheepherder and a fruit picker before God spoke to him. And he seems to have been a very reluctant prophet at that. On one occasion, when he had delivered a very unpleasant prophecy concerning Israel, he was told to knock it off, go home, and shut up. Here’s what he replied. You’ll find it in Amos, the seventh chapter. He said, I was no prophet. Neither was I a prophet’s son. I was a herdman, a sheepherder. I was a gatherer of wild figs. And the Lord took me as I followed the sheep, and he said to me, Go, prophesy to my people Israel. So he wasn’t schooled, he wasn’t trained, he wasn’t taught. And I’ve noticed something, well, something peculiar about how God works. When he decides he wants to tell you something, he does not look for someone who will impress you. He is just as likely to pick somebody you wouldn’t listen to on a bed. Somebody to come along and say, you expect me to listen to this guy? A long time ago I made up my mind of that. I said, I know for a fact if God ever decides for whatever reason to send somebody to talk to me with a message from God, it’s going to come from somebody I will definitely not want to hear it from. So here’s a prophet named Amos. And Amos left us with a very interesting principle. He said this. You’ll find it, chapter 3, verse 7. Surely the Lord God will do nothing but He reveals His secret to His servants, the prophets. The lion has roared, who will not fear? The Lord has spoken, who can but prophesy. God will do nothing unless He reveals His secret to His servants, the prophets. Now, I kind of understand what he’s saying. I know, for example, that I am no prophet. But if I find something God has said, how can I possibly keep quiet about it? He said, the lion has roared, who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesy? But if God has said he will do nothing except to reveal his secret to his servants, the prophets, where are they? Surely God is not silent to the world. Or is he? It seems to me that we’re heading into some really bad times in this world, but God seems to be disinterested, or at least detached, or at least he’s not talking to any of us. Oh, I realize there are many pretenders to the prophet’s office. I have met a few of those myself. But they’ve all been just that, pretenders to a man. I am still waiting to encounter a real prophet, and I am in no hurry. On the other hand, suppose God has already said his peace, and we were not paying attention. Jesus explained the principle behind this to a group of Pharisees one day, and he did it with a parable. He laid out in graphic detail two characters. One, a wealthy man, stinking rich, had everything. The other was a beggar who laid at the rich man’s gate. The beggar was in a lamentable state. He got only the crumbs from the rich man’s table, a miserable life the poor guy had. So they died, the story goes. The beggar is carried to be with Abraham, and the rich man is buried. Then follows a dialogue between the rich man and Abraham. And being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham a long way off and Lazarus in his bosom, you know, lying as the custom would be, like you were lying at meal. Lazarus is right there reclining next to him. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me. Send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame. Miserable, poor guy. Abraham said, Son? Remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things. But now he’s comforted, you’re tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can anyone come back the other way. Now remember that this is a parable. It is not a description of what is, but a story to illustrate a point. So what is the point? Well, it follows. He said, I beg you, therefore, Father, then that you would send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment. Oh, please send him. And Abraham said, well, they have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them. And he said, No, Father Abraham, but if someone came to them from the dead, they would repent. And Abraham answered, Now if they don’t hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rise from the dead. I think what Jesus is saying is that God isn’t going to tell us the same thing over and over again. Why should he send us a prophet when we haven’t listened to the prophets he sent long ago? You know, there are two categories of prophets in the Bible. There are the oral prophets and the written prophets. Elijah, the archetype of all prophets, never wrote down a word, as far as we know. He spoke directly to those who were the object of the prophecy. Someone else wrote his words, or we would know nothing of Elijah’s message and work. Then there are the writing prophets. Now, why do you suppose their word was written down and preserved down through the generations instead of merely delivered orally, say, like a sermon? Well, whatever the case, it’s clear enough that Jesus concluded that the prophets wrote this stuff down so God wouldn’t have to tell us again and again. on the assumption that if we won’t listen to it when it’s been written down by the likes of Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel, why should we assume anybody will listen even though somebody rose from the dead to tell them? So, if we think we would like to hear from a prophet, maybe the starting place is with those prophets who have already long since spoken. Now I can hear someone say, well, yeah, but all those prophecies were fulfilled in the Old Testament. They’re not for the future, are they? Well, apart from the fact that that idea would leave the world somewhat hopeless in a modern world and with no message from God, it’s not quite true. I used to teach Old Testament, and every year I’d pass over a section in Isaiah that addresses this issue, and finally I got the point. It’s found in Isaiah chapter 41 and verse 23. And it comes in the middle of God challenging the false gods, the idols that Israel was chasing around. He says, “…present your case, bring forth your strong reasons. Let them bring forth and show us what will happen.” Now, right there, that’s what most of us are looking for. We want to know what’s going to happen. Now, why we want to know it, that’s another question entirely, but we want to know. He says, let them show the former things, what they were, so we can consider them and know the latter end of them. Or declare to us things to come. Show the things that are to come hereafter that we may know you are God’s. Now, this is not only useful in the study of prophecy, it’s also useful in evaluating a prophet, which is what this statement is all about. It’s all about whether or not somebody comes to you with a message out of the blue, hanging it out there with no support under it whatsoever, or whether he comes forward and says, okay, here is what God has said, here is what God has done in history, and I’m here to tell you he is about to do it again. Now, I’ve encountered a few wannabe prophets in my time, every one of which I rejected as a prophet. Now, how can I be so sure? The reason is that not one of them anchored his prophecy in history. Not one of them went and showed me the former things, what they were, so I could think about them and apply the lesson to what’s coming in my own future. Not a one. A new one showed up just a few days ago. His prophecy? Something is going to happen on October 23rd. Now, how useful is that? Of course, it came to pass. Something did happen on October 23rd. I got out of bed the first thing in the morning. I brushed my teeth. I shaved. I showered. But I don’t really think that that’s a particularly useful illustration of prophecy. Now, if you read the Bible very much, if you think about what you read, there are some important ideas that emerge from the prophets. Listen to this brief message, and when I come back, I’ll tell you what those are.
SPEAKER 02 :
The Real Prophets series is available in album form. If you would like to get in on this story from the beginning, write or call and ask for your free CD titled Real Prophets. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 03 :
One thing that occurred to me in spades one day as I was making my way through the prophets is, God does not send a prophet to tell us how well we are doing. Not ever. He doesn’t come down and give us pats on the head and say, yeah, that’s good. You people are living the life just right, and the future will go on. And he doesn’t send prophets with a feel-good message. If they have any encouragement at all to offer, it seems always to be on the other side of a terrible disaster. He’ll give you the disaster and say, well, yeah, but then on the other side of this, those of you who survive will go into a much better kingdom. God does not send a prophet with pablum. And I will have to tell you, a great deal of what comes down the road these days as prophecies is nothing more than regurgitated psalms. You can tell where they come from. They come from the King James Version of the Bible, and you can tell it because of all the these and thous that are sprinkled in the middle of it all. And it really doesn’t have much to do with anything. Now, if you see a prophet… but you know he is, and he’s walking down the road toward your house, you can start worrying immediately. Because God does not send a prophet to us to tell us how well we are doing. He sends a prophet to tell us we have screwed up and we’d better straighten out, or big trouble is coming our way. Why on earth, after all, should God tell us anything about the future? The only reason I can think of is because he expects us to do something with the information, like repent, turn our life around, begin to live straightened up and fly right. Okay. Now, why does God not send a prophet to tell us what we should already know? Because he doesn’t do that, you know. Well, the recent way he figures it is, if you won’t respond to the written word, here it is, it’s right there on the pages of your Bible. If you can’t get it there, you’re not going to do any better, even if someone rises from the dead to tell you. So if you’re wishing that God might send you a word by the prophet, you might want to rethink that idea. Now, there are two important words we need to think about here. One is the word prophecy, which means to speak under divine inspiration. Prophecy almost always includes some moral content. You people are lying, it has screwed up your judgment, and I’m going to come down there if you don’t straighten this out. Or as someone once said, letter from God, don’t make me come down there. The other word is apocalypse. Now, apocalypse means revelation, and it’s merely a recounting of future events, often in highly symbolic words and visions, as in the book of Revelation. What most people are looking for is not prophecy, because prophecy is sent to correct their sins. What most people want is apocalypse, revelation. They want to predict the future, not change their lives. I’m sorry. It doesn’t work that way. A real prophet tells us what is going to happen and why. And it should make some kind of sense. God doesn’t send prophets to us with the answers to trivia. It just doesn’t work that way. But I realize that I have laid down a major marker when I say I have never encountered a true prophet. How can I be so sure? Well, for one thing, the man of God should not be gullible. John wrote it this way in his first letter. He said, Beloved, do not believe every spirit. Test the spirits, whether they are of God. For many false prophets have gone out into the world. Note that. Not just a few. They’re out there, and there are dozens and hundreds. So what are you supposed to do about that? Well, you’re not supposed to believe every spirit that comes along. You are expected to try them. Who is? You are. You’re not supposed to rely on somebody else’s judgment of these guys. You’re supposed to trust your own judgment and to look into the pages of the Bible. John goes on in his fourth chapter to address a heresy of his own day, but this principle stands here for us to read and apply. Don’t believe every spirit. Check them out. There are all manner of preachers out there, each with his own message, his own claim, sometimes with his own miracles. Now, John seems to be saying it’s okay to think about these men or women. You don’t have to just swallow what they say. Put them to the test. After all, there were then and there are now plenty of false prophets in the world. Now, who do you suppose they might be if you look around you? Now, how do you go about the actual process of testing a guy to see whether he’s really a prophet of God or whether he’s simply talking out of his ear, as it were? Well, based upon what we have already seen, their testimony should be consistent with the message of Moses and the prophets, right? And you go all the way back to what Abraham told the rich man. He says, they’ve got Moses, they’ve got the prophets, hear them. So surely any prophet we come along has to be consistent. And it should not be a mere regurgitation of what we already know. Some would-be prophets just give us back the King James Bible and claim it’s prophecy. Actually, it’s plagiarism. You can recognize it by the King James English. Now here is what a real prophet had to say about this. His name is Isaiah, chapter 8. When they say to you, Seek those who are mediums and wizards who whisper and mutter. Should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living? To the law and the testimony, if they do not speak according to this word, it’s because there is no light in them. Now, when Isaiah speaks of the law, he is obviously talking about Moses. There’s no other source to go to. What is not so obvious until someone points it out is that the word testimony, as it is used in the Old Testament here, means the Ten Commandments. We’re accustomed to speak of the Ark of the Covenant. You may not know its original name was the Ark of the Testimony. Why? Well, because it contained the testimony of God in ten statements of law. That’s what it was. The Ten Commandments were called the testimony. So where are we when a prophet comes along with a word from the Lord, and that prophet tells us that the law and the Ten Commandments were abolished in whole or in part? I’ll tell you what we have. We have us a genuine, certified, card-carrying false prophet. Now, what do you suppose a real prophet would have to say of the various and sundry self-appointed prophets of our own day? We’re not left in the dark. Now remember, prophecies don’t have to be repeated because history repeats. What happened before happens again. The language may be different, the names may be different, but the spirit is the same. So our real prophet on this occasion is named Jeremiah, and he has a really hard message. But first, grab a pencil and a piece of paper. I want to give you an address so that you can get a copy of this program.
SPEAKER 02 :
I’ll be right back. For a free CD of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only and request the program titled The Test of a Prophet. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344.
SPEAKER 03 :
If you read Jeremiah carefully, you’ll understand that occasionally he is citing God’s words and occasionally he’s expressing himself. And in Jeremiah 23, verse 9, he says, My heart within me is broken because of the prophets. He had looked around. He saw what was going on in the temple. He saw what was going on in all the preachers of his own day. And what he’s about to explain is a massive failure of the preachers of his time. He said, all my bones shake. I’m like a man that’s drunk. I’m like a man whom wine has overcome. Because of the Lord and because of his holy words for the land is full of adulterers. You know, it isn’t really saying too much to notice that this is a fair description of our land right now. Adultery and fornication are a defining characteristic of our world. Love has been replaced with sex in our world, and nobody seems to care very much who it’s with or when. He continued, Because of a curse, the land mourns. The pleasant places of the desert are dried up. Their course of life is evil. Their might is not right. For both prophet and priest are profane. Yes, in my house I have found their wickedness, says the Lord. Now this is stunning. Because what he is saying is about the lone preacher of righteousness to be found in the entire land was one poor guy named Jeremiah. And the whole temple, it’s the whole temple precincts, the loaded up with prophet and priest who have profaned everything. Israel, you see, had no doctrine of separation of church and state. The prophets were the preachers, the priests tended to be the civil administrators, and they had become utterly corrupt. We learn from the history books of the Bible that pagan worship had actually been carried right into the temple, and idols were set up there. We learn that prostitution… male prostitution, female prostitution, had moved right onto the temple mount, and they’d set up their little booths right around the courts of the temple. It was all right there. Therefore, he said, their way shall be to them like slippery ways. In the darkness they shall be driven on and fall in them, for I will bring disaster on them the year of their punishment, saith the Lord. Years ago, I was reading something about the clergy, men who are in the ministry, and they, alongside sometimes of psychological counselors, are people who need that psychological counseling themselves. Sometimes they have a fairly high degree of neurosis, of psychosis, and in fact it’s probably because they keep seeing what God’s Word says, and they keep not saying it to the people when they preach to them, that their mind begins to go. God says, I’m going to bring disaster the year of their punishment. Upon whom? Upon the priests and the prophets and those who followed them. I’ve seen folly in all the prophets of Samaria. That’s the house of Israel in the north. They prophesied by Baal and caused my people Israel to err. Baal has many names and has been around for generations, and he still hasn’t gone away. Also, Jeremiah said, I’ve seen a horrible thing in the prophets of Jerusalem. They commit adultery. They walk in lies. They strengthen the hands of evildoers. So people don’t turn back from their wickedness. They don’t tell them what they’re doing is wrong. They don’t preach to them about sin. All of them are like Sodom to me and are inhabitants like Gomorrah. Adultery in the ministry? Sodomy in the priesthood? Oh, say it isn’t so. But it was, and it is. Therefore, thus saith the Lord of hosts concerning these prophets, I will feed them with wormwood. I’ll make them drink the water of gall. For from the prophets of Jerusalem, from the preachers, profaneness has gone out into all the land. And I want to tell you something that maybe you don’t understand. This is where it all began in our own country. The trends so prominent today did not emerge on their own. They didn’t come about from secularization in the government and in the school system. All that stuff followed the failure of the preachers who did not stand for righteousness. Preachers who wanted to dismiss the law of God. Preachers who wanted to say, well, sin is relative. And maybe even to eradicate the word sin, because we can’t tell people they’re sinning. It’s so passe. It’s so out of date. But it started in the churches, it started in the pulpits, and the failure of preachers to preach the Word. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Don’t listen to the words of the prophets that are prophesying to you. They make you vain. They speak a vision of their own heart, not from the mouth of the Lord. They continually say to those who despise me, The Lord has said, you’ll have peace. Are you going to think about this? The preacher would stand up and say, you’re going to have peace, and he says it to people who hate God. They say to everyone who walks according to the dictates of his own heart, oh, no evil shall come upon you. So what are you supposed to follow if not your own heart? The law and the testimony, pilgrim. I have not sent these prophets, said God, yet they ran. I have not spoken to them. They prophesied. And in comes a truly remarkable statement. If they, these prophets that God had not sent, had stood in my counsel, had caused my people to hear my words, then even they would have turned them from their evil way and from the evil of their doings. You know, I take great heart from that. God has not spoken to me in the night. I have no vision from God. I haven’t been dreaming dreams. But I do have a grip on his words, and I find them in the pages of the Bible. If I can make people hear those words, then maybe even I can turn them away from the wickedness of their doings. Then he summarizes, he said, the prophet who has a dream, let him tell his dream. He who has my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff that is the dream to the wheat, says the Lord? Is not my word like a fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks in pieces the rock? Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets who steal my words, every one from his neighbor. Behold, I am against the prophets, says the Lord, who use their tongues and say, God says. Behold, I am against those who prophesy false dreams and cause my people to err by their lies and by their recklessness.
SPEAKER 02 :
May it not happen to you. You have heard Ronald L. Dart. If you would like more information or if you have any questions, write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. In the U.S. and Canada, call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE-44 and visit our website at borntowin.net.
SPEAKER 01 :
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False prophets have been a recurring issue since ancient times, and this episode unpacks their presence and roles across history. In a world yearning for apocalypse over prophecy, how should we discern messages of divine inspiration from reckless chatter? Ronald L. Dart discusses the challenges of recognizing true prophetic voices, emphasizing the importance of historical anchoring and moral clarity in any prophecy. Through biblical examples, we examine why modern prophets are often assumed silent and the consequences this has on faith and society.
