|---------------| | HELP WANTED: | | MORE PROPHETS | |---------------|
PUBLIC DOMAIN: Copyright declined by author at publication.
First edition July 2011
This document available as a single HTML file, in plain text, Open Document, and PDF for now.
I am a prophet of Jehovah, the God of the Bible. I want to tell you what God requires on this earth. That does not say anything about you and your obligation to listen or act. It's simply a way of explaining why I am addressing you. You owe me nothing; if the message doesn't move you, pay no attention. If you need further explanation, ask as many questions as it takes to clarify. All I can offer is myself, in the hope whatever truth lives in me can show through. This is the prophet's ethic.
Starting with the title and the cover, everything in this book is merely a narrative of my soul. It's the best I know. The objective in writing is to provide a manual of instruction to help other prophets, and perhaps to help others who simply need some answers about the burning in their own souls.
If the message takes an anchor in your soul, you'll have to decide how to obey. I'll make suggestions according to my experiences. Use what fits; discard the rest and forge your own understanding. The mind is no more than the means to implement the imperatives of the Spirit of God speaking into your spirit. There is no orthodox theology aside from what is recorded in Scripture. All else is merely the efforts of humans to organize their thinking and their actions. You are not bound by anyone else's personal intellectual narrative of how they encountered God. The whole point is to deepen your commitment to God, calling you to do the work, to undertake the study which naturally flows from your desire to serve Him.
Everything on this human level of existence is no more than a good tool for that service. You can belong to any organization you like, but it falls to you alone standing before God to account for how you have invested the resources He has provided. It doesn't matter what material things you can claim to possess, so long as they do not possess you. You cannot serve God and the stuff of this life at the same time. When something no longer serves His purpose in Your life, throw it aside. That includes organizations and human affiliations of every type. Do not bind yourself by anything, or to anything, which you can name, point to or touch on this mortal plane.
That's a summary of my spiritual teaching. I assert without apology most Christians mix and confuse the spiritual and human planes, failing to separate between heavenly things and earthly things. What gets you into Heaven is the grace of God; what gets you right with God on the earth is fulfilling His Law Covenants. Grace trumps Laws, but often has you doing exactly what the Laws required. You can let grace inform your obedience here, but grace is not necessary to fulfill the Laws of God and gain the blessings of those Laws. Prophecy can surely serve a spiritual purpose, but it is a ministry of the Laws. This is my experience with God. Nothing here will serve well as an apologia for norming. Thus, I will not presume to debate or defend. That's God's territory. Read it or don't; review if it amuses you. I'll gladly answer questions and elaborate if something is unclear.
This study assumes the authority of the Scripture. It assumes you have read the whole Bible enough times to recognize phrases and content. There will be a few quotations, but this is not a Bible study guide. My personal preference is the Protestant Canon, but you'll have to work that out with God yourself. While I presume a certain spiritual receptivity in the reader, the nature of anything I can put into human language is merely intellectual content. Everything should be well within the reach of human intelligence alone. But because it presumes a higher realm, and is built entirely on written revelation from the Bible, you'll have to adjust your logical assumptions to fit that.
Right up front, we will be dealing with the question of Hebrew mystical logic versus Western Aristotelian epistemology. If you cannot acknowledge a source of input from beyond the five senses and reason, you will be wasting your time reading this. If you can cultivate a means to embrace something which comes to you from a non-rational source, a sort of intuition or subconscious processing, then at least some of this will make sense.
My fellow Christians are going to have to understand this stuff was working before Christ, and was based on covenants which His coming did not end. Granted, those covenants are best understood by knowing Christ, and He is the destination where everything was headed back when these covenants were the way God did things on the earth. Nonetheless, serving as a prophet is founded on principles which worked before He came and they work still. The Law of Moses is a closed covenant, but the Law of Noah is not closed. It still applies to all humanity until this earth is no more. We do study Moses as a particular example of Noah. Furthermore, you really don't understand Christ completely until you understand this first. This is the background behind everything He taught.
This in not about religion and spiritual birth, not about the Covenant of the Cross. The path of the prophet is understanding and obeying His commandments on the human level. A great many miracles and prophecies arose from simply obeying the applicable Laws of God, not necessarily because of some special spiritual awareness. There were prophets before Moses and we walk today in their craft. It should be obvious to anyone who has read the Bible, there has always been, and always will be, a great deal of divine activity on this level of existence, based on something other than being born-again. We are pointedly told spiritual birth is not for everyone. While the Laws do point to something on a higher level, His divine concern most certainly does affect life on this plane. If it happens on this level of existence, the Laws of God can address it, and things can be understood at least on this level by understanding His Laws.
Feel free to ask questions. This book is not about converting you to my religion. The final aim is to promote adherence to God's Laws. If you prefer to view that as cosmic moral absolutes, that's up to you. What you must understand is what I describe here does work; I have concrete results.
THIS BOOK IS PUBLIC DOMAIN. It would be contrary to the nature of this material to place it under any form of copyright. Distribute at will. It will be offered first in several different electronic formats. Those who wish to print it on paper or some other static media should be warned God is watching you. Charging more than what it costs to produce and distribute is a sin. Anyone wishing to translate into any other language needs no permission from me. Do your best; I won't presume to set limits. Obviously, it would be dishonest if you changed the words in English without noting in some obvious way you were the editor. Again, the nature of this material assumes God will notice and will act if anyone attempts to use this dishonestly. But this is not Scripture, and should not be treated as such.
What makes a prophet? What's the difference between a prophet and any other person? It's not what you might expect.
It burns. You look around you and it just burns. Things are wrong. Not just a little messed up, but monumentally wrong. It's so bad, even when it's right it's wrong. It hurts. Nothing takes away the pain, because it's not in your flesh, though it will produce some symptoms of physical discomfort. It comes from somewhere else. It keeps you awake at night, dims the light of the sun during the day, and provides a blackened and burnt smell to every delight in your world.
You could probably come up with other ways to express it, but there is a sense things are just wrong, and it's not just you. It includes you, of course, but you know it's something wrong all around you. Worse, it doesn't have to be that way. The relief is in reach, you know, even if you don't exactly know what it is. If you could just...
Somebody has to do something. It won't matter whether you consider yourself capable, talented, or whatever. You have a driving desire to understand this malaise and fix it. It's not simply about religion, either. This is something more immediate. The world could be better, has to be better, but everybody who claims to have the answer, or an answer, is barking up the wrong tree. No matter how many different things you try, every philosophy and every discipline of academia somehow falls short. None of them offer any real answers, and certainly none of them has any power to fix things. If they did, there would be a fix already, given the way so many people are trying.
You sense the anger of the universe itself, the world around you. But it's more than just anger, it's a deep sorrow. Is there some way to get in touch with that? Something tells you there is a way to restore peace and harmony, but nothing you've encountered does it. A thousand programs, books and conferences leave you somehow short of that thing which is always just beyond your reach.
You are called.
For the prophet, divine justice is the wellspring of all things. We could call it a hundred other things, since they are all just words plastered over something bigger than all our best words. God in Creation has woven a thread of His own Person into all things. It's not simply a standard, a body of laws, commandments, something you can simply memorize. Yet it is well within human reach, because it works entirely upon the human plane of existence. Nor is it religion, per se. It has a spiritual element, but does not require any particular religious experience. What it requires is simply that we recognize it sometimes defies the best of our human logic.
This justice we seek is a living thing. Like all living beings, it responds differently in every context. Embracing justice is not a simple matter of knowing, nor doing, but another category altogether. It is desire and commitment, a drive from just beyond the reach of our intelligence, beyond our control. The brain cannot own it, merely obey it. The brain must surely organize and formulate ways to fulfill the demands of justice, but cannot take the executive function. The decisions of justice are from a higher plane than mere intelligence, because they arise from something universal, something inherent in the moral fabric of the world you experience. We seek familiarity and friendship with justice, to serve justice as something which is far greater than any living human.
Your first intimation of justice knocks you on your face. If all you understand of that burning desire to fix the world is anger and indignation, then you don't get it. You are personally as powerless to do justice as you are to get justice. You are no less a transgressor than any other human. But you understand justice includes mercy; it's all in the same package. Justice isn't performance, but desire, and those who desire justice shall see mercy. You gratefully hold mercy to your breast and carry it to the world.
Mercy is not possible without repentance. Nobody can afford to really do justice, but we can reach for it, show our desire for it. We express in some way our desire to get loose from our broken natures, and justice recognizes that, offering mercy. The key to all good things on this earth is mercy. It's not a meritocracy, but something far more deeply personal.
From where we stand today, we look back over what seems a fairly long lived and mature civilization. There are a thousand philosophies with fancy names like existentialism, post-modernism, and so on. They appear to be a departure from the classical approach of the Enlightenment. Perhaps they are, but in at least one sense, they all still stand on the same foundation. The Enlightenment is simply a revival of the Ancient Classics, which included a lot of philosophy, particularly Roman and Greek philosophy. The difference is the Enlightenment is the birth of secularism, itself merely an extension of something hinted at in ancient Greece and Rome.
Indeed, if you boil it all down to what folks in the West actually do when they are at their best, the basis upon which they approach life, it all still derives from one Greek philosopher in particular, a fellow named Aristotle. Among all the other things he said and taught, there is one particular teaching for which he is noted, and it was his approach to knowing.
The fundamental question here is bound up in that fancy word, "epistemology." You can look it up and compare with my definition, but I'm going to focus on certain core concepts. It works like this: Aristotle was asking the question of how we should act in this world. That is, by what means do we understand reality such that our actions in this world work more or less predictably? Can we develop a reliable view of reality so we can study it and develop consistent expectations how various human activity will turn out?
Epistemology deals with the question of what we can know such that it's usable, as it were. What can I claim is true so that we can talk about it knowing it will work pretty much every time, for every person? Mankind has always sought control over his world, one way or another. It's one of the human instincts to want to shape our environment to suit our purposes. If we accept all sorts of inputs to our knowledge base without proper filtering, we might start believing stuff which can't be proved. Then we'll be wasting our resources on activities which don't do us much good, and might actually do harm. Of course, it involves plenty of discussion about what's good and useful, but that's part of the philosophical pursuit. Aristotle was all about establishing the frame of reference, giving such debate some firm foundation so it will have meaning.
Aristotle makes one assumption for which his native Greek culture is well known: If the best of men can't grapple with it using their intelligence, it's not important. Humanity in the ideal is the measure of all things. Indeed, if the answer cannot be arrived at from an entirely human-centered approach, it can't be valid. Aristotle felt this was largely self-evident. He did allow for things he didn't understand, but only under the assumption it had to be logical on his terms.
This is the reason virtually no one understands divine justice -- they exclude it from consideration before they start. You cannot know divine justice entirely from any study of sensory data and logic. At least, not using logic as Aristotle defined it. Divine justice is available only if you accept a form of logic which includes something beyond senses and intellect. To be a prophet requires you become comfortable crossing that barrier, reaching outside what science can prove. For an awful long time before Aristotle was around, people unanimously assumed a form of logic which included human faculties of knowing and deciding which aren't acceptable to modern science.
If you can't accept that assertion, you've already wasted too much time. You can't be a prophet without it.