- Spoken word
- Had power because was in reality the word of God and carried His
authority and power
- Was creative - having been spoken, it began to create a new future in
which the word came true
- Accomplished what it was sent to do (Isa. 55:10-11)
- Symbolic action
- Enacted word
- Not just a visual aid or sermon illustration but a powerful way of
dramatically portraying the word of God
- "initiated the divine action in miniature, and thus helped
towards the fulfillment of what was foretold" (H. Wheeler Robinson, Inspiration
and Revelation in the Old Testament, 227)
- Examples - Isa. 20:1-6, Ezek. 4:1-5:17, Hosea 1:1-9
- Prophets typically spoke to their present time - they were trying to
get their people to repent to avoid punishment and destruction - they were not trying to
predict the future
- Test of the validity of a prophet's message
- The sure test of whether a prophet is a true prophet or not is
whether his words come true (Deut. 18:21-22) - if his words come true, the prophet is true
- if his words do not come true, the prophet is false
- Problems
- We do not often have the luxury to wait to see if a prophet's words
come true - members of the audience may not live long enough to see if all of a prophet's
words come true
- The prophetic books we accept as canonical typically contain
prophecies that have not come true yet (e.g., Isa. 11:6-9, Ezek. 40:1-48:35, Micah 4:3-5)
but through the centuries they have been accepted as canonical - is it because a certain
percentage of their words have come true?
- People of faith seem to have accepted these prophets as true for
other reasons other than that all their words came true - perhaps their words have the
ring of truth because they agree with and/or illuminate the earlier words from God