The prophet's handbook

light-emitting beings and materials as with God’s heaven and angels. These two anomalies of the day did not exist for the people of the age, but they did exist in God. •Third, the prophecy must be empowered by God’s authorization to take effect in the person’s life. For instance, Elijah embodied the power to make fire come down from, and to close up, the heavens. He was imbued by God with the biopneumatic material to impregnate a barren old woman by prophesying. It was part of his mantle and his ministerial covenant with the Lord as a prophet. Elisha, his successor, also had such power. He was authorized by God to cause lead to float, to slaughter people who offended him or his God, and to command the elements to obey. This authority was integral to his mantle as a prophet. Therefore, his words along these lines were self-evident because they had always come to pass or shown immediate signs of being able to do so at the prophet’s command. The phrase immediate signs is a key in this explanation. The Hebrew word bow, used by Moses in the Deuteronomy reference, suggests that some sort of sign regularly accompanied or immediately followed the prophets’ words so that when they spoke the Lord promptly acted on their prediction by manifesting a present, unmistakable sign of the word spoken. The two tests of a prophecy—existence and appearance—are individual ways of distinguishing prophets who just love to hear themselves talk. They delight in prophesying for the sake of prophesying. The Lord calls such prophesiers presumptuous prophets and suggests that because of this character flaw, He does not listen to what comes out of these messengers’ mouths. Notice that He did not say the person was not a prophet, only that he or she had no power or influence with God due to the habit of saying whatever comes to mind. The Ezekiel 13 reference solidifies this explanation well. It speaks of how the prophets are led by their own spirits and when they prophesy falsely in the Lord’s name, they hope that they can somehow make their words come to pass. To do so requires magic, which of course has no power to coerce the Almighty. More recognizable signs of false prophecy or divination are unbelief, apostasy, and libertinism, all damaging behaviors and responses that are addressed elsewhere in this handbook. Moreover, spiritual errors and prophetic blunders are incontrovertible outcomes of prophesiers who delight in just seeing (or claiming to see) in the spirit realm and saying what is seen (or imagined) as prophecy, regardless of whether the word can be verified as God’s or not. To such prophets, the fun is in the prophesying, not in the other safety measures that protect God’s reputation and His people’s faith.