The prophet's handbook

psychics presently dominating their place on the supernatural front. What Is a Prophet?

A prophet is a divine messenger of God (or any god). He or she is an official spokesperson for the deity served on earth. A prophet invokes the will, destiny, plans, and powers of God to manifest the spiritual and the supernatural in our world. Although prophets do this mainly by speaking, sometimes they resort to drama, theatrics, song, or other demonstrative modes to depict and otherwise manifest the word of the Lord—their sole revelatory objective. According to Strong’s Concordance, the Greek word for prophet is prophetes, the word most accepted by the New Testament church. However, in concept it falls short of the ancient origins of the prophetic in its usage and applications because the Greeks saw the prophetic predominantly in oracular contexts. By the time they controlled the world, religious and therefore spiritual extremes were being pushed to the background. Therefore, they stressed mostly the prophesying rather than the performance and provocative work of the ministry. Most of the definitions we use today to explain the prophetic come from their limitation of the office and its officers to this narrow field of revelatory activity. The era of the Hebrews, on the other hand, had a fuller connotation of the prophetic as conveyed in their meanings of the word. Their term shows an expansive understanding of the mantle in all its contexts. Their word is nabi. Unlike the Greek perception of the prophetic, the Hebrews, who derived their use of the minister from the ancients who preceded them, saw the prophet as much more than a simple predictor. For them, the ministry had a power-wielding influence that affected destiny and dramatically impacted the world around them. The nabi can be traced throughout history, its functions documented as far back as man, religion, and God are recorded, after the Edenic transgression. The Israelites drew from these ancient models to operate their prophetic ministry under Jehovah God. The Distinctive Features of the Nabi The confusion over what makes a prophet, and what signifies one as a vessel of prophecy, or prophesier, is understandable. When one is strictly guided by the definition of a prophet most commonly given, confusion cannot help but engender deeper confusion. If one defines the prophetic exclusively by giving the word of the Lord, then anyone who says, “Thus says the Lord,” or “the Lord told me,” may be a prophet. But when one takes into account the prophetes-nabi