John of Japan
**We'll have to agree to disagree here. I believe a "word of wisdom" or a "word of knowledge" simply to be advice, not words given directly by the Holy Spirit. The Greek for both of these is logos, which can simply mean a message, rather than rhema, which usually means a specific word. **
A retired Greek professor I know through the Internet has shot this rhema/logos argument down. Actually it was popularized by WOF Charismatics. If you look up ‘word’ in a concordance and see where ‘rhema’ and ‘logos’ are used, it easily disproves the idea that ‘logos’ is non-revelatory and ‘rhema’ is—at least as some teach the meaning of the two words.
If the Spirit gives someone a message to say, how is that not revelation. Do you argue that a revelation has to be word-for-word to be revelation? What about dreams and visions then? They are not in the form of words.
And what about people who do pray specific words that the Spirit gives them, specifically about someone’s situation, and it really ministers to them? What do you do with that when that happens?
**Yes, of course the Holy spirit can help someone called before authorities to know what to say, help a preacher know what to preach, help someone to pray for a specific situation, etc. The latter two have happened to me. But my point is, this does not have to be in the exact words of a revelation, but can be simply in impressions and leading. I have never had specific words given by the Holy Spirit. **
And if the Spirit gives someone impressions and leadings, for example telling them what to speak on, isn’t the Spirit communicating outside of scripture? If the Spirit tells you to preach on I John, I John is scripture, but the Spirit telling you to preach on that is not scripture.
Or what if someone has the ‘audacity’ to claim to be called to preach? The Bible does not list their name and say they are called to preach. Yet they claim that the Spirit revealed to them, outside of scripture, that they were supposed to preach.
***You are right about the can of worms. If we get on the issue of the canon, we'll hijack the thread.**
If we keep it focused and on point we might not.
**As for your next point, we're going to have to agree to disagree here. I am a dispensationalist, which means I have no problem at all with what you are saying. I don't believe that anyone is adding to the Bible in this present dispensation simply because we don't need added revelation. The words of the Bible are completely sufficient for our spiritual needs in the church age.**
Dispensationalism is only good so far as it is backed up by scripture. If someone comes out with a chart of the end of time and writes ‘gifts’ in one box, but ‘no gifts’ in another, what is his authority? There has to be scripture to back up which periods of time are without gifts, right? Otherwise, its just human opinion.
Where are the verses to back up the idea that there are no gifts in this dispensation. You do believe there will be prophecy at the end of this age, when the two witnesses prophesy, don’t you? Where is the scriptural authority for saying that the gifts ceased for a couple of thousand years between John and the prophets at the end of the age?
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**Once again, I'm a dispensationalist. I have no problem with there being both a previous dispensation and a future one which had predictive prophecies, while the church age does not.**
But if you do not have scripture to back up the idea that we are in a gap of time without predictive prophecies, you end up with unbiblical doctrine. Where is the scripture that teaches this?
**Let me ask something here. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to have a wide open view about this. Do you believe that there can be false prophecies? I'm sure you do. How then do you believe we should limit prophecy? Or should we? How can you tell a false prophet?**
Fortunately the Bible has a lot to say about this. I believe prophets should function in church according to the commandments of the Lord Paul gave in I Corinthians 14, including the commandments about the prophets speaking two or three and the other judging. Jesus also said we would know false prophets by their fruits.
I think a lot of people don’t want to believe in prophecy because of fear. It makes them uneasy thinking they might hear a prophecy and have to determine if it is not from God. Saying there is no true prophecy but the Bible is comfortable. It makes things easy. Easy is not always true.
The early church had to deal with figuring out if prophecies were true or not. Maybe some of the Thessalonians wanted to reject prophecies or roll their eyes when they heard them because of this. But Paul commanded them to despise not prophesyings, to prove all things, and to hold fast to that which is good. Paul did not offer them an easy out of a doctrinal formula that would cause them not to have to determine if something was from God or not.
And he left us commandments in scripture like ‘despise not prophesyings.’ A lot of people reject these commands, unfortunately, based on human reasoning.
**For many of us non-Charismatics, what ruins the whole thing is the great abuse in Charismatic circles of this doctrine. I have read some really bizarre stuff by Charismatics claiming to be prophets. Does this embarrass you?**
I try to think of myself as a follower of Christ rather than as a ‘Charismatic’. Baptists who are in Christ are my brethren as much as Charismatics are. I suppose I would find strange things like this to be embarrassing if I were with an unbeliever and witnessed someone doing strange things.
There are Charismatics and Pentecostals who consider some of these guys to be strange as well. There were false prophets and false teachers going around in the early days of the church. There were also true prophets and true teachers. I can imagine some of the Christians might have been embarrassed before unbelievers that the flakes and false prophets claimed were associated with Christianity in the eyes of unbelievers. I believe the situation today is the same as it was in scripture in a lot of ways. There are true prophets, and there are false prophets, just as we would expect from reading the teachings of Christ and the epistles.
Some weird things people do are just weird, and it does not mean they are not believers. Even with Baptists, isn’t it weird if there are 10 people in a room and the person giving a teaching feels compelled to scream at the top of his lungs and say “And-uh” instead of “And.” If I took an unbeliever with me to church and a guest speaker who talked like that came to church, that might be embarrassing. Some things Charismatics do that look weird to people unfamiliar with them are just weird cultural things, culture in the sense that that is their church culture. So I don’t condemn all weirdness as being the same as false prophesying.
On the issue of modern prophets and prophecies, I study the Bible and believe what it teaches. I don’t worry about whether someone who claims to be a prophet is weird, or if Mormons claim to prophecy. The Bible teaches what it teaches and if people who claim to be Christians prophecy falsely, that does not make the Bible false. In fact, the Bible teaches that there will be both true and false prophets, so the fact that there are false prophets lines up with scripture, too.
