Growing up, the prophets always came across to me as super-humans. They got all the good experiences of God and everybody else had to receive their Godly experiences vicariously through them. The prophets got to hear God’s voice and everyone else had to use them as a mediator.
This saddened me as a child. The prophetic gifting seemed like the ultimate call in life, yet God only reserved it for a select few and I figured I could never be like them. Furthermore, since I had no good theology for the prophets as a kid, I figured their role had been done away with after the Old Testament ended. I had no idea that prophecy was a gift that people could still operate in today, nor did I understand that all Christians had some leeway to move in the prophetic on a basic level.
But as my spiritual theology developed and I started to understand how the prophetic still worked today, my heart leapt for joy. Maybe one day I would be able to experience God like the prophets did, or at the very least, perhaps I would begin to hear His voice if I could understand what He sounded like.
Furthermore, I also began to realize that those who moved in such power were not super-humans like I once thought they were. They had the potential to make flawed statements just like everyone else (see 1 Chron 22:1-17). They had marriages and kids and ate and slept and used the toilet. They were so much more relatable than I ever thought they could be.
When we read the Scriptures as though the prophets were super-humans that heard the audible voice of God at all times and could even summon His voice at will, we actually miss much of what the Bible communicated about the prophets. Yes, such things could happen, especially as they were powerfully anointed for the task, but if we look at them in the light the Bible actually presents them, we can begin to open our eyes to the passages that teach us how prophecy works. Now that we understand that we have the same Holy Spirit inside of us that spoke to them, we can finally connect ourselves to the prophets in a way that others before Pentecost were incapable of doing.
Don’t get me wrong: the prophets had a lot of crazy experiences and plenty of their supernatural stories go far beyond what any of us have ever experienced or ever will experience. But even with this being said, they are not so strange that we can’t relate to them—for they are human like us.
Want to continue the conversation? Take the long journey with my book/audiobook, The Rush and the Rest, or take a shorter path with my condensed version, Fantasy IRL.
Jamin Bradley 