Why don't prophets predict the future anymore?
Amos 1-5
The book of Amos has yet another perspective on the same basic story: Israel sinned, God is going to punish them, and then restore them to an Eden-like state. Whoever compiled the books of the Bible had a clear message. It seems they gathered all the prophets who got the basic story right, and put all their writings together in one collection.
Reading Amos makes me wonder about this vocation of the prophet. Amos says, “Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets” (3:7). That’s not how we view things today. Many people pray for God to do things, and don’t expect a prophet to be warned first. Today, claiming to be a prophet is a good way to make people ignore you. But enough people listened to Amos to preserve his writings for over two thousand years.
Amos describes the call of the prophet to be irresistible. He says “The lion has roared - who will not fear? The Sovereign Lord has spoken - who can but prophesy?” (3:8). Amos didn’t just wake up one day and decide to be a prophet. He had no choice, just like he has no choice to be afraid if he hears a lion roar.
It is interesting that the Christian and Jewish tradition is based on these prophetic writings, but neither tradition has officially recognized many legitimate prophets in the last two thousand years. Before that, there were a few centuries where prophets sprang up everywhere. These prophets predicted many things God would do in the future. Since then, there have been Christian Saints and famous Jewish Rabbis, but they have mostly helped us understand the past, not predict the future. Christian saints help us understand the story of Jesus, and Jewish Rabbis help us understand the Torah.
In those centuries before Jesus, the main role of the prophet was to predict the future. Moses said that you’ll know a true prophet if his predictions come to pass. In this ancient culture, people listened to prophets intently, and waited to see if their predictions came true. Even if they didn’t believe the prophet, they still respected them.
Can you imagine living in a world where respected people can claim God is talking to them? Imagine someone saying, with a straight face, “I’m a prophet. God talked to me this morning. Here’s what he’s going to do.” Then, imagine nobody bats an eye, nobody is surprised, everyone listens intently to what the prophet has to say. Afterwards, people wonder whether this person is a true prophet. It’s an open question.
In our culture, we’d expect everyone to dismiss this so-called prophet as a lunatic. If you didn’t, you’d be a lunatic yourself.
I enjoy doing thought experiments like this because it helps me understand just how different this ancient culture was from ours. To understand these ancient texts, it helps to understand the culture they came from.
This begs the question, why was the culture so different back then? Did God go through a period of talking to prophets, warning them of the future, and now he doesn’t do that anymore? That makes perfect sense considering the Gospel story. All the prophets were predicting Jesus in their own way. But maybe the culture back then was just superstitious. They believed in prophets, but we have weird superstitions too, like making a wish before blowing out birthday candles. It’s just a random difference in culture with no explanation. This also makes perfect sense.
However, it is interesting that ancient prophets were mainly concerned with the future. It’s as if something was missing from their world. There was an unsolved problem. The wisest story tellers were interested in what the creator of the universe was going to do to solve this problem. In that context, what could be more important than predicting the future? Creation was broken, and a good creator won’t let that continue for long.
These days, we’re also interested in the future, but not so much on a cosmic level. We might be interested in technological change, but that’s more of a curiosity. Artificial intelligence is interesting, but very few people think the world is broken without it. Today, we’re almost bored with technological change. It’s been happening quickly, but our human struggles remain the same.
Our modern science says that the future is bleak. If climate change doesn’t get us, then a solar flare will. If not that, then the sun will eventually explode. If we go to another planet, the heat-death of the universe eventually makes life impossible.
Today, our wisest people are interested in the past. They want to learn from ancient people. It doesn’t have to be Jesus. There are plenty of philosophers and ancient religious figures to choose from. That’s where the real wisdom lies. The world isn’t perfect, but it’s not fundamentally broken. God doesn’t have to do anything on a large scale to fix it. It’s up to us to learn from the past and fix the world ourselves. We can do it.
Prophets used to be interested in the future, but now they’re interested in the past. The world used to be so broken that we needed help from the creator of the universe. Now, it’s still not perfect, but we don’t need a cosmic reset. I’m no historian, but it seems like something happened two thousand years ago that changed the world.