Recently,
I'd been asking Father for an upgrade in the gift of discernment, as He’d been emphasizing
1 Corinthians 14:29 to me (“Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others
judge.”). And what do you know, but suddenly I began getting scores of
submissions for the www.northwestprophetic.com
website, many of them with what I would call a fairly judgment-oriented interpretation.
Cool! I was getting schooled!
Cool! I was getting schooled!
So I
brought each word to Him for my lessons, and he’d have me separately discern
the revelation portion of the prophecy from the interpretation portion.
In those particular prophetic words, over and over, I sensed the Holy Spirit in the revelation, but
not in the interpretation.
“They’re
interpreting through their expectations. They’re not listening to me, but they’re
listening to what they already believe,” he said.
One
illustration from this season: one of the prophecies came from a fairly mature
prophet, a mature man whom I knew and trusted personally. It spoke about the county where
he lived, and it carried a deadline: two weeks away. The revelation spoke of
earthquakes and volcanoes, and I could sense God in it. The interpretation
spoke of disaster and judgment, and I did not sense God on it (whew!). I heard
Father say, “This is not a literal revelation; it’s a metaphor. The earthquakes
are about things that he thought were stable getting shaken, and the volcanoes
are about deep, hidden things being brought to light, violently.” I had the
fairly strong sense that the word applied to him personally.
I
asked the prophet if maybe that word could be metaphorical rather than literal, and he rejected
it out of hand. OK. Maybe I’m wrong. But God was not directing me to respond as
if it were literal and I did not publish the prophecy on the website.
Three
weeks later the deadline was behind us, and no earthquake or volcano had struck. He called me: “That word was
right, but I got the date wrong!” and he gave me a new date. Then he added, “But
could you pray for me? My whole life is getting shaken, and there’s stuff I
thought was way behind me that’s becoming public now!” The revelation had been correct, but the interpretation, and therefore the application, were incorrect.
Frankly, I’m
one of those prophetic folks who was always quick to interpret prophecies with
words like “judgment” or “the remnant.” He corrected me: in this season, Father
asked me, “Son, why do you expect judgment? Everything – every sin – that deserved
judgment was paid for in the Cross.”
I have since come to believe that one day, those who rejected his payment for their sin would have the “privilege” of paying for their own sin (Revelation 20:12), but there were no sins – past, present, or future; individual or corporate – that were not covered by the blood of Jesus on the Cross.
I have since come to believe that one day, those who rejected his payment for their sin would have the “privilege” of paying for their own sin (Revelation 20:12), but there were no sins – past, present, or future; individual or corporate – that were not covered by the blood of Jesus on the Cross.
This
is not to say that I don’t think
real trouble is coming to America ,
and to our region in particular. I actually do believe we’re in for tough times,
and I’m asking for more revelation for how to prepare. But from the way I think I’m learning to understand the
cross, those troubles are not about judgment, certainly not about judgment from
God, and a good number of the prognostications of disaster are errors in interpreting true prophetic revelation.
More
recently, He’s been teaching me more about the power of our declarations as
believers. It’s a lot. We’re made in God’s image, and he did his first big
project by words: “And God said… and it was so.” That’s my Dad! I'm in his line of work.
Here’s
where I’m going: there are a lot of believers who don’t understand the cross
very well. (Yeah, I was one for a bunch of decades, durn it.) And a lot of
believers have been declaring disaster coming to America , or declaring Mr. Obama’s
incompetence, or similar things. Recently, I’ve begun to question whether our
declarations of disaster may have a hand in causing disaster to come about,
about whether our declaring icky things about Mr. Obama are bringing some of those
things to pass, whether we are seeing the fulfillment of our own declarations.
By
way of illustration, God himself (Genesis 18:21) seems to declare that the
reason that Sodom & Gomorrah were judged was because of the
outcry against it. I wonder– if there is judgment coming against our nation, or
against “famously sinful” cities in our nation (San Francisco, Las Vegas, New
York, New Orleans, etc) – whether the judgment is not from God, but from God’s
people.
So
I’m pretty careful about speaking un-lovely things about people or nations; I’m
really, really careful that I’m not
interpreting prophetic words according to my own expectations.