For some crazy reason I can still remember taking a Latin vocabulary test way back when. My professor read off the English words he wanted is to translate into Latin one of which was profit. What he failed to do was spell profit. Those of us who had no idea what the Latin was for profit wrote propheta = prophet. When the tests came back, he humbly had to accept propheta. He wanted lucrum. How interesting! Back to that in a moment.
Were I to ask most anyone today to define prophet, my suspicion is that I would hear something like, “a person who foretells the future,” which would be wrong. No one can foretell what will be. A prophet is someone who speaks for God. Yes, Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Amos usually did foretell the future, but it did not take anyone special to foretell what they foretold. All Isaiah, Amos and all the other prophets foretold was that if the people kept on sinning, their sins would come back to haunt them.
Not rocket science is it? The only future any of the prophets was concerned about was the immediate future. The people were disobeying their God and they knew it. And if they did not know it, the prophets were sent not only to remind them of their responsibilities and duties but also to warn them that if they kept on sinning, God would not protect them when it came time to pay the piper.
Again, not rocket science; moreover, we are all prophets in the same vein as an Amos. We warn those we love (prophesy to them) as those who loved us warned us (prophesied to us) that sin and selfishness always catch up to us and we will reap the results of those actions. God wants us, those who love us want us, and we ourselves should want to cease the sinfulness and get right with God and one another.
That is all prophecy is. It is not the foretelling of some distant future. Amos did not predict some far-off event several hundred years later. The Book of Revelation does not predict something about to happen 2000 years later. Amos was written to his contemporaries who were disobeying God. John wrote Revelation to those who were being or about to be persecuted. The Book of Revelation has no reference to any time other that to the time at hand when it was written.
That is not the same as saying it has no relevance. Just as Amos warned and reminded his people that they needed to amend their lives, so he reminds us today. As John encouraged the people who were being persecuted for their faith to remain strong and promised them God would see them through, so John reminds us today of God’s ever-present grace and strength when we find it difficult to live out the demands of our faith.
What is happening today is that there are those who are were like my classmates and me in that Latin class. They are distorting prophet for profit (Latin: lucrum from which we derive lucre, as in “filthy lucre”). To assert that Revelation was written about events that would take place 2000 years later is to say John was lying to the people of the seven churches to whom he wrote. It would be as if he were saying, “Times are tough. But have courage. In 2000 years God will make all this right.” It would be as if Amos said, “You better get right with God because in 1000 years your sins are going to catch up with you.” Nonsense!
We are all prophets when we live our lives as we should. There should be no profit, lucre, in being a prophet. In fact, it is often very painful in so many ways, as we have all learned from experience.
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