Prophet

Jesus isn’t just our Priest and King, He’s a Prophet.

Do you stumble over that notion like I do?

When I think of prophets, I think of “Thus says the LORD,” and “The word of the LORD came to the prophet so-and-so.”

In Jesus’s case, that translates to, “Thus says Me,” and, “I came to Me.” That makes me smile.

He’s a ringer!

Furthermore, we think of prophets telling of future events. With Jesus, it’s like cheating or insider trading. The one who’s telling the future is the one who ordained it. He knows the end from the beginning. Come on, Jesus, you’ve got insider information. You wrote the book.

So what does it really mean to say Jesus is a prophet?

Whereas priests represent the people before God, prophets represent God before the people. First and foremost, prophets proclaimed the truth. And Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. He’s the ONLY way, the source of ALL truth, and the GIVER of life.

In that sense, Jesus is very much a prophet.

Prophets spoke the Word of the Lord. And Jesus is the Word. As the embodiment of the Word, when He proclaims truth, He proclaims Himself.

Moses prophesied about this prophet that was to come:

I will raise up for them a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them everything that I command him. – Deuteronomy 18:15-18

That’s Jesus!

He spoke with authority. Even at twelve years old, he schooled the religious leaders. He pwned the Pharisees on a regular basis.

(Pwn: dominate, defeat, utterly outdo)

In Peter’s second sermon in Acts, he confirms that Moses was prophesying about Jesus:

Moses said, ‘THE LORD GOD WILL RAISE UP FOR YOU A PROPHET LIKE ME FROM YOUR COUNTRYMEN; TO HIM YOU SHALL LISTEN regarding everything He says to you. – Acts 3:22

Prophet isn’t a name I usually associate with Jesus. Yet other religions do. Islam acknowledges Him as a prophet. Some Jews think He was a prophet and a good moral teacher. And those who identify with the widespread faith of our culture, the vague, wishy-washy Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, readily acknowledge Jesus as a prophet but fall short of calling Him Lord or King or God.

Maybe that’s why I have a hard time thinking of Jesus as a prophet. It seems like a copout. If He were ONLY a prophet, He would be a false one.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

But, when looking at the essence of a prophet, Jesus is the prophety-est prophet  ever.

This year-long series is inspired by Ann Spangler’s Praying the Names of God for 52 Weeks