When we learn about the gift of prophecy, our first lesson to learn is that it is God speaking, not a human. While God will use His servants to verbally transmit or demonstrate His message, it is God who is speaking to us. Knowing it’s His voice that is giving us a message should humble us and keep us from using a prophetic word to gain personal fame or notoriety.
Isaiah 42 is speaking about Jesus, the coming Redeemer. Jesus is what motivates the spirit of prophecy. He is the essence of prophetic ministry. “For it is the Spirit of prophecy who bears testimony to Jesus” (Revelation 19:10).
Because it is Jesus who is speaking through His prophets, we can trust a revelation that is truly from Him. Scripture reveals, “Everything I prophesied has come true, and now I will prophesy again. I will tell you the future before it happens” (Isaiah 42:9).
We can trust the Lord’s words of prophecy, even if what He is saying does not fit into our narrow understanding. We can have this kind of trust because what He faithfully spoke in the past will reveal that His current revelations can also be trusted in the future – before the future happens.
A prophetic word has a purpose, “I will brighten the darkness before them and smooth out the road ahead of them. Yes, I will indeed do these things; I will not forsake them” (vs. 16).
When God speaks through His trusted prophets, His revelation will lighten dark places and straighten out the crooked path of the future. He will faithfully walk with them through the difficult events that will come in the future. They will never be abandoned as His revelations play out in real-time, exposing dark places with His light of truth. We are never alone in that process of revelation.
God overarches all time and all human theologies and interpretations. He has not changed. Those who receive God’s prophetic words are those “Who will hear these lessons from the past” (vs. 23). God’s faithfulness in the past will create harmony in the present.
Those who embrace God’s prophetic truth will use what happened in the past to discern how to live in the future when confusion has taken hold of individuals and nations. That is the hope we can have when we walk into the unfamiliar spiritual territory of uncharted human history, holding onto a word from the Lord until it is fulfilled.
We can have the hope and assurance of God’s abiding presence and direction when the world is moving deeper into confusion and disarray, living lives without any hope of God’s intervention in human affairs.
It is powerful to watch prophecy unfold in space-time…..here a little, there a little….a piece at a time.