Modern Christian Revelation

I have been doing some searching on the net and came across this blog by a Baptist that illustrates, to me, what is wrong with accepting extra curricular prophecies, better than my previous post did.

One of the things that I should have mentioned is that God being beyond time and space, has foreseen everything already. We can't say that we are Biblical literalists and believe, for example in Noah and his ark, and then turn around and say God didn't foresee the United States and therefore the US isn't mentioned in the Bible. God has foreseen everything important. He has never forecast for anyone, a play by play account of their lives, although in the case of special people, he has occasionally seen fit to mention them via prophets in the Bible.

We are in a spiritual famine, where we are hungry for words from God and longing for his coming. All that is natural but also sets us up to want to believe there are still prophets. I should clarify that when I speak of prophets, I don't believe that there are any prophets sent by God who make Spirit-filled prophecies of the End Times. I believe that God however, can reassure a person on an individual level, with regard to things like health concerns. Not earth-shaking events, but personal events.

All that there is to say about the End Times has been said repeatedly by the prophets of the Old and New Testaments, with John the Beloved, being the last. There is no new revelation. The interesting thing about the so-called new revelations, whether it is Nostradamus or Washington, is that they are always vague and can never be pinned down to anything. It's like someone thinks that if they use Biblical language with 'thees' and 'thous', that is enough to fool people. Some of these so-called prophecies can't be contradicted that easily not because they are from God, but because evil disguises itself in the vagueness and the Biblical references and language.

I would say, that those who seek modern and new revelation are rather like the rich man in Luke 16, who begged Abraham to send someone to the world of the living so that he could bare witness to his brothers:

Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house: For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

If belief will not come with what we have already been given in terms of revelation in the canon, then belief will not come with new revelation.

Matthew 16 has something to say about this too:

(and you say) And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.

Layla