Your Sons & Daughters Shall Prophesy - Prophetic Gifts Today In The New Testament Church

A Profile of the Ancient Hebrew Prophet

Our conclusion: Moses was indeed a prophet, but his responsibility and position in God's program placed him in a unique position-and this position required a relationship with God not shared by other prophets.

The Sons of the Prophets

Were people trained for prophetic ministry during the Old Testament period? This question is usually raised because of the bands of prophets mentioned in 1 Samuel 10 and 19 and "the sons of the prophets" men tioned in 1 and 2 Kings. 18 Sometimes called "The School of the Prophets," 19 these groups have led to much speculation about what was actually tak ing place. Did prospective prophets join themselves to these groups in order to qualify as prophets? Was there some kind of training program to produce prophets? Was education one of the prophetic traits? Samuel, the first of the prophets in an institutional sense, was most likely the instigator of apprentice prophets and their personalized train ing (although the Scripture does not explicitly say so). Notice on our chart on p. 62 that this falls at the beginning of the third period or the early monarchy. Previously the gift of prophecy had been manifested in isolated cases through the patriarchal and Mosaic periods. Now Samuel emerged as the first of the prophetic office. As Fairbairn says: "Prophecy, in its formal character, comes into view only in the age of Samuel, with whom properly originates the prophetical order of the Old Testament." 20 Israel had barely survived the hectic, sporadic time of the judges, and the spirituality of the nation was at an all-time low. The prophet Samuel, submitted to God and called from childhood, became the focal point for the spiritual renewal of the nation. This new prophetic era returned a con science to the nation and its leadership, giving birth to a new sense of loy alty through the ministry of Samuel and his associates. Prophets had existed previously, of course, starting with Abraham (Gen esis 20:7). Living as he did two thousand years before Christ, he walked in faith and developed an intimate friendship with God, but this was just his personal experience. Moses, similarly, was considered a great prophet, but he was such because of an experience with God (unattainable by oth ers) and a most uncommon commission from God (Numbers 11:25; Deuteronomy 34:10; Hosea 12:13). Miriam was called a prophetess (Exo dus 15:20), and the days of the judges also had prophets (Judges 4:4; 6:8; 1 Samuel 2:27). Thus it was at the time of Samuel's birth that, according to 1 Samuel 3:1, "word from the LORD was rare in those days, visions 64