Prophets in our beliefs

FAITH

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
HUMANKIND’S fascination with spirits and the spiritual realm would not have survived but for certain mediums or emissaries.
Always we see humans who are selected, appointed or anointed as emissaries on earth, interceding between spirit and man.
The fashionable term to describe these lot of mystics is Prophets to set them apart from other professions.
Strange lot, these emissaries. They choose seclusion to get their communication with the spirits and once informed or directed, they act with a sureness that borders on insanity.

Nothing, not rulers, not threats and even physical violence will diminish their resolve, their divine directed purpose.
It is from these band of solitary mystics that the world has derived some of the strangest insights and from them the world’s great religions.
The Jewish Bible and the Muslim Koran are the results of the singular efforts of mystics – Moses, Elizah, Paul and Mohammed among them.
The world today is full of them.
There are in the country Malawi, if the Internet is to be believed, certain individuals who proclaim they are modern day prophets.
They claim secret communication with the almighty God, that they have received directions unto mankind to the effect one is prohibited from sleeping with his spouse but instead he is to perform the act with a snake.
As preposterous sounding as this seems, it does not deter following. Thousands have risen to do these people’s bidding, many to the extend where they allow their spouses to have sexual union with the prophets and to beget children through this arrangement.
To carry the logic to it natural conclusion, by the way, if you are prohibited from sleeping with your spouse but instead sleep with snakes and the so called prophet is doing the honours would he not then be identified as the snake and be rightly punished as the snake in the Judeo-Christian belief is supposed to be. Or if your spouse sleeps with the Prophet would she not be identified as a snake also. That, of course, is by the way.
In Papua New Guinea we have our own prophets who have risen to dubious fame in certain communities who claim direct communion and communication with God. They have had band of followers, flower girls including married woman there for the prophet or leader’s sexual gratification, and children begotten under such circumstances belong to the exclusive inner circle.
PNG’s own Black Jesus cult in parts of Madang had its own idiosyncrasies and did spark international media interest and spawned a Hollywood film.
There have been more respectable persons who held the title of prophets from days of old.
Elijah, Micah, Isaiah, and Malachi, the prophets of the Old Testament and John the Baptist, Paul the Epistle writer and Mohammed of more recent fame are the heralds, chroniclers of God’s message for mankind. They claimed in the days of old, as do the modern ones, an intimate relationship with God, that they convey God’s innermost desires and wishes, that they have direct communion with It.

Only Jesus Christ stands alone, by his own admission and by the belief of all Christendom that he is the son of the most high God.

Only Jesus Christ stands alone, by his own admission and by the belief of all Christendom that he is the son of the most high God.
He who read from the holy scroll of scripture that proclaimed he had been sent to bring the good news to all men and tell blind people that they can see and tell them that the kingdom of God had come. And after reading from this scripture he declared that indeed the time had come, that the kingdom of God was at hand.
But the prophets among us, both ancient and current, make the most astounding claims – of experiences and visions and visitations that few have questioned but most have believed in blind faith.
These strange ambassadors of God rise from among the most ordinary of backgrounds or the most privileged and by the mere act of spending some time in seclusion, arrive back among humankind again with astounding claims and messages from on high.
From Mosses to Mohammad and Luther, there are strange visitations and apparitions visible only to their God-trained eyes and messages only their God-trained ears can hear.
Mosses came from a humble Jewish family and by his miraculous escape from the scythe of the pharaoh’s armies by way of floating down the Nile in a basket into the arms of a princess he was raised a prince in a palace and rose to prominence in all Egypt.
Then he fled all that glamour and riches into the swirling desert night and when he next emerged in the court of pharaoh, it was in the garb of a wandering Arab Bedouin with a staff in his hand, sandals on his feet and the swaddling cloth of his humble Jewish origin for a turban, demanding nothing less than the total freedom of all his people.
Nothing more preposterous was ever before or since demanded of a dictator whose very prosperity depended upon the unpaid labor of a servile nation that bent to his iron will.
Mosses’ success in this political endeavour is as much a miracle as any he concocted with his staff and God-assist.
Elizah is another powerful prophet who emerges from the Judeo-Christian tradition whose exploits match and rival that of Mosses and even of Jesus Christ in two most powerful respects – that of restoring life to a dead child and of his bodily ascension into heaven in a chariot of fire.
His calling down fire to burn his water doused offering, after the priests of Baal had been tearing at their clothes and cutting themselves from sunup to sundown to get their god to do the same, would have convinced any half-witted idiot, but humans can be very obstinate folk sometimes, then and now.
Certain traits characterize these wild eyed men of God.
They are normally individuals who operate mostly on their own or with a clique of devout followers.
Each claims to have received a message from on high.
Most of these messages are predictive in nature. They foretell what is going to happen earning themselves accolades as possessing the gift of prophecy and a place in society as its prophets.
That their message is generic or clever interpretations of common trends in society and where it might all end up is also a common thread.
Only the Biblical prophets are separate from most of the rest in that they predicted specific events as affecting specific individuals, feats no modern day prophet has equaled.
Another common trait is that they take the first initiative to come out and proclaim their message. No prophet has been “discovered” by the people.
Prophets are quick to judge. They proclaim that a person or a people are sinful or disloyal and demanding justice they condemn such people.
More often than not they do not separate the sin from the sinner.
But are prophets really messengers of some god?
We do not know.
Some appear deranged, delusional and their messages garbled and simple witted.
But it is from these people that we received our religions.
The prophet’s greatest claim to fame is not his wondrous actions or colourful language; it is his contribution to sustaining the idea of God throughout the ages.