About Prophets

Prophets use words to remake the world. the world - heaven and earth, men and women, and all living things - was made in the first place by God's Word.

Prophets, arriving on the scene and finding that world in ruins, in moral rubble and spiritual disorder, take up the work of words again to rebuild what human disobedience has demolished.

As their words enter the languages of our world, men and women find themselves in the presence of God, who enters the mess of human sin to rebuke and renew.

Left to ourselves we turn God into an object, something we can deal with, something we can use to our benefit, like a feeling, and idea, or an image. Prophets scorn all such stuff. They train us to respond to God's presence and voice.

Prophets - those charged with keeping peopled alive to God and alert to listening to the voice of God use words not simply to define or identify what can be seen, touched, smelled, heard, or tasted, but to plunge us into a world of presence.

To experience presence is to enter that far larger world of reality that our sensory experiences point to but cannot describe - the realities of love and compassion, justice and faithfulness, sin and evil...and God...mostly God.

The realities that are Word evoked are where most of the world's action takes place.

When a prophet anointed beghins to speak...there are no "mere words"

Taken from "The Message {The Bible in Contemporary Language}" by Eugene Peterson

From the introduction to the book of Micah
Edited and recomposed in small measure by Jason Watkins