Thus Saith the Lord,
Approximately

A perfect message and a prophet who makes mistakes?

Why do people still call a man a prophet when his words did not come true? Their reason is this.

They say that the message from God is perfect. But the prophet is a human being. He may receive something real from God and still report it badly. So one wrong prophecy does not show that he is a false prophet. And the New Testament tells churches to test prophecies. It does not tell them to simply obey.

This page calls that idea “fallible prophecy”. “Fallible” means “able to be wrong”.

The full page tested this claim carefully. In one place the author found that part of his own claim was wrong. He says so. You can read about it in Part 5.

What the Bible says

In the Bible, prophecy is not mostly about telling the future. It is speaking for God. But telling the future is the part that we can check. A date, a name and a result can be written down.

Everything stands on one sentence. God says about the prophet: “I will put my words in his mouth” (Deuteronomy 18:18).

If the words are God’s words, they are as true as God. So what if they are not true? Then there are only two answers. Either God said something false, and nobody believes that. Or the words did not come from God.

The Bible gives the second answer. And it gives it as the answer to this very question: how can we know?

You may say in your heart, “How shall we know the word which Yahweh has not spoken?” When a prophet speaks in Yahweh’s name, if the thing doesn’t follow, nor happen, that is the thing which Yahweh has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously.

Deuteronomy 18:21–22 · World English Bible

In simple words: You may ask, “How can we know that a message is not from God?” Here is how. A prophet speaks in God’s name. If the thing does not happen, God did not say it. The prophet spoke from his own proud mind. (“Yahweh” is God’s name in the Old Testament.)

Look at what this verse says. It does not say that the prophet made a small mistake. It does not say that the message became unclear on the way. It speaks about where the message came from. It starts with what we can see, the failure. It ends with what we cannot see, the source.

The test has two parts

There is a second rule in Deuteronomy 13. A prophet may give a sign, and the sign may come true. But if he then leads you to other gods, you must not listen to him.

So in the Bible:

• One false prophecy decides the question.
• One true prophecy proves nothing by itself.

Today many people do the opposite. A true prophecy shows that the man has the gift. A false prophecy shows nothing. That is the Bible’s rule turned upside down.

Honest and wrong is still false

Does the Bible know about an honest prophet who is simply wrong? Yes. And the Bible still calls him false.

The book of Ezekiel speaks about prophets “who follow their own spirit” (Ezekiel 13:3). They say “Yahweh says” when God has not sent them. And they hope that their word will come true. So they are not liars. They believe their own message. The Bible’s judgement on them does not change.

The book of Jeremiah has the same two groups: prophets that God sent, and prophets that God did not send. There is no third group.

The other side: a serious argument

The idea of fallible prophecy is not a cheap excuse. A Bible teacher named Wayne Grudem worked it out in a long study at a university. He does not make money from prophets. Four of his arguments are strong.

1. Paul tells whole churches to want this gift. If prophecy in the churches was the same as writing the Bible, this would be strange. So it must be a different kind of speech.
2. Paul tells the church to test what prophets say. He writes: “Let the prophets speak, two or three, and let the others discern.” (1 Corinthians 14:29) “Discern” means to judge carefully. Nobody judges the words of the prophet Isaiah in this way. So this speech can have good and bad parts.
3. Paul says to keep the good. He writes: “Don’t despise prophecies. Test all things, and hold firmly that which is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:20–21) This is a strange rule if every word is the word of God.
4. Paul says the gift is not complete. He writes: “we know in part and we prophesy in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9).

Grudem also gives three rules. Many people who use his idea leave them out.

• Do not say “Thus says the Lord” in a church meeting.
• Say it carefully, like this: “I think the Lord may be showing me something.”
• Never use a prophecy to tell a person what to do in a big life decision.

So his teaching is a teaching about careful, modest speech.

Where that argument is weak

1. One verse does not prove what it is used to prove. Paul writes that the church is built on “the foundation of the apostles and prophets” (Ephesians 2:20). Grudem reads this as one group, “apostles who are also prophets”. But the Greek words do not have to mean that. And Paul speaks of them as two groups in other places.
2. One verse can be read both ways. “Let the others discern” may mean “test this message”. Or it may mean “decide if this man is a true prophet”. The Greek does not decide it. This point is a draw.
3. The earliest Christians do not know this idea. In the first hundred years after the apostles, churches had many travelling prophets. Christians wrote rules about them. No writer speaks of a prophecy that is truly from the Spirit but partly wrong.
4. The example of Agabus fails. This is the example the idea needs most.

Agabus

Agabus was a prophet in the book of Acts. He took Paul’s belt and tied his own hands and feet. Then he said:

The Holy Spirit says: ‘So the Jews at Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt, and will deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.’

Acts 21:11 · World English Bible

In simple words: The Holy Spirit says: the Jews in Jerusalem will tie up the man who owns this belt. They will hand him over to people who are not Jews.

Grudem says that Agabus made two small mistakes. The Romans tied Paul, not the Jews. And the Jews tried to kill Paul. They did not hand him over.

But two years later Paul told the story himself. He said: “I… was delivered prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans” (Acts 28:17). Paul uses the same words as Agabus. So Paul himself did not think that Agabus was wrong.

Five kinds of speech

Much of the confusion comes from mixing five different kinds of speech.

Paul keeps these levels apart. In one chapter he says which words are from the Lord and which are his own. He writes: “not I, but the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:10). Then: “I - not the Lord - say” (1 Corinthians 7:12). Then: “I have no commandment from the Lord, but I give my judgment” (1 Corinthians 7:25). Paul thinks his readers have a right to know the difference.

Today many people mix levels 2, 3 and 4. A person says “The Lord told me” for a strong feeling. This sounds like level 4. When it does not happen, the person goes back to level 2: “I only meant that I felt it.”

Usually this is not lying. The words have just stopped doing their job.

Where this page changed its mind

It is easy to think this: “People invented the idea of fallible prophecy to explain their false prophecies.” The author checked which came first. He found that this is not true.

The idea is very old.

• A church leader, Gregory the Great, wrote about it around the year 590.
• The teacher Thomas Aquinas worked it out around 1270.
• A Pentecostal teacher, Donald Gee, taught it in the 1920s and 1930s. That was long before most of the modern failures.

So the claim “they made it up to hide their mistakes” is false as history. This page gives it up.

What would show that a man is not a prophet?

Think about it. A true prophecy shows that the man has the gift. A false prophecy shows nothing. Then nothing can ever show that he is not a prophet. A claim that nothing can test is no longer a claim about the real world.

This is a strong thing to say. The author tested it and found a surprise. Some churches that believe in prophecy today have a written rule. The Assemblies of God is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. Its official paper from 2001 says:

A predictive prophecy that proves false leads to the conclusion that the person is a false prophet.

The Assemblies of God, official paper, 2001

In simple words: If a person says what will happen, and it does not happen, that person is a false prophet.

So it is wrong to say that nobody has a test. This page takes that back. What is true is smaller: the rule exists, but nobody uses it. The churches that wrote the rule have no power over independent preachers. And that is where most of these prophecies are made.

So the real question is about power, not about truth. A group of church leaders can discuss a plan. They cannot discuss “God told me to do this”. To say no, a leader must say, “God did not say that,” or “We should not obey God.” So the discussion stops. Nobody has to be dishonest for this to happen.

“God told me Y”

A leader says, “God told me X.” X is clear and people can check it. X is false. Then the leader says, “God told me Y.” Why should a Christian believe Y now? There are four answers.

1. “There is no reason. Deuteronomy 18 decides it.” This is the simplest answer. But it is not fair to a woman in a prayer meeting who says, “I saw a picture of a bridge.” For speech at levels 4 and 5, it is exactly right.
2. “The gift is real. The report is human.” This is the idea that this page tests. Its problem is that it changes nothing. If you trust the man the same after a false prophecy, then the failure taught you nothing. And if a failure cannot make you trust him less, a success should not make you trust him more.
3. “Judge Y by itself.” This is a better answer. But then the words “God told me” add nothing. They are only decoration. And that is not what the speaker meant.
4. “Trust him less than before.” Almost nobody gives this answer. I think it is the right one. A man tells you what God said. You can ask how often he was right before. One false prophecy makes him less sure to be right. Many false prophecies mean that you should not act on his words. For this answer you do not need to say that God never speaks today. You do not need to accuse anybody.

Where this page is weak

1. The page changed its claim. The idea is older than the failures. So the first claim was wrong, and the new claim is smaller. The reader should notice this.
2. Deuteronomy 18 is too hard a rule for a small gift. That is fair for a quiet word in a prayer meeting. But this page is about level 4 and level 5 speech: public, clear, and said in God’s name.
3. Agabus is not so clear. In Acts 21 the Romans save Paul from a crowd. The Jews do not hand him over. This is the best argument against this page. It cannot be fully answered. If Agabus was wrong, the idea of fallible prophecy is much stronger.
4. This is about famous leaders, not about prophecy. A company boss can also make decisions that nobody may question. This is mostly true. But “God told me” adds one thing. It turns a disagreement about a plan into a question about your faith.

One more fact. The full page takes its bad examples only from people who have died. Living people appear only with their own printed words. This is on purpose. It makes the page’s evidence weaker, and the page says so.

Read it yourself

1. Read Deuteronomy 18:15-22 and Deuteronomy 13:1-5.
2. Read Ezekiel 13:1-9 and Jeremiah 23:16-32.
3. Read 1 Corinthians 14:26-33 and 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22.
4. Read Acts 21:10-14 and Acts 28:17. Was Agabus right?
5. Ask the three questions in the gold box about your own church.