‘Is there any word from the Lord?’ (Jer.37:17). When King Zedekiah made a private plea to an imprisoned Jeremiah, I suspect he was not looking for the answer he got: ‘Yes, you will be delivered into the hands of the king of Babylon.’ It takes courage to be a prophet.
Is there a prophetic ministry today? Whilst I accept that the church’s foundation of the apostles and prophets (Eph.2:20) does not need to be relaid and that we do not have prophets delivering to us the new New Testament, is there no place for the prophetic within the church and to the society? The application of Biblical principles by such as ‘the men of Issachar who understood the times and knew what Israel should do’ (1 Chron.12:32) is surely something that is directly relevant and needed today.
Men like Francis Schaeffer and C. S. Lewis had a prophetic ministry, as does Os Guinness. C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength was prescient in seeing how the regression of modern society would go. Melvin Tinker, who has recently gone to glory, used the title and message of Lewis’s book to issue a clarion call to the church. Tinker’s That Hideous Strength: a deeper look at how the West was lost is one of the few books that I believe should be on every church bookstall and in every Christian’s home. Those of us who don’t have the time or ability to read Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self will benefit enormously from reading Tinker’s short work.
