The voice of the LORD comes, and it comes for some as a sound sweeter than honey, and for others a call for their destruction. Part of me wonders whether our misunderstandings of prophets have ruined the way we read prophecy.
Whether it's John of Patmos, Ezekiel, or Micaiah, we tend to see prophets as some sort of fortune tellers (see: Herald Camping), divine horoscopes in which we are able to peer behind the mask, to see the salvation and damnation of the earth. It would be wonderful if this was the way it worked, but, I think that - even with prophets - God remains masked in creation.
Micaiah's words are haunting. First he says, "As the LORD lives (to say nothing of the 2nd Commandment!), whatever the LORD says to me, that I will speak." Okay, so he's sworn by the name of the LORD, and he has lied about the victory in battle. "The LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has decreed disaster for you." Now, if this were an isolated example of a prophet indicating something was going to come to pass when, in fact, it was not, we could gloss over this passage and rest easily.
I think the real question is: where does the allegiance of the prophet lie? Prophets have a history of being tempted to say what the king wanted them to say, and false prophets rose among them because it was financially (and mortally) in a prophet's best interest to tell the king what he wants to hear. Popularity with the people was tempting then, as now. Sometimes, even when we say we want to know the truth, prefer half-truths that are often easier to stomach.
The Revelation of John, indeed, is difficult to stomach. It's prophetic and end-time (eschatological, if you're feeling fancy) nature leave more questions than answers in our minds. Perhaps this is the point. It is through these questions that are, finally, unanswerable by humans that we look away from ourselves for the answers and to God, who has numbered our days, the hairs on our heads, and time from the dawn of creation to its fulfillment. Whatever messengers come our way, they can only point to the masks of God. To confuse the masks of God with Godself is to make the message into a horoscope, the messenger into a tarot reader. Let us not confuse the messenger with the One who sends the message. The message may be confusing and difficult to understand, but perhaps this only serves to prove the point that it is not we, but God, who is the source and the object of the answers.
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