In Deuteronomy 18, Moses promised the Israelites, “[God] will raise up for them a prophet like you [Moses] from among their fellow Israelites, and I will put my words in his mouth. He will tell them everything I command him” (v 17). In short, a prophet is defined as speaking God’s words; God will speak his words through the prophet. Since God is a God of truth, someone who speaks for him can only speak the truth and the prophet’s message is authoritative. God takes truth seriously, as the text commands the Israelites to kill those who speak presumptuously, who claim to speak for God when God has not spoken (v. 22).
When the New Testament writers refer to prophecy, those prophets speak or write the very words of God. Many today, following the argument of Wayne Grudem, believe that prophecy in the New Testament and today is to speak “merely human words.”1 Thus, as Grudem writes, “I agree that the kind of ‘prophets’ mentioned in Ephesians 2:20 ceased in the first century.”2
This paper argues that if prophets in the Old Testament spoke God’s words and there are no humans today who speak God’s words, then prophecy has ceased. Redefining “prophecy” as “merely human words” is a form of cessationism.
Numerous implications follow; among them, the inerrancy, authority, and sufficiency of divine speech in Scripture are preserved since prophecy as merely human words need not meet the standard demanded of divine words. On the other hand, since there are many sources of human words it is unclear how contemporary “prophecy” differs from preaching, teaching, conversation, etc. Perhaps an unintended consequence is that human experience, often viewed with suspicion by evangelicals, is now recognized as an authoritative source of theology since surely these “merely human words” are of some value.
1.00 Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Bible Doctrine, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020),1303.
2.00 Grudem, Systematic Theology, 1300.