Who are you soliciting? "Oh, I'm soliciting the Lord." Well, that's great.
In other words, no entity on the other side could masquerade as the Lord
or masquerade as an angel, right? Where do you get that?
You once mentioned here that one could train to learn how to become a prophet
in the Old Testament.
How is this different from the bad kind of divination?
Well, I don't think we can learn or be trained to do something
that it is an act of the Holy Spirit to do.
What I'm talking about in terms of training is the school of the prophets
that's mentioned in the Old Testament.
Where people would sit at the feet of a prophet and would travel with him.
I think ostensibly record what was said.
Learn how to preach. Maybe learn how to do public speaking.
Learn how to preach to people. They would certainly learn more of the covenant.
They would learn more of Torah from the prophet, so on and so forth.
So that stuff you can learn and be trained for.
But if the Spirit of God has to be empowering the prophet, that's up to the Spirit of God.
You don't learn some buzzword or some incantation
that makes the Spirit of God fall upon you and now you can prophesy.
So, I think we need to be a little more careful when talking about prophecy.
It depends what you mean.
How is it different from the bad kind of divination? Well, it would be wrong.
The bad kind of divination is seeking knowledge from "the other side."
Seeking knowledge from the spiritual world.
And those who today would claim to be learning to be prophets
or being trained to be prophets, they're being trained to seek God.
As much as I disagree with the idea,
because the Spirit of God is going to do what he wants to do.
The Spirit of God isn't waiting for you to take a class or degree to use you as a prophet
if that's what he wants to do. He's just going to give you revelation.
That's the way it happened in the New Testament.
That's the way I would expect it would happen at any point.
But the people today who are taught, again, I'm thinking of like the NAR situation,
the Bethel School of Ministry, that kind of thing.
They're not taught to seek revelation from just anybody on the other side.
They're being taught to seek the Lord or to seek God,
you know, seek God's revelation or maybe even an angel,
I mean, that which is dangerous, we don't have any precedent for that in the Bible:
Go and solicit an angel for information.
But they certainly aren't thinking that we want to tap into the other side
no matter what's over there, and get information.
Okay, that would be your classic condemned divination; that you're consulting the dead
or you're consulting evil spirits that are part of the spiritual world.
I do think that the Bethel crowd does transgress here a little bit with...
I'm trying to remember the term they use, but basically laying on people's graves
to soak something up.
To me that gets very close to necromancy and just outlawed forms of divination.
Grave... what is the term they use? Grave something, grave sucking.
Oh, yeah, such an elegant term.
There is actually a tradition in rabbinic Judaism when some people
go to the graves of Rabbis and do something similar.
I think you're getting pretty close to necromancy there.
And that should definitely be avoided.
Because you don't know who you are talking to.
Right, who are you soliciting? "Well, I'm soliciting the Lord."
Well, that's great. In other words, no entity on the other side
could masquerade as the Lord or masquerade as an angel, right?
Where do you get that?
You know, again, where are the examples in the New Testament
of the gifts being taught or dealt with in this way? They're not.
The gifts were transmitted through the apostolic laying on of hands.
It's not that complicated.
It came directly through those who would have been apostles in the New Testament.
I realize there's four or five different kinds of apostles in the New Testament.
So without getting into all that, but that's how the gifts were transmitted.
You know, Paul would go to a place, he'd win people to the Lord.
They'd start a church.
They'd try to find leadership, Lord willing, or they'd leave people behind;
some of his traveling companions until that local group had enough leadership.
And then they; the apostles, and the elders would lay hands on an individual,
both validating their ministry. And also Paul says on a couple of occasions,
like with the Romans, he wants to visit them, and he desires to impart
to them some spiritual gift through the laying on of hands.
You know, there are passages like that.
But that's Paul. That's a special kind of upper level apostle
that we don't have today, regardless of what anybody's claiming.
We're not operating at the level of the apostle Paul.
And certainly the twelve, of which Paul was not a part, that sort of thing.