Ah, secondhand information. Such a wonderful source of crap.
Technically it’s gossip. If you didn’t see it yourself, if you weren’t personally authorized to spread the word, it’s hearsay. It's of little to no value. That doesn’t stop people from spreading it around anyway.
Some interesting bit of it got spread to me, and I temporarily lost my head and ranted at length about it. Not that my ranting was of any value either. Ranting on gossip is just as useless as the gossip itself, and most of the time it just produces hurt feelings on the part of the person who was gossiped about.
But the point is still valid, so I'm gonna make it anyway. I’m just not gonna use any names so that I don’t slander any undeserving individuals. The circumstances, as I understood them, were these.
Someone had recently prophesied a natural disaster. Maybe The Big One (you know, the earthquake that’s supposed to be so powerful that it causes California to split away from the rest of the United States, which will then slide into the Atlantic). This caused a lot of people concern, and now they’re having two days of prayer. Maybe fasting.
I don’t know what they're praying—for God to spare all those poor non-Californians, for God to stop the earthquake, for God to only kill the unrighteous. As I recall, it takes a lot more than two days to get God to change his mind about stuff. Two days is nothing. You don’t even need two days; you just need one righteous person who God talks to regularly to talk him down to an earthquake of 3.4 magnitude. (That’s like a garbage truck driving by.) And since it’s Lent, some of us are already fasting anyway.
Here’s the part what I don’t get: What spiritual discernment has gone into accepting this prophet’s message?
If God is warning people in advance a disaster is going to happen, he’s not just going to warn one guy. He’s going to warn a lot of people. Historically that’s what he’s done. Not everyone listened to them, but that’s beside the point. Nobody paid attention to the prophets who warned us about Hurricane Katrina; and being humble, these prophets didn’t spend a lot of time screaming “I told you so!” after the fact. Unlike some false prophets who tried to grab some notoriety afterward.
I didn’t pay too much attention to the prophets because I live in northern California. Levees break here all the time and it only affects the fools who are dumb enough to live in flood plains. I underestimated the disaster. So did everyone. But I have to admit the prophets were right. I never said they were wrong; I just figured we’d wait and see, and turns out they were right.
But I haven’t heard about this giant disaster thing from anyone else, except maybe the occasional Kurt Russell science fiction movie. So naturally I’m skeptical.
Back in Old Testament days, we used to stone false prophets to death. I say if this person’s disaster doesn’t happen within the next year, we ought to at least tar and feather the dude, okay? Let’s not kill him. But let’s at least hold him accountable for any unnecessary panic he generates. Prophecy isn’t something to be taken lightly, and we ought to tack some obnoxious consequences onto anyone who claims to speak for God and isn’t.