Monday Morning Meditation #42: Chosen To Prophesy

I Chronicles is an interesting litany (chronicling, if you will) of the tribes and people of Israel and the generations of off-spring and what they did. In all these listings, one in particular caught my eye. I found it in Chapter 25, Verse 1:

"David, together with the commanders of the army, set apart some of the sons of Asaph, Heman and Jeduthun for the ministry of prophesying, accompanied by harps, lyres and cymbals."

The rest of the chapter lists the individuals selected and their families. Few details are given about them or any indication provided as to why they were the chosen ones.

Reading: I Chronicles 25:1

Meditation: This was truly a puzzling verse for me, and after reflection, it remains puzzling. Up until this point in the Bible, it seems that God selected the prophets, sometimes not even in keeping with what they would have preferred to do. Now, we are told that David selected individuals for the ministry of prophesying. That raises some questions for me that I do not know how to begin to go about answering, including

(1) How did David know whom to select?

(2) How was it that these three families were prolific producers of prophets?

(3) Were these really prophets or some other ministry related to prophesizing that was part of a worship serve?

Asking these questions led me to another set of questions related not to David's time, but to our own:

(1) Leading evangelists, especially those with large congregations, are often taken as modern day prophets; are they really? (The Oh, God! Movie comes to mind here, where God instructs John Denver to tell what of the leading evangelists that He is not happy with his profit-oriented "ministry.")

(2) How can we tell when the word that is coming to us through others is the Word of God and not a result of someone being human, misled, or deliberately used by a negative power?

(3) How can we, as individual believers, know that what we sometimes "hear" from what we think is the Holy Spirit or even that locutions (for those who receive them) are truly from God? (In the absence of any other confirmation, the latter always send me scrambling to a priest for interpretation.)

So, I will pass along these questions to you and hope for some enlightenment from the blogging world. I clearly understand not clearly this time and especially with this verse.

That is far as I can go with you this Monday morning. I must retire to private prayer to thank God that He does send prophets to us and in other ways shares with us what He would have us know and do, to praise Him for His ability to reach through the "cloud of unknowing" to His often confused people walking the earth, to repent for those times that I have been deceived by false prophecy and my willingness to listen without questioning (fortunately, that does not happen often since I am a skeptic by nature), and to ask Him to help me see and understand more clearly what it is He would have me know and do. Now I retire to spend as much time as I can in contemplation, my favorite part of the day, letting God take over the direction in which my relationship with Him moves.

I will leave you to your prayer and contemplation, but first, I would like to bring to your attention a Monday morning prayer post that you might enjoy:

Fr. Austin Fleming, priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and pastor in Concord, Massachusetts, posts a prayer each Monday morning that he calls "Monday Morning Offering." I enjoy his prayers very much. I hope you also will find them inspirational. He has graciously given me permission to include a link to his blog on my Monday Morning Meditation posts.

For additional inspiration throughout the week, I would point out two sets of blogs: (1) the list of devotional blogs that follow the enumeration of Monday Morning Meditations on the sidebar of this blog and (2) my blogroll, where I am following a number of inspirational priests and writers about spiritual matters. I learn so very much from all these people. I highly recommend them to you.