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"Now I, John, saw and heard these things. And when I heard and saw, I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel who showed me these things. Then he said to me, ‘See that you do not do that. For I am your fellow servant, and of your brethren the prophets, and of those who keep the words of this book. Worship God.’ And he said to me, ‘Do not seal the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand.’" (Revelation 22.8-10).

If one were to remove every reference to a prophet from the Scriptures along with the work of each of God’s prophets, do you know what we would have left of the Bible? Answer: Literally and absolutely nothing! Every word would disappear from the manuscripts and nothing but blank pages would look back at us. As a race, we would be left without any direct knowledge of God and His character; we would be left without any knowledge of His will for us; we would be left without any promise of tomorrow and hence no hope for anything in the future. Take away the prophets and their work and you take away the only basis of understanding of our origin or our destiny; take away the knowledge of our origin and our destiny and you take away the reason for our existence!PROFILES OF THE PROPHETS

We commence this study by looking at our focus verses (Revelation 22.6-10) and the last usage of the words prophet(s) and prophecy in the scriptures. This text is significant to our study because it involves a prophet, an angel, the product of the prophets (the book in the text) and proper as well as improper attitudes toward the prophet and his work. Without trying to prove the case at this point in time, we simply state that John (the author of the book of Revelation) was a prophet. In the scene depicted, John was directly interfacing with an angel and in that exchange, John was so overwhelmed by the events that he fell down to worship at the feet of the angel. In short order and with no room for misunderstanding the angel corrected John because of his attempt to worship him. As he should have done, he told John, "Worship God!" Implicit in the angel’s instructions is the fact that only God is worthy of worship. Hence our first lesson concerning the prophets: We may reverence the prophets and their work; some of them may even stand head and shoulders above the crowd, but no mere prophet is worthy of our worship. But for one prophet about whom we will have much to say later, all of them were but men, men whose feet were made of clay and hence subject to temptations and to sin.

Pause to thank God for His prophets! Without their work we would be engulfed in total spiritual darkness! (Continued)

Questions:

1. Believing the Bible to be fully inspired of God, what portion of it do we owe to the prophets?

2. Rather than being a detailed study of the prophetic books, what is this series designed to do?

3. What did the angel imply when he told John, "Worship God"?

4. What is meant when we say that the feet of all the prophets, save one man, were made of clay? Who was that one man?

"God's Words For US" from Cecelia Lester

The Importance of Prayer