Today there are two different streams in the prophetic. Some still follow the Old Testament pattern for prophets, which is largely negative while others feel that it is a thing of the past and they seek to follow a New Testament pattern. They interpret scripture from I Corinthians 14 were it says prophecy is for edification, exhortation and comfort. Many have therefore so interpreted the role of the prophetic to be largely positive, which is not entirely correct either (applies to both streams ).
This wasn’t entirely like this in the 80’s .A history into how the split happened would be helpful.
When the prophetic movement started in the 80’s everything was centered on bringing correction. As a matter of fact in some of the movements, people’s sins would be called out publicly and exposed. The prophets had amazing insight and accuracy. Some were even able to predict world events and personal events to the date. However their understanding was limited to an Old Testament view of the prophetic only and it centered on correction and greatly lacked God’s Love. The erratic ways of some of the Old Testament prophets were personified. Since this was the case and there was a genuine lack of God’s love, this caused a lot of offense in sections of the body of Christ.
Within the prophetic movement a counter culture tried to adopt the opposite approach. They adopted I Corinthians 14:3 as their basis for prophecy from the New Testament and propagated that the main purpose of the prophetic is just encouragement. So since this was basically an overreaction to the original model it gave place to a lot of the excesses on the other extreme that we see today. Some have stayed behind in the Legalistic camp but for some others they have been vastly influenced by this counter culture. This culture has led to the prophets loosing their basic role, which is to confront sin, and as the standards were lowered, terrible errors in prophesy.
We need a movement that has proper balance; has God’s Love, is encouraging and that does not forsake its Old Testament roots in confronting sin.
When we dont have that balance we might end up hurting people or the other extreme which is misleading people.We need the Old and the New to produce a proper balance and we can’t separate the two.
In conclusion there are times prophets have to be “negative” and there are times they have to be “positive” to correctly portray God and bring His wholesome truth. Behold the kindness and the severity of the Lord!
