false prophets

Joseph Mattera- 7 Typical Prophetic Buzzwords Given to Hype Crowds

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From Charisma

Every year, many prophetic words are given to start the new year. Many prophetic words are just repetitive rewordings of previously hyped-up words. However, are they really prophetic words? With all the prophetic lunacy in much of the charismatic church over the last few years, we need to revisit the prophetic standards statement as a guide for church movements and Christ followers.

Also, I encourage you to check out the 2023 review of prophetic words given last year by Remnant Radio.

To aid the body of Christ in developing discernment, the following is a summary of some of the standard generic words or phrases that appeal to many despite the fact they rarely come to pass.

The following are some generic prophetic hype buzzwords:

1. There will be a wealth transfer this year. In the past few decades, I have often heard many words like this that I have lost count. The truth is that many people who believe in these words are still in the same financial position year after year. Even though I have seen some individuals go from poverty to wealth quickly by utilizing faith, creativity and hard work, the Scripture regarding wealth transfer implies that it takes several generations. Hence, it usually entails parents instilling practical life skills and biblical discipleship into the next generation, imparting money management skills and life principles that result in a wealth transfer from the wicked to the seed of the righteous (Prov. 13:22).

2. A great revival is about to take place. For many years, prophetic words have been used, promising an imminent revival that will shift the nation. Words like these tickle the ears of vast prophetic adherents but have yet to come to pass despite many local outbreaks that have come and gone through the years. Also, many local church pastors have told me that a prophet came to their church and said their church would be the center of a great revival in their city. However, in every city I visited, I met a pastor with the same word. Even within the same city, multiple pastors received the exact word about their local church.

Can a prophetic word predict a revival? Of course! However, pastors should not build their entire ministries upon these prophetic words.

3. All your adversaries shall come, bow down and repent to you. Some iterations of Isaiah 60:14 have been given numerous times to multitudes through the years regarding a promise of adversaries repenting to them. However, these kinds of words are conditional and do not come to pass without a Christian exhibiting humility, brokenness, forgiveness and unconditional love toward those who hate them (Matt. 5:44-45).

4. This is the season of your elevation. I have heard this kind of word spoken over people online and in some conferences too often. However, walking in Christlike humility is always the conditional precursor to God lifting a person up whether they receive a prophetic word or not. The written word promises this for those who live for the glory of God (1 Pet. 5:6).

5. God is sending you to the nations. I have heard this prophetic word spoken over people more often than any other word on this list. What does this mean? Since all the nations have come to major cities like NYC, believers no longer have to cross an ocean to minister to the nations. Unfortunately, traveling prophets often give words like this to people, resulting in them becoming distracted from serving and committed locally to their own congregation. They are always looking to leave to fulfill that prophetic word rather than stay home to make a difference. Can a word like this be legitimate? Of course. However, I wish more prophetic people would give words that help build up the local church rather than prophetically sending all gifted people out of their church.

6. Using a New Year’s rhyme to prophetically predict what’s to come. In late 2019, I heard prophets say things like, “2020 will be the year of 20/20 vision,” essentially a year when there will be an acute level of prophetic accuracy. However, it may have been the year with the most inaccurate prophetic declarations as virtually few, if any, foresaw the looming global pandemic and the failure of Trump to get reelected.

Another word I heard in late 2019 was that 2020 would begin the so-called Roaring ’20s, when the power of God and great revivals would break out. Thus far, nothing implied in this prophetic rhyme has occurred nationally except perhaps in some local areas in North America and beyond.

Furthermore, before 2024, I’m sure there were words such as “There will be an open door in 2024,” and in the coming years, there may be prophetic declarations like “You’re gonna thrive in 2025” or “Everything will be fixed in 2026” or “2027 will be an open heaven ….” You get the picture. It’s almost as if these so-called prophets think God depends upon man-made calendars to shift His actions or focus.

7. Hebrew calendar usage. Many popular prophetic people use the Hebrew calendar or alphabet to predict what is to come. Unfortunately, most of these words (sometimes interspersed with symbolic visions and dreams) are so complicated that very few people understand the totality of what’s being communicated, which makes it challenging to edify the church (1 Cor. 14:3, 11-12). Furthermore, this utilisation of the Hebrew calendar can sometimes be considered by some to be a form of Kabala, which is Jewish mysticism.

I have no issue with people attempting to understand the importance of certain times of the year corresponding with a Jewish feast in Scripture (the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, Passover and Pentecost, to name a few). My point here is that we must be careful with prophetic words that are so mystical that they are either too difficult to interpret or can be interpreted in numerous ways.

Hal G.P. Colebatch: The prophets of eco-doom: a perfect record of failure

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CULTURAL HISTORY
The prophets of eco-doom: a perfect record of failure

by Hal G.P. Colebatch

News Weekly, June 3, 2017

Environmentalism, or at least its deep-green variety, has, by the clownishly failed predictions of its gurus and prophets, confirmed its place as a leader among those “sciences” in which a complete lack of factual accuracy bears not the slightest relationship to its proponents’ reputations or careers.

“Earth Day” was conceived 47 years ago, time enough for any catastrophic threats to the Earth forecast then to have materialised. At that time the late George Wald, a Nobel Laureate and professor of Biology at Harvard, predicted: “Civilisation will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

It didn’t.

The problems facing civilisation come chiefly from uncivilised men who denude landscapes by chopping down trees for fuel. Civilised men have available safe, clean nuclear energy, and if they live in a country like Australia, the means to quiet superstitious fears by building reactors in deserts.

At the same time as Professor Wald’s predictions of universal doom, Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University boosted his bank account with the best seller, The Population Bomb. This declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. He stated that the “battle to feed humanity” was lost. In 1969 he told Britain’s Institute of Biology: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

The ludicrous nature of this doom mongering, looked back at from 2017, should speak for itself. Ehrlich was peddling a sort of doom pornography.

If anyone had taken it seriously, rather than as a subject for a cheap thrill, they would have been laying down stocks of food, guns and ammunition, and, like some American “survivalists” (whose fears came from a different direction), preparing refuges in the Outback against the coming Armageddon. On that first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned: “In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”

Instead of being sacked from his chair, or being offered a job as a circus clown, since then, showing the limitless human appetite for flim-flam, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award. As that well-known social philosopher Charles Manson put it: “You can convince anyone of anything if you push it to them all the time.”

In an article for The Progressive, Ehrlich predicted: “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.”

Of course, the first influential proponent of ecological doom was Thomas Malthus, the first edition of whose Essay on the Principle of Population was published in 1798. Neither Malthus nor Karl Marx, with the Theory of Increasing Misery, foresaw that improved agricultural and industrial production and technology would lead to the Earth being able to support populations many times larger and at a much higher level than they imagined.

Thus, with the “green revolution” allowing at least countries with good governments to feed themselves, a new hobgoblin was called for. How many of us remember that in the 1970s the existential threat hanging over mankind was not global warming but global cooling?

In International Wildlife of July 1975, one Nigel Calder warned: “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” In Science News the same year, C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organisation is reported as saying: “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

In 2000, climate researcher David Viner told The Independent that within “a few years”, snowfalls would become “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” In the following years, Britain saw some of its largest snowfalls and lowest temperatures since records started being kept in 1914.

In 1970, ecologist Kenneth Watt told a Swarthmore College audience: “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

2000 has come and gone, and there is no ice age in sight.

Also in 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look magazine: “Dr S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian, believes that in 25 years [ie, by 1995], somewhere between 75 and 80 per cent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

A chart in Scientific American that year estimated that mankind would run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver would disappear before 1990. In 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey said that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas.