God’s Initial Response to my Strange Prayer for the Gift of Prophecy

God said "yes" to my request in the year 2000 to exercise that gift. The prophecies I was given were intended to, and did, awe me into recognizing the seriousness of prophecy--and even more so as they seemingly have been fulfilled in the 20 years since.

Beware what you ask God for–particularly if it is something he says he wants you to have! By this, I don’t mean that God punished me for what I asked. God doesn’t punish his children for coming to him with requests, even if they are wrong requests, and leaving it to him to answer–though in his mercy he may deny wrongly motivated requests. Compare, Matthew 7:7-11; James 1:5; and James 4:2-3. But my request was rightly motivated, and was for something he said I should desire, so the answer was–frighteningly–“yes.” The first message I was given, during a meeting, and immediately later reduced to writing, was a simple and reassuring one, declaring the implications of the fact that God is already present in our future: “God says: Trust me with the frightening future.” The second one, however, was a frightful warning, which I pondered carefully, reduced to writing, and posted on the Internet on October 8, 2000 as “A Prophecy Against Idolatry” (later renamed “A Warning Against Idolatry”).

For those who don’t remember the time period just before the 2000 elections in the United States, it was an economic boom time, the end of the dot com boom. Democrat Bill Clinton was just finishing his second term as President, and, until the last two weeks before the election–when the economy started to turn down–the state of the economy wasn’t even an issue in the election. The message I was given was that we had long since come to trust in our booming economy, government and social institutions too much–so much that we, collectively as a Church, forgot God. Unless the Church repented of this idolatry, God was going to bring a collapse. That collapse came fully into effect two months later, in December 2000, and has been continuing, with brief periods of apparent recovery, ever since. The economy has never recovered close to the October 2000 level in the 20 years since then, and, in America, good jobs and the middle class have been steadily disappearing, and the poor increasing and getting poorer.

That was true long before the COVID-19 pandemic that is happening as I write this post precipitated what is generally now all-but-officially predicted to the worst “recession” since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Though there have been periods of partial recovery, none have brought us back even close to the summer of 2000 economic level.

Exactly as I predicted, the social “safety net” has been collapsing for the last 20 years–usually deliberately sabotaged by politicians. And it is still up to the Church to reverse this, by repenting of its idolatrous dependence on human institutions in preference to God in order to become the vehicle of his provision. However, the collapse of the whole human structure was not instantaneous and has not been continuous or generally rapid (though there have been a few rapid falls), and this illustrates something about negative prophecies in general: negative prophecies are, generally, calls for repentance and are conditional. If there is even partial repentance, there can be some remission.

I have not been by any means the only person who has called for repentance in the last 15 years, and, in the years since the December 2000 economic downturn, parts of the Western Church have been progressively repenting, gradually correcting their long-standing historic mistake as to the purpose of the Church. So chastisement has been moderated by repentance, though the trend has still been downward.

In 2001, I included “God says: Trust me with the frightening future: and “A warning against idolatry” in a larger collection of unpublished works I registered with the Copyright Office. (At that time works published only on the Internet were considered “unpublished.”) The Copyright Office’s date stamp on my copyright application for this collection is very significant–September 10, 2001. We all know what happened the next day…

The next small burst of specifically predictive prophecy came about a month after 9-11. I qualify this as specifically predictive prophecy because my understanding of the nature of prophecy has changed since then–God was working with me where he found me, as he usually does. This burst of predictive prophecy came in the form of a group of short pieces which I first read aloud and then posted on a minor web site in early October 2001. They remained on that web site until the ISP disbanded the platform on which they resided a few years later. In the interim, I had included them in another unpublished copyright packet in 2003. Though they are no longer online, I still have copies available for verification.

One of these documents pertained to Osama bin Laden, and connected him in part to the previous warning. The specific prediction it made was that, although the then-current President, George W. Bush, would do his best to eliminate bin Laden, he would fail to do so. Instead, God would remove bin Laden in his own time. Subsequent events confirmed this prediction–although President Bush devoted considerable resources to eliminating bin Laden, the honor(?) of bringing about his death went to President Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama. The second document in the set pertained to Mohammed Omar, who at the time was the head of the Taliban government of Afghanistan. It stated that, unlike bin Laden, Mullah Omar was being given time to repent. Subsequent events showed that, though Mullah Omar was deposed from office by American forces in October 2001, he died of natural causes (mainly tuberculosis) in 2013, and was never either captured or killed by American or allied forces. The third message in this set was to President Bush. It encouraged him to resist the pressure that would be brought upon him after 9-11 to muzzle (either suddenly or gradually) non-Islamic religious voices in the U.S., in order to keep the peace with our Islamic allies in the war against Al-Qaeda. President Bush–who most certainly was unaware of my website–actually did resist these pressures.

Up to this point, God had been answering my request essentially as I understood it, even though my understanding of it was less than half correct. I still had a picture of prophecy that focused on prediction, with prediction used to focus moral teaching, and this had been what God had given me. (The main function of prophecy, as I now understand it, is to speak forth God’s words to people or situations, and prediction is a only minor and often absent aspect of this). I am now convinced that his purpose in giving me these predictions was, in part, to frighten me, or, at least to give me great respect for what he was doing. The predictions above were frightening–and now, in retrospect, appear even more frightening because of their accuracy. Surely I was to understand, and I did come to understand, that prophecy is very serious business, not a toy to be used to gain notoriety.

Also, like tongues and the other manifestations of 1 Corinthians 12 spiritual activities or “gifts,” prophecy is NOT intended as evidence of greater personal spirituality, or as a divine endorsement of the life of the speaker. I can say this from experience–in the 2000-2001 time period, in many ways, my life was a mess. Still, when I asked for prophecy, God used me. All of these spiritual manifestations are given by the Holy Spirit, for his own purposes, for the common good of all believers, as the Spirit wills (1 Corinthians 12:7-11).