God made a covenant with Israel through Moses that promised blessings on obedience and curses on disobedience (Deut 28). The covenant provided spiritual protection and cleansing of sin through the tabernacle sacrifices. The curse produced agricultural failure and military defeat. The ultimate curse was exile from the land.
The Old Testament prophets challenged the children of Israel to keep the covenant and warned that the curse of the covenant would come upon them if they continued to reject God and lived like the surrounding the nations.
The other nations never signed up to the Mosaic covenant, so the curses and blessing it specifies do not apply to them. The Old Testament prophets never challenged the nations to comply with the covenant and never warned of the curses that it specifies.
The only covenant that God made with all the nations was the Adamic covenant that promised that the people of the world would be safe if they trusted in him, but warned that they would be enslaved by the spiritual powers of evil if they rejected him. The nations of the world continuously rejected God, so they are under the authority of the spiritual powers of evil. These powers have authority to harm these disobedient nations and to attack and destroy them if they choose.
The other covenant that applies to all the nations is the Rainbow Covenant made with Noah that gives God authority to destroy any nation that becomes so powerful and so evil that it begins to seriously harm his earth, putting its survival in jeopardy. In this situation, God can judge and destroy the political leaders of these nations to prevent them from continuing to harm the earth.
When the Old Testament prophets prophesied against a nation (other than Israel), they challenged them on the basis of these two covenants. Reading through prophecies against nations recorded by the Old Testament prophets reveals four basic messages.
Describes how God will use nations against each other to accomplish his purposes — stirring up nation against nation, or stirring up people within a nation against its rulers.
Describes how he will use the nations to bring judgment against his people: Israel and the church.
Describes what the spiritual powers of evil want to do, because, or when, they hold power over the nation.
Describes how God will destroy a nation because its rulers have raised themselves up as gods, or because they have begun to do too much harm on the earth (This was Jeremiah's message to Babylon — Jer 50,51).
After the Cross
Since the coming of Jesus, the situation is as follows.
Israel mostly rejected the new covenant, so is still under the covenant with Moses. If they fail to keep that covenant, they can expect to experience troubles. Prophets to Israel should be warning about this danger.
The growth of the church changes the situation for the nations of the world. God has promised to bless and protect the people who have chosen to follow Jesus. If there is a large number of people following Jesus in a nation, the blessing of God will flow a long way out to the rest of the nation. The believers will push back against the spiritual powers of evil in prayer. Blessings will flow to those who engage with them in various ways. The poor and infirm will be cared for. The vulnerable will be protected from harm. Those who submit to a Christian employer, share his/her blessings. The wisdom that God gives to his people will be copied by the people of the world. Everyone in the nation benefits when more people choose to follow Jesus.
The real problem occurs in a nation when there is a substantial drop in the number of Christians living within it; everyone suffers. The prayers of the saints will have restrained the spiritual powers of evil. When their number declines, the authority and influence of their prayers will decline too, so the spiritual powers of evil get greater freedom to operate.
People who have lived in a country with many Christians get a false sense of security. They benefit spiritually from the prayers of the saints and the blessings that flow towards them, even if they do not acknowledge Jesus themselves. When the influence of the Holy Spirit in a nation declines, the decline in the state of the nation is not proportional. The amplification of the power and authority of the spiritual powers of evil means that evil gets worse out of proportion to the influence of the gospel in the nation.
This is the situation in New Zealand. The number of Christians and the influence of the Holy Spirit has declined significantly. Here are results from the last population census.
This is a disturbing picture. The Christian influence in New Zealand has declined significantly, but Christians and non-Christians both assume that things can go on mostly as normal. Christians tend to assume that revival is just around the corner. Unbelievers assume the residual blessing from the faithful past will continue, even if they do not acknowledge its source.
The reality is that the influence of the spiritual powers of evil in New Zealand has increased much faster and further than the blue line in the picture would indicate. They are now rampant in our nation. We should expect to see the impact of their greater activity, if there is not an increase in allegiance to Jesus.
The role of a prophet in a secular nation with a declining gospel influence is to warn the nation of the harm that the spiritual powers of evil are planning to do. This is the fourth task in the list in the previous post.
God may sometimes allow Warning Events to wake the people of the nation up. At every stage, the prophets should be warning what the spiritual powers of evil want to do in the nation. The believers will often not have the spiritual authority to prevent it from happening, because unbelievers have given the spiritual powers of evil much greater authority in the nation. I describe this situation in Prophetic Events. If the influence of the gospel declines massively, the control of the spiritual powers of evil will become huge.
If the nation where this is happening is powerful, they might use it to do great evil in the world. When this happens, God might have to bring a Protective Judgment against the nation to restrain it from evil. This is what happened to the Babylonian empire. See Protective Judgments for more on how this works. Warning of the collapse of a powerful empire is role number 4 in the previous post.
The influence of the gospel in the United States is declining so God will need prophets in the United States to undertake this role.
Message
During a season of rapid spiritual decline, the role of prophets is to describe to their nation the consequences of giving greater authority to the spiritual powers of evil. The scope and direction of their message will vary according to the situation.
Prophets will primarily address the people of God. Because they are people of hope, they will often be assuming that their nation will turn around and return to a place of blessing. The prophets will warn them what will happen if these hopes are not fulfilled. This type of prophecy is sometimes not fulfilled, because the warning spurs God people to pray and share the gospel effectively, which leads their nation back to blessing as they hoped (Jonah's prophecy to Nineveh is an example).
Prophets will teach the people of God to be prepared for the troubles that the decline in faith is bringing. They will explain the strategies that God has to protect his people during the time of distress that is coming. They will tell them what they must to do to be prepared for a time of disruption. This is important, because if they are not prepared, the people of God could be swept away by troubles that they do not deserve. God wants his people to stand together while everything around them is being shaken. They will be able to support each other while the foundations that everyone trusts are being swept away.
Sometimes, God will get the prophets to speak to the leaders of the nation and warn them of the dangerous consequences that their decisions will have. The prophets will explain that what they think is good is bad in God's eyes and that they are responsible for the outcome. They will explain that the leaders' decisions and actions are increasing the authority of the spiritual powers of evil, so the harm that follows will be out of proportion to the scope of their mistakes. They need to know, that whatever their intentions, the consequence will be far worse than they expect, and they are mostly responsible. The message of the prophets will probably not be received by the leaders of the nation, but because they have taken up authority and placed responsibility on themselves, God will want them to understand the consequences.
During the spiritual decline of a nation, God is unlikely to tell his prophets to speak to the unbelievers living in the nation, even if their numbers are growing. They do not believe in God, so they are unlikely to receive a message from him. Many do not understand the working of the powers of evil, so a prophetic message would confuse them.
And it is not fair to blame non-Christians for the state of the world. If there has been a spiritual decline, it is because followers of Jesus have not been doing their job, so they are responsible for the consequences.
The people of the world need to hear the gospel of Jesus, so God is more likely to send evangelists to carry the message of his love to those who don't know him. He will send people to heal the sick and cast out demons and tell them that he loves them and wants to rescue them from their troubles.
National Covenants with God
Many Christians in America and other places believe their nation has a covenant with God. I believe that a nation can make a covenant with God, but it is different from what most Christians assume.
We tend to assume that the New Covenant makes the covenant with God a personal thing, but that seems to be a very Western, individualistic way of looking at the covenant. I believe that God is much more communal.
The leaders of a nation have the authority to make a covenant with God on behalf of the people who have submitted to their authority. However, two conditions would have to be fulfilled for such a covenant to be effective.
The leaders of the nation would have to renounce all previous covenants made with false gods. That was a problem for the American founding fathers, because they had covenanted with greed and military power, etc, and they never renounced those covenants, before apparently making covenant with God.
A covenant with God is always one-sided. He specifies the terms of the covenant, including what is required for fulfilment and the consequence of keeping or rejecting the it (a nation cannot just claim the covenant that God made through Moses with Israel). Most nations throughout history that have tried to make a covenant with God have done it the other way round. They decide what they will do for God, (often not much) and what they expect him to do for them (usually quite a lot). I suspect that it what the American founders did. They demanded God's blessing on their enterprise without actually committing to obedience to his standards.
Non-covenant
One role of the OT prophets was to monitor the covenant that God made with Israel and challenge the nation's failure to comply, and warn of the consequences. That role has finished because God has not extended the old covenant to other nations, but established a new covenant through Jesus. The role of covenant guardian perhaps still applies to the nation of Israel which claims to be under the old covenant, but it would be serious critic, rather than a cheerleader for what the Israel government is doing that the American church has become. The nation probably needs modern prophets to challenge its failure to comply with God's covenant.
The other role of the Old Testament prophets was to speak to the surrounding nations and warn them what was going on spiritually and what would happen if they carried on in the way they were going. See Isaiah 13-21, Jeremiah 46-52, Ezekiel 25-30. There were others including Elijah, Elisha and Jonah. Daniel and Joseph spoke to the emperors of their time.
These prophetic words to nations and rulers were not couched in the context of covenant, because God did not have a special covenant with the surrounding nations. They warned the nations of what would happen if they continued on their existing path. This was a substantial part of the prophet's ministry and I see nothing in the New Testament that says that this role is discontinued, or that God has stopped speaking to kings and nations. Why would a God who speaks stop speaking? Rather, Rev 10:11 suggests that the role will continue.
What has changed is that God no longer relies on one prophet to speak to many nations. He will use many prophets, but just a few speaking to each nation or ruler, because the role has been split up and spread around since the Holy Spirit has been poured out widely. "One to many" should have been replaced by "many to each one". The modern prophet movement is a long way from being able to exercise this role, but it is still needed.
The United States is on a dangerous path, far more dangerous than most Christians realise, and it is being led down that path by nationalistic/patriotic failed/false prophets. The nation really needs a clear prophetic voice to warn it if of the dangers it faces (and that has nothing to do with the Old Covenant).
