Deeper Reflection
WE HAVE THE COMPLETED CANON OF SCRIPTURE, the written Word of God, and affirm the supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture. So, the secondary kind of prophecy, as portrayed in 1 Corinthians 14, is not comparable to that of the biblical prophets. However, “God undoubtedly gives some” with the prophetic gift and ministry “a remarkable degree of insight either into Scripture itself and its meaning, or its application to the contemporary world, or into His particular will for particular people in particular situations”³⁸. We can legitimately call such insight “prophetic insight”³⁹.But regarding such “prophecies” we are to “test everything” (v.21a) – “to sift” them, “to weigh carefully what is said” (1 Cor 14:29, NIV). We are to discern the true and the false, the right and the wrong. And through such testing of prophetic utterances, we are to “hold fast to what is good” (v.21b). Apparently, when Paul uses the word “good” (kalos) here, he was using “the imagery of testing coins”⁴⁰. For the word kalos “was used of what was ‘genuine as opposed to counterfeit coin’”⁴¹. So, Paul implies that “every form of evil” that we are to “abstain from” (v.22) is a counterfeit of truth.We are to test prophetic utterances against the Scriptures, like the Bereans. The Bereans “received the word” preached by Paul and Silas “with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:10-11). They did not assume that what was spoken was true, just because the preachers were Paul and Silas. They were not gullible, but critical – and with critical teachability.

---

³⁸ John R. W. Stott, 128 ³⁹ John R. W. Stott, 128 ⁴⁰ John R. W. Stott, 129 ⁴¹ John R. W. Stott, 129