Prophecy is defined as God communicating with people through people filled with His Spirit , it is simply what the Lord Jesus Christ is saying at a particular moment in time whether he is addressing a specific person, a specific church or even the Church at large. True prophecy refers to the origin of the word (God), but more specifically it includes the ideal way in which it is communicated, to whom it is directed to, and the attitude and motive in which it is delivered.
Prophecy is usually spoken, but it may have other means of expression. It may be an enacted demonstration, as in the case of the prophet Ezekiel. It may be a type of symbolism (Daniel’s visions), or it may be a demonstration of divine power accompanied by miracles (Moses, Elijah).
We believe that the key to life is communication. Prophecy is one medium through which God the Father communicates with his sons and daughters and ultimately the bride of Christ, The Church. The Lord often communicates encouragement and exhortations to His Church but He also communicates His will to the world and for the Church. More often than not, the Lord releases these words so that the church will intercede and pray for the Father’s will to be fulfilled.
While every man and woman is fallible, every spirit-filled believer and prophetic minister featured on our site relies on the Holy Spirit to speak the word of God. Prophecy is of the utmost importance but we don’t place our faith in prophecy, we place it in the Lord Jesus Christ. While we don’t have a perfect record, our seasoned prophetic ministers are extremely accurate which can be viewed on this very website in their fulfillments. The way people interpret a prophetic word may not necessarily be correct, seeing that all prophecy is partial, progessive and conditional. In other words, we never assume that we have the complete picture through a prophetic word. A word may still be inspired by the word of God even if it is not fulfilled in the way that we think it should be.
No. The Bible is littered with instances where God spoke through a prophet and released a word that eventually did not come to pass. In Jonah 3:4, Jonah prophecies “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Shortly after in Jonah 3:10, “Then God saw their works, that they turned away from their evil way and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it”. Does this make Jonah a false prophet? Certainly not. Prophets and those prophesying the Word of the Lord must do it in faith, and likewise the church must receive and pray in response to these words in faith. As stated before, prophetic words often but not always are given with conditions and so if man does not uphold his responsibility, the Lord is not obligated to fulfill His word. Furthermore, the humble believer understands that prophecy itself, much like prayer, is a mystery as to how exactly the Lord unfolds his will on earth with regards to prophetic words being released, in response to man’s choices, and heeding the prayers of the saints .
The timeline of prophecy is not always defined and the conditions of fulfillment are seldom obeyed, so the person prophesying may have still been accurate although the prophetic word failed.
The “multiple fulfillment principle” is a prophetic principle which states that many types and forerunners may fulfill prophecies in part until its complete and literal fulfillment comes.
Example: Hosea 11:1- “When Israel was a child, I loved him, And out of Egypt I called My son.”
Fulfillment:
1-Moses leads the children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage (Exodus 12).
2-When Jesus returns from Egypt after Herod’s murderous slaughter of innocents(Matthew 2:15)
3-You were called out of world and into God’s Kingdom in Christ – God called us as sons out of Egypt(the World).
In the context of The Prophetic Annals, this means that when a Word is given by the Lord, there may be different ways in which a word is fulfilled; a word may not necessarily be constrained to a single fulfillment. This also means that as time passes, there may be new evidences of a word coming to pass.