Are you?

Are you sure you want a prophet’s reward?

Matthew 10:17

Beware of men, for they will deliver you up to councils and scourge you in their synagogues.

Matthew 10:21-22

Now brother will deliver up brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death. And you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.

"So the first thought that should come to mind is: Life is not so easy for prophets. "Prophets are people who are completely identified with God’s message. They’re not people who have a message from God. They are the message from God."

"That’s the nature of being a prophet: Either get burned up from the inside by God or burned up from the outside by those who don’t like what God has to say. In the Bible, false prophets get stoned for telling a lie. True prophets get stoned for telling the truth."

"So from the standpoint of this world, if we ask, “What is the prophet’s reward?”, the answer is clear: Death. Persecution followed by suffering followed by death. Really painful death, in most cases." In Hebrews 11, we read about the great pioneers of faith. Many of these were prophets. And in Hebrews 11:36-38 we get a list of how many of the prophets suffered and died:

"Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated—the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground.

Matthew 5:10-12,

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Revelation 11:18

The time has come for judging the dead, 

and for rewarding your servants the prophets 

and your people who revere your name, 

both great and small— 

and for destroying those who destroy the earth. 

Matthew 23:34 

Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town.

"That is what this scripture reveals about the character of God. It is not only that “He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me,” as he says in the scripture today. It is also that he who sent the prophets sent himself, to die the death that all prophets die due to their identification with him.

When the writer of Hebrews lists the suffering of all the pioneers of faith, he writes in Hebrews 11:16, “Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God.” But it is because God himself suffered the very same things that we do that we are not ashamed to call him our God: Immanuel, God with us."