- #Life flashing before your eyes got questions christianity how to#
- #Life flashing before your eyes got questions christianity full#
Many biblical accounts detail the prophet acting out the command, the presence of eyewitnesses watching him, the responses of the witnesses, and a declaration that the event will surely come to pass. Nonverbal activity: Jeremiah buys, wears, and buries a new waist sash and then digs it up to discover that it’s ruined, no longer good for anything (Jeremiah 13:1-7).Īnother way to spot a sign act is to look for the description of the performance. So when you see nonverbal activity coupled with verbal proclamation, you know you have a sign act. Like, maybe Isaiah just liked being in the buff or Ezekiel wasn’t so fond of his wife. Imagine how easily actions could be misinterpreted if there were no explanations.
There’s the action carried out and the interpretation of the action. So how do we know when we’ve come across a sign act? First, it’s always communicated in a distinct literary form involving “two primary components: the divine command to the prophet to perform the specified action, and the interpretation of the sign act” (Friebel, Dictionary of the Old Testament Prophets). Prophets can indeed perform signs, such as Elijah raising a woman’s son from the dead (1 Kings 17:17-24), but that’s not a sign act. In Hebrew, “signs and wonders” refers to miraculous events intended to be passed down and remembered from one generation to another. Sign acts also aren’t the same thing as symbols or signs (as in “signs and wonders”). The non-communication activities of the prophets, such as traveling to a location to deliver a message or writing down a message on a scroll, are not sign acts, nor are the activities that happen within a vision or the rhetorical commands that aren’t meant to be carried out.
#Life flashing before your eyes got questions christianity how to#
Pretty cool, right? Now that we know what they are, we need to figure out how to spot one. The Israelites could choose to ignore the prophet’s words, but they sure couldn’t miss them. The visual nature of the prophet’s presentation made his message unmistakably clear to a people who were notorious for muddying the waters of God’s Word. Ok, that does seem weird, but it’s the strangeness of his actions that drew the audience into his message, which is exactly what he wanted.
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Just a few of his “enacted prophecies included lying bound in ropes (4:1-8), shaving his head and striking some of the hair with a sword (5:1-2), covering his face and digging through a wall (12:3-7), trembling (12:18), and avoiding the full mourning rituals for his dead wife (24:16-24)” (L. Ezekiel, a prophet whose sanity is often questioned, is the most notable example of this.
He might use coordinated body movements, grand gestures, facial expressions, or complex actions with objects to make the divine point (imagine the game charades on steroids). What makes these visuals so interesting (i.e., “weird”) is that the prophet himself was intimately involved in the visual. In the same way, sign acts were nonverbal actions that visually demonstrated and drove home the message being delivered by prophets. Think of them as “visual aids.” Who doesn’t love a good visual aid? Whether it’s in the classroom, the sanctuary, or on YouTube, visuals make instruction concrete in our minds, and they reinforce it in ways we remember. “Sign acts are nonverbal actions and objects intentionally employed by the prophets so that message content was communicated through them to the audience” (Friebel, Dictionary of the Old Testament Prophets). This means that if we want to understand the weird, wonderful world of prophetic communication, we need to understand the sign acts.
Unfortunately, the nonverbal components don’t get much press today, so we often mistake these sign acts as yet another prophetic oddity when, in fact, they’re a key ingredient in the compelling, multi-sensory presentations that fill the prophetic pages. They didn’t merely speak out prophecies they acted them out as well. The prophets were communicators, and like all great communicators, they utilized a wide range of verbal and nonverbal elements in their prophetic speeches. But no, they’re not weird in that they’re random or meaningless. Yes, the prophetic actions are weird in the sense that it’s rare to see a man walking around naked (unless you live in Portland, Oregon like me…then it’s not so rare). There’s also that episode of Isaiah walking around naked for three years.
But on the way to these beloved texts you come across strange scenes like Jeremiah smashing jars before an audience and Ezekiel baking bread over human waste (yes, poop). Sure, there’s cherished passages like God’s promise to give his people a future and a hope in Jeremiah 29:11 or a new heart and new spirit in Ezekiel 36:26. If you’ve ever read the Prophets, you know they seem a little weird.
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