Christ the Supreme Prophet

As the Word of God incarnate, Jesus is both the supreme Messenger and the supreme message of biblical prophecy. Today, R.C. Sproul explains what it means to have Christ as our Prophet.

Now, most people that I talk to who are Christians don’t get all that excited when you say that Jesus is a prophet. And I think the reason for that is because there is so much skepticism that abounds in our day—the legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism and cynicism, that denied all things supernatural in the New Testament, denying the virgin birth, the atonement, the resurrection, and all of that. And they still didn’t want to close down the churches. They had payrolls and they had a lot of money invested in church property. So, they tried to reconstruct and redefine Christianity and redefine Jesus. And they said, “We don’t believe that He’s the Son of God anymore, but we believe He was a great prophet.”

And so we’re accustomed to hearing the title prophet associated with Jesus as a downgrade from being the divine, incarnate Son of God. And we need to get over that because there is no conflict in the New Testament between Jesus holding the office of prophet and being the Son of God. And it’s important for us to understand that Jesus Christ not only has the Word of God put in His mouth; He is the Word of God. He is the Word of God incarnate. And in this regard, we look at the irony of this relationship between Jesus to the Old Testament prophets, that Christ is both the object and the subject of biblical prophecy. He is the supreme object of prophecy, in that all of the multitudes of Old Testament prophecies regarding the future coming of the kingdom of God and of the Messiah of Israel, all of these prophecies converge in Him. See, Jesus is the supreme subject and the supreme object of biblical prophecy.