Section 01 - The Prophetic Mantle

Acts 2:17 says,

And it will occur in the End Times, says God, that I will pour out from my Spirit onto every kind of person: and your sons and your daughters will prophesy, and your young people will see visions, and your seniors will have dreams.

We have been looking at the subject of ministry mantles in our School of the Supernatural. We have covered quite a lot of material already, but we actually haven't looked at specific mantles that are designed for a particular kind of ministry.

We looked briefly at the teaching mantle but we didn't go into detail. But now I would like to look at the prophetic mantle and we are going to look at it in quite a lot of detail.

Prophesying is Not New

Prophesying is something that has been known amongst mankind for a long time back. You will see it mentioned way back in the Old Testament. Actually, the earliest possible record that we have of prophesying being spoken of is mentioned in the book of Jude.

It seems that Jude was actually quoting from a writing that is not part of the Scripture. There has been a lot of debate as to whether we should even accept the epistle of Jude because he quoted from a book called the epistle of Enoch.

This is an apocryphal work and contains a lot of false teaching. But Jude spoke about Enoch, the seventh from Adam as having spoken prophecy.

That goes way back to the seventh generation from Adam before much else was taught in the Scripture. But prophesying was already spoken about there.

If we look at the Old Testament, it is known as the law and the prophets. The reason for this is that a very large portion of the Old Testament was in fact written by prophets. This means that the Prophetic Ministry is something that is rooted in Scripture and has been there for a long time.

Even the New Testament has writings from prophets. In fact, the last book of the New Testament, the book of Revelation, is one that is written from an entirely prophetic viewpoint. It was written by the Apostle John when he received prophetic revelation on the Isle of Patmos.

So Prophetic Ministry was never done away with. There are those who like to teach that since the Scripture has arrived we don't need Prophetic Ministry anymore, and therefore it doesn't exist.

But as we saw in the Scripture that I shared at the beginning, God told us something way back through the prophet Joel. He said that in the End Times, He was going to pour out a fresh move of His Spirit and a fresh revelation of Prophetic Ministry.

He said, "Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, and older people will have dreams."

Dreaming also has a prophetic orientation.

So I want to look first at prophecy, what exactly it is, and how it functions. Then we are going to go into a lot of detail in this course on exactly how Prophetic Ministry should function. We will look at how you can also enter in and be used by God, and obtain this very special kind of anointing which we call the prophetic mantle.

What Prophecy Is

Prophecy effectively means speaking under divine inspiration. It can involve revealing something that wasn't known. In fact, there was a common term that was used back in Jesus' day already.

We see that when they arrested Jesus, and they were taunting Him and hurting Him before He was actually crucified, it says in Luke 22:64,

And when they had blindfolded him, they struck him on the face, and asked him, saying, Prophesy, who is it that struck you?

Their understanding was that a prophet should be able to tell by revelation who was hitting Him, even though He was blindfolded.

So this passage already shows that prophesying has an element of being able to know things that go beyond your senses.

Predicting the Future

Prophecy can involve predicting the future. In fact, that is probably one of the most common understandings of the word prophecy or prophesy.

It has become part of our language, to the point where we even call the person who forecasts the weather a prophet. So everyone knows what prophet means.

Seeing into the Spiritual Realm

Prophesying also involves seeing into the spiritual realm which is outside of this natural world. For this reason, prophets in the Old Testament were originally known as seers. They could see things.

Today any believer can see spiritually, not only the prophets. We will be looking at this in a bit more detail.

I remember years back reading a book by Mel Tari entitled Like a Mighty Wind. This was an account of the revival that took place in Indonesia, where there was a great move of the Spirit of God.

One of the expressions the believers there used was a term called watching God's television. I remember Mel Tari saying that they would pray, and you would say to your friend,

"I am just going to pray, and while I pray would you watch God's television and tell me what you see."

So they would reveal what they saw in their vision. That is being a seer.

The Purpose of Prophecy

What is the main purpose of prophecy? Unlike what many seem to believe and practice today, it is not meant to exalt the prophet and make them look good.

It is to help a person to open their hearts to receive and to let them know that God cares. It's to take away fear and give them assurance.

Unfortunately today you only need to look around at the so-called big-name prophets out there. They are all making a big show for everyone so that they will think how wonderful they are and glorify themselves.

Prophecy and Power Combined

Prophetic Ministry or prophesying is often accompanied by gifts of power. If you look back in the Old Testament at the prophets Elijah and Elisha, they combined prophecy with the miraculous and the two flowed together.

In 2 Kings 2:21, one of the miracles that Elisha performed was this. It says,

And he went out to the spring of waters and threw salt in there.

The waters were polluted and they couldn't drink it. So Elisha threw salt in there and he said,

Thus says the LORD [Yahweh], I have healed these waters; there will not be from there any more death nor will there be [barren] land.

He prophesied, and as he prophesied he released God's power to perform a miracle.

Jesus often combined gifts of power with the words of prophetic revelation that He had. For example in Matthew 9, we see that when they dropped down the man who was sick with palsy, Jesus said to him,

"Your sins are forgiven."

Everybody was thinking,

"How dare He do that! Only God can forgive sins."

The Bible says He knew their thoughts. That was a prophetic gift or ability to know their thoughts. Then He turned to them and said,

"I want to show you that the Son of Man has the authority to forgive sins."

Then He commanded the man to rise up and walk and performed a miracle.

Mark 3 shares about another occasion where there was a man with a withered hand. It was the Sabbath and they were all thinking,

"I hope He is not going to heal on the Sabbath. That is wrong!"

Jesus once again knew their thoughts and said to the man,

"Come and stand here and stretch forth your hand."

Then Jesus healed him.

So just because you are a prophet doesn't mean that you are limited to only getting prophetic revelation or speaking prophetic words. Very often those very prophetic words release a power that brings about a miracle.

Moses often spoke by prophetic decree and caused things to happen. When he spoke to those plagues, each one of them was a prophetic act. It was a prophetic word that said,

"Thus says the Lord."

And there came the plagues.

So prophecy involves a lot more than just speaking.

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