Like many people all over the world, I love the Bible! I find it is an infallible and eternal source for solving problems. I love the stories, the songs, the wonderful healings. But I have often wondered where the successors to those memorable Bible prophets are today? They were the ones who, through their closeness to God, led whole countries into freedom, abundance, and health. One of today’s greatest needs is for strong, honest, upright leaders, and for those who can bring peace and healing to individual and collective problems. Throughout the Bible, prophets were these leaders and healers. It got me thinking as to what actually is a prophet? Is it just someone walking around in an ankle-length cloak, wearing a long beard? This does not exactly fit today’s world! So who are today’s prophets? A prophet has been defined as “a spiritual seer” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 593).
This definition is from a timeless textbook on healing called Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by a remarkable woman, Mary Baker Eddy. We’ll talk more about this book later. So what is a spiritual seer? It is someone who sees beyond what the five physical senses tell him. Ancient prophets saw a world beyond what material vision presented.
Elisha, one of the greatest prophets in the Bible, when alerted by his servant that he was in great danger and was surrounded by enemies, prayed: “Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha” (II Kings 6:17). He saw something invisible to human view. So being a prophet or spiritual seer is having the ability to see something that doesn’t at a first glance appear to be there. It is having the ability to see the invisible, to discern something beyond what our five senses are telling us.
