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Micah the prophet, Russian icon from the
first quarter of the 18th cen. |
When people hear that the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a prophet, they sometimes dismissively ask what he has prophesized. I have been asked more than once why we need to pay tithing when the prophet can just predict which stocks will rise, where oil can be found, etc. The modern definition of the word “
prophecy” focuses so much on telling the future, that we have come to think of prophets as mere psychics who give us vague foretellings of things to come (which, if they are vague enough, couldn’t possibly be untrue). But that isn’t what prophecy is all about.
