Your 5 Prophetic Strategies: A Prophet’s Guide to High-Level Warfare!

What is a prophet’s responsibility to the nations?

In my book, Becoming the Voice of God, we look into the fact that prophets spend more time in the business of hearing God’s strategy for nations and groups of people, dealing with leaders, who in turn shape nations. There are five areas that prophets need to consider to ensure that they comprehensively guard and call nations into order:

Five Responsibilities of Prophets to Nations

1. Establish the Future

Prophets call the future of nations to be established, forth-telling and commanding their destiny, according to what God wants that nation to become. This secures and holds the nation’s future. We can inadvertently get into so much of a strong focus on the present that we forget how to protect the nation, prophetically shaping what it is to become for multiple generations. What prophetic words are holding your nation’s future?

Top tip: Ask God, “What are You excited about for the future of this land?”

2. Raise Up an Occupying Army

Prophets have a responsibility to call the church into place and to raise up an army to pray, fight, engage, and occupy. This is a present-day focus in which the prophet leans into their Ephesians 4 role as foundational for the building of the church.

Top tip: Ask God, “What does the church need to know today? What is the truth You want them to be established in?”

3. Welcome in What God Wants Now

Utilizing the sight of the watchman, a prophet standing on the walls of a nation should be able to open the gates of a nation so that God and His Kingdom purposes may come in. “On earth as it is in Heaven!” This again has a present-day focus on welcoming what God wants now. These words bring explanation to what is happening in “real time,” where we understand the season of God and why things are going as they are in the nation(s) right now.

Top tip: Ask God, “What is happening (what are You doing) in my nation today?”

4. Set Nations Free from Their Past

Prophets must also be able to set nations free from their pasts, and thus must be able to accurately identify and confront spiritual strongholds. This necessitates an ability to see where a nation has specific “open doors” (because of past sins and idolatries) to principalities and powers and may include the need to map out the territory spiritually, take the lead in identificational repentance, and tear down thrones, sin structures, and demonic ideologies. This is the prophet in high warfare mode!

Top tip: Ask God, “What is the top demonic force suppressing my nation, and how did it get into place?”

5. Expose Demonic Plans for the Future

Prophets should be able to expose hidden demonic strategies that the enemy has set as future “traps,” thus setting the nation free to walk into its future. Here we move into the territory of know- ing the “wiles of the enemy” (“the devil’s schemes”—Ephesians 6:11). Again, this is the prophet in watchman mode, aware of that which will undermine our future well-being.

Top tip: Ask God, “Would You put me up on the wall of the nation and give me an alertness and understanding of satan’s future plans by the revelation and insight of Your Holy Spirit?”

Generally, we are more familiar with words that talk to the church today, and most of us will be familiar with identificational repentance regarding our predecessors’ sins from our nation’s history. However, on the whole we have been much less clear about putting “today” into prophetic context, securing the future of the nation, and taking future demons out of action before they can strike.

Activation

Therefore, stretch yourself to write prophetic words that cover these five areas. This will bring you into the balance of hope for the future, understanding in the present, repentance for the past, and warfare that liberates.

The Role of the Prophets—Diving Deeper

Covenant Watchdogs

By now we should have a fairly robust, foundational understanding of a prophet’s responsibility, how they sound, and what their role is. Now let us dive deeper together in our understanding of their duties before God.

Prophets are “covenant watchdogs,” meaning that prophets come along in the Bible whenever God has made a covenant with the people. The biblical books of the prophets only make sense if we understand that they are guarding covenant—guarding the promises between God and His people, guarding the relationship of commitment. They are sentries over the binding agreement that God would be their/our God, and they/we would be His people.

Prophets guard the partnership arrangement, sort of like looking after a couple’s marriage vows. No wonder they can be annoying! How would you like someone standing over your shoulder, commenting on how you are doing with your marriage vows every day? God is in the business of entering into intimate partnership with humans, and His prophets protect this.

Moses guards the covenant made at Mount Sinai in which, in Exodus 19, the nation of Israel is supposed to become a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6 NIV), put on display to all the surrounding nations. Therefore, the Israelites must be faithful, live by the terms of the covenant, and display a new form of humanity to the rest of the world. In essence, Prophet Moses, in leading and looking after Israel, will enable them to be a bright sign for other nations, calling them all to come back to the Garden of Eden, the dwelling place of God, where He walks with His people. God places His divine presence in their midst (in the Tabernacle, “Dwelling”) and all they need to do is be faithful to the terms of the marriage (we call those marriage terms the “Law” or the “Mosaic Law” or the “Old Covenant”).

God’s Lawyers

So if the prophets represent God’s interests in the keeping of the Law, we could say that they are lawyers, or “non-neutral marriage counsellors,” working on behalf of God! A lot of what prophets say revolves around staying in the favor of God and therefore warning the people each time of how they might be close to breaking the terms of agreement with God that would push Him to call off His blessing over their lives.

The primary burden you will have as a prophet is as covenant watchdog, lawyer, and marriage counsellor. You represent the interests of God. (This means you are with the people, but not the same as the people—and you are supposed to offend and challenge current thinking when it is off course.) Priests/shepherds come in the opposite direction, as representatives of the interests of the people.

Prophets, you work outside of the thinking of the institutional systems. You are not supposed to think the thoughts of those to the left and right of you! You fly above people, and churches, and nations, to see from God’s perspective and what He thinks, always asking, “How does this look to Heaven?” as opposed to, “How does this look to me?” This is why through- out the Bible you find that God is in the habit of saying to His prophets, “Come up here!” In other words, remember who you are representing!

The Hebrew prophets of Scripture speak a bit like lawyers using poetry! They use ancient, arcane, covenant-lawsuit language, making arguments with legal terminology. If you are a covenant lawyer, the first thing you will do is point out what is wrong—naming, exposing, accusing. There are whole poems and speeches accusing people groups in Scripture. This flies in the face of perhaps what is a substandard approach to the prophetic today that always wants harmony. Never forget that to successfully outwork your prophetic function there is a need to frequently ask God, “How does this look from Your perspective?”