Revealing His Secrets to the Prophets

Observations From My Study (Amos 3:7)

At the beginning of the year I started working my way through Tabletalk magazine, a magazine of daily devotionals (which I'll write more about later). Along with the devotionals, the writers give a verse to meditate on during the week. This week, the verse was Amos 3:7:

For the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets. (ESV)

At first I thought, "What on earth am I supposed to learn from this?" But as I thought about it, I realized that this verse gives a reason for great joyfulness, thankfulness, and worship.

Let's think about this for a minute. What is a prophet? We tend to think that a prophet is no more than a fortune-teller, someone who predicts future events. But in the Bible, a prophet is really a spokesperson for God. A prophet's function is to relay the words of God to his people and the world. This does involve predicting the future at times, but that's only because God himself tells them what will happen in the future. But that's not all that God talks about.

What is the Bible? The Bible is the Word of God. God breathed out his word (revealed his secret) to people to write down for the world to read (to his servants the prophets, his spokespeople to the world). In other words, because God revealed his secrets to the prophets, we have the Bible! God, through the prophets and apostles, wrote the various books of the Bible that have been preserved and passed on through history to us, that we may read them and know his Gospel.

I don't know about you, but if you ask me, the fact that God has given us his Word and preserved it so we can read it today is cause for great joy, thankfulness, and worship.