Prophetic actions

“Then he said, ‘Take the arrows’; so he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, ‘Strike the ground’; so he struck three times, and stopped. And the man of God was angry with him, and said, ‘You should have struck five or six times; then you would have struck Syria till you had destroyed it’” (2 Kings 13:18-19)

Elisha asked King Jehoash to strike the ground with his arrows but his tepid and not very enthusiastic response meant that King Jehoash would not get the victory over the Araemans that he could have had. If he had struck the ground five or six times he would have had complete victory.

The Bible is full of prophetic actions that can seem a bit strange today but prophetic actions are just as prevalent and just as significant now as they were then. In Hosea’s days God told him to marry an adulterous woman who was symbolic of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God by worshipping Canaanite idols (Hosea 1).  Through Hosea's marriage, children and further actions God showed his people that despite their idolatry he still loved them and wanted them back. Ezekiel and Jeremiah also performed prophetic acts.

Today we may not be called to do things like this but there are many other ways that God may ask us to act prophetically.  Have you heard of someone saying they must sow their seed  by which they mean give financially into a church, ministry or so on expecting there to be a return or fruit from their seed which they may or may not see?

I have seen people jump on chairs, open doors, stretch themselves out on beds to prophetically act out what they believe God is saying and doing. The one thing they all had was a conviction that what they were doing was going to make a difference. King Jehoash’s problem was that he did not believe striking the ground with the arrows was going to make any difference. He had a ‘it won’t work’ mind set.

If God asks us to do something like this, please don’t reason it away. Do it before reason persuades you it is silly and not worth doing.  We need to get to a place of faith where we believe that the prayers we say, our prophetic actions, our declarations and our Godly choices do make a huge difference even if we do not see the effect in the short term. Prophetic actions can be very graphic and powerful ways of making a spiritual statement. They do work!