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Good Morning,

It’s the time of year for making predictions and if even half of what’s foretold comes to pass, 2019 is apparently shaping up to be a good year for the Cassandras. They’re saying it’s going to be a bad year, and not just because it ends with a 9.

Happily, people are notoriously poor at predicting the future. Scientists have shown that we have a tendency to construct predictions from our wishes or terrors rather than actual data; and, even then, the super-forecasters who are paid to get things right can get it badly wrong. Like the banker who told Henry Ford the horse was here to stay, or poor Michael Fish the weatherman who, on the eve of this country’s worst storm, said ‘it might be a little windy tomorrow.’ Expert or amateur, panglossian or doom monger, the future can make mugs of us all.

Perhaps there is danger in putting too much store in what might happen tomorrow. As well as betraying the preferences of the predictor, predictions about the future play to the fatalist and the fantasist, and both these outlooks can leave people thinking they can’t do anything about the outcomes predicted. We then end up doing nothing and our predictions become self-fulfilling prophesies.

Prophecy and prediction are not the same thing. When the prophets - like Jeremiah and Isaiah - pointed to terrible events in the future they were not predictions of what would happen; but rather descriptions of what could happen if the people didn’t change their ways. They were more concerned about getting things right in the present, than being right about the future. They called out uncomfortable truths - sometimes at great personal risk - about the injustices of society, the people’s indifference to poverty, or the environment - urging people to change now in order to avoid future catastrophe.

The Jeremiahs maybe long gone, but if we listen carefully we can still hear the prophets of our day. Not all end up being thrown into a pit or put to death, although of course, some still are. They could be journalists, or musicians, or even one of your children. They don’t need special qualifications. God once used a donkey to prophesy to its hard-hearted owner. And the message doesn’t have to be pious or priggish or conventionally religious. The inspiration might be divine, but the action is earthly, urgent and rooted in the now.

Some believe that part of the supernatural outworking of creation is that God has placed the future inside the present. A prophet is someone who is able to describe that future, provoking a change of heart and mind that leads to action. I’d even suggest that anyone who calls out injustice is a prophet. And we are in need of new prophets to speak the truth about what is necessary this year in order to win a hopeful future for ourselves and the generation to come.

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