(B) Are You Called to Be a Prophet?

The ultimate question that you need to answer for this gift is the same as one of the questions about the gift of apostleship. Are you in the foundation [i.e. the teaching] on which all Christians must be built (Eph 2:20)?

But someone might say,

“Even after Moses established the foundation of the first covenant and died, God still sent many prophets to Israel, even prophets whose teachings were not written down in the Old Testament. So God still can send prophets today to God’s people, Jew or Gentile. He can still give people the gift of prophecy.”

Now if this were true we would most likely still need to be writing, by the Holy Spirit, the New Testament to chronicle the history of Christianity, like they did with the history of Israel after Moses died. We would then need to include in that history various amounts of these prophets’ words at various and certain intervals of Christian history, like they did in the Old Testament. We would also likely need to include several individual specialized books from these prophets in the N.T., like they did in the Old Testament. But again, I must take you back to Ephesians 2:20, which says that we are built upon a foundation. The foundation of the Old Testament included both Moses’ Law and the prophets. The foundation of the New Testament includes the prophetic gospels and the prophetic letters in the New Testament. The difference then between the foundation of the O.T. and the foundation of the N.T is that the O.T. took much longer to write than the N.T. So the so called canon [i.e. authentic collection of inspired writings] of the O.T. was open longer than the canon of the N.T. before they both could be prophetically closed. The O.T. was closed sometime before Christ arrived, seemingly four hundred years before Christ. Evidently, the New Testament was closed in and around the time that all of the apostles died.

.... more about this in the Bible Study on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit