to prophesy: to speak a message that comes from God rather than from oneself, as God's inspired spokesperson
At its core this word does not mean to guess or to predict. It means to speak for God: to say out loud what God has given you to say, so that the words carry his authority rather than your own opinion. Announcing the future is only one thing such a message can do. In the New Testament the same word covers Spirit-prompted praise, a warning about what is coming, the exposure of a secret in someone's heart, a rebuke, and a written vision, because all of them share one thing: the speaker is delivering God's word, not their own.
The breadth comes from the Old Testament. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, this was the word chosen for what the prophets of Israel did, and it inherited their whole range: foretelling, warning, comforting, exposing, and praising. The translators deliberately kept it separate from the ordinary Greek words for fortune-telling and trance-divination, so that speaking for the true God never shared vocabulary with pagan magic.
By far the most common use in the letters of Paul is the ongoing gift given to the church: a person moved by the Spirit says something that builds up, encourages, and comforts the gathered believers, and what is said is then weighed by the others. It is intelligible, orderly speech under the speaker's control, not an uncontrolled frenzy. The word also stretches to cover false claimants who say they speak for God but do not, and even a man who spoke God's truth without realizing what he was saying.
Because English readers hear the word "prophesy" and think first of predicting the future, this is one of the easiest biblical words to narrow too far. Its center of gravity is speaking for God, with prediction as one branch among several.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the congregational prophecy Paul describes in 1 Corinthians is a fully authoritative form of inspired speech or a distinct, lesser category that is non-authoritative in wording and can err in its details.
- contestedNew Testament congregational prophecy is a spontaneous, Spirit-prompted report of something God brings to mind, non-authoritative in its wording and capable of inaccuracy, and thus a category below Old Testament and apostolic prophecy.; Wayne Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today (1988); D. A. Carson, Showing the Spirit (1987)
- contestedNew Testament prophecy is fully authoritative inspired speech; the texts show no separate fallible tier and no case of prophecy treated as ordinarily mistaken.; Christopher Forbes, Prophecy and Inspired Speech in Early Christianity (WUNT 2/75, 1995); Max Turner, The Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts (1996); David Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity (1983)
- minorityPauline prophecy is essentially pastorally applied preaching and proclamation that retains a spontaneous, revealed element.; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC, 2000)