FireSide Chat

Dear Teresa,

My daughter died at age 30 a few months ago. She was initiated into a gang when she was 13, and could never seem to get away from it. She gave her heart to the Lord when she was young, but drug use kept her from walking with the Lord in a dedicated way. She also struggled with a strong bi-polar disorder.

One of the gang members went out of his way to keep her in a drugged state the last many months of her life, while he drained her money and resources. She tried to get away from him, but he pursued her whereever she moved to. She died due to fowl play.

Her brother is struggling with this: She was given many prophetic words throughout her life. Many came from credible men and women of God about a future ministry that God was preparing for her. That ministry would break free many who was enslaved in the things that she was. But then God allowed her to be taken. Why would there be so many powerful words spoken, and then she is gone?

He is pretty broken up by this and struggling with God over this issue...can you give me any insights on this?

- A Grieving Mom

First, let me say that I am very sorry to hear about the loss of your daughter. I know how hard it is to loose love ones, and I suspect that both you and your son have quite a bit of grieving ahead of you. The good news is that the Lord is willing to walk with you through that grieving process and to meet you in it. Now, on to your question...

I wish that I could give a really good answer to your question, but the best I can do is share a bit of my limited understanding on it. Some aspects of the prophetic remain a mystery to me--I don't have all of the answers.

In fact, I went through something similar in 1994-5. A friend of mine had cancer, and I was part of a group that prayed for her every week. We saw cancer lumps shrink under our hands as we prayed. She was in remission for a while, but then the cancer came back. We were sure God would heal her, because she had been given all sorts of prophetic words from very credible sources about the future ministry that she and her husband would have together. (God had not personally given me any prophecies for her, but I believed the words that she had received from others were truly from Him, and I expected her to recover fully. Instead, she died from the cancer a few months later.

That resulted in a crisis of faith for me--both about praying for the sick, and about the prophetic. I had to struggle through this with the Lord, and this is the understanding that I came away with out of this experience.

Some of God's words are unconditional--His absolute will, and there is nothing that can be done to change them. An example of that would be prophecies predicting the coming of the Messiah as a human to die for our sins and the second coming of the conquering king.

But most of God's words are conditional, and many of them are invitations. For instance, we see in 2 Chronicles 7:14 says, "If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land." That is a conditional word and it is also an invitation. In this case, God very clearly spelled out His condition in the word--the condition is that we have to repent and seek God and the promise is forgiveness and restoration of a nation that was damaged because it fell under judgment.

Sometimes He spells the conditions out clearly, and other times He does not. An example of the later can be found in the book of Jonah. In Jonah 3:2, God instructs a repentant Jonah as follows: "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to it the message that I tell you." The message that God gave Jonah is found at the end of the next verse: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"

That word sounds pretty definitive. There did not appear to be any room in that word for repentance and forgiveness. Yet God's word to Nineveh was, in fact, conditional. The implied condition in this word was that this judgment will be carried out if things don't change. The Ninivite people are not sure whether or not there is room for grace, but they change anyhow. Jonah 3:5 tells us, "So the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them." The king said (in end of verse 8 and verse 9): "Let every one turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who can tell if God will turn and relent, and turn away from His fierce anger, so that we may not perish?"

The people responded to God's word, and as a result, Jonah's prophecy was NOT carried out. Nineveh was spared, much to the prophet's dismay.

I am not sure all that went through Jonah's head when that happened, but I think that a part of him felt resentful that God commanded him to say one thing and then God did something different. (Jonah must have been mindful that the Old Testament criteria for judging prophet as "false" was whether or not his word comes to pass.) At any rate, we know from Scripture that Jonah was not a happy camper.

Jonah had no choice but to say what God told him to say--and he was probably embarrassed that his word went unfulfilled. Some of his fellow Israelites may have judged him as a "flake" and a false prophet. Jonah repeated what God said, but God "changed His mind" about what He was going to do when the people response to His word.

That is the nature of prophecy--God speaks to us because He wants to elicit a certain response from us. Otherwise, why would He bother to speak to Nineveh at all? He could just send the judgment and destroy them. Many of God's words contain invitations--either explicit or implied. The way we respond to God's invitation can effect how the word plays out in our lives.

The example from Jonah was where the word would come to pass unless people gave God the response He wanted. But it can go the other way too. God can issue an invitation to a person in a word, speaking His perfect will and destiny to them, but the word may be conditional. They may need to repent and get right with God and learn to walk out His lordship in their lives in order to see the word come to pass.

This discussion would not be complete unless I shared the story of a Nigerian pastor who was raised from the dead at a Reinhard Bonkee crusade. He and his wife had been given many prophetic words about the ministry that God had for them together. But he was killed in a car accident before those words could come to pass. His wife would not accept his death and would not allow him to be buried. She told God, "You gave us these prophetic words about how we would minister together, so You are obligated to fulfill them. My husband is dead, so they can't be fulfilled unless You raise him from the dead." Then she took his corpse to a crusade many hours drive away to get prayer for her husband. Their story is very dramatic and I am only telling a portion of it--but in the end, he was raised from the dead. They are currently ministering together, living out that prophetic word.

I don't understand it all, but there are times that when we cling to a word against impossible odds, our faith motivates God to fulfill it. The Nigerian pastor's wife held on to her word in faith, and as a result, she saw her husband raised from the dead. Yet, in the case of my friend, we did not see a resurrection, and the prophetic words she had been given went unfulfilled.

There is one last thing to consider. Not all words are "God words." Sometimes a prophetic person can be so overcome with compassion for a person that they speak out their wishes for the person instead of God's word. If someone is sick, then many around them may be moved in that manner.

I don't know if any of that was going on in your daughter's case-- she obviously had a difficult life. The same thing may have happened for my friend. I know that some of the people who prophesied to my friend were very credible--yet it is possible they prophesied from their soul or compassion. However, since there were so many similar words from so many sources, I suspect that at least some of them had to be God-words. If so, those words contained conditions that were not fulfilled in her life, resulting in the word going unfulfilled in her life.

I wish I could give you a more definitive answer, but this is "hard" question. I encourage you to pursue it further with the Lord and allow Him to speak to you personally about your daughter's case.