When we come to the New Covenant laid out by the Lord Jesus Christ, it appears that an almost every aspect when Christ thinks about what a Christian is, He is thinking about the Old Testament prophets.
You have in the Sermon On The Mount His word of encouragement for Christians who suffer for obedience to the word:
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.
Matthew 5:11-12
His encouragement in that instance, is that Christians are like the prophets in that Christians suffer for the word. But it's interesting how Jesus says this particular likeness.
He says ‘the prophets who were before you.’
You see Christians can trace their lineage not to the priesthood of Judaism, not the kings of Judaism, not to the faithful scribes of Judaism like Ezra. (Jesus did not say, “like David before you,” or “like Ezra before you,” or “like Aaron before you.”)
Christians, according to the Lord Jesus trace their lineage to the prophets who were before them.
‘Context Police’
Aside from taking one text and making a molehill out of it, there's numerous other texts in the New Testament (and Old) that seem to hint at the same theme: Christians are prophets.
In the inaugural sermon of Christianity itself, Peter's Pentecost sermon, he cites Joel chapter 2 from the Greek Septuagint:
"And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:"
Acts 2:17
While there is a certain class of Christians called Cessationists, who would like to hem-in this idea of Christian prophecy to the apostolic age only, the following verses in the Joel passage Peter is reading from says [unfulfilled] wonders will occur after the Pentecost experience:
And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.
The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD come.
Joel 2:30-32
So if we are to keep to Joel’s context, we must say that while Pentecost has happened, these events in verses 30-32 have not occurred and are still needing fulfillment at the end of the church age. Thus, the “prophecy” and “visions” portion of Joel 2 must still be “for us."
Do All Christians Need The Gift of Prophecy to Be Christian?
I don't think that Peter or Joel necessarily assumed that all Christians would either have the gift of prophecy or the office of prophet.
The reason that Christians are prophets is not because they carry some office or title (“Prophet So-And-So”), or are super super gifted (“I have the gift of prophecy”), rather, it's because the main benefits of being a prophet in the Old Testament (as well as the cost) belongs to the Christian.
The prophet in the old covenant had the ability to ignore all men on the face of the Earth if authorities expected disobedience to God’s Word.
The prophet could defy the institutional Judaic system with its authorities of priest and high priest, kings and scribes.
He could ignore all these things, should God direct him elsewhere, because his faithfulness as a prophet, depended upon obedience to God alone.
The Christian is exactly like this.
When Jesus appeared to Ananias in Damascus, he does not consult with an elder or pastor as to whether he should obey, rather he immediately obeys and proceeds to walk to the house of persecutor-of-all-things-Christian, Saul of Tarsus to baptize him.
Philip, one of the seven deacons, does not hesitate when he is told by the Holy Spirit to walk down the road in the middle of the desert outside of Jerusalem where he meets his divine appointment, the first Ethiopian Christian-to-be.
So really the benefit of being a prophet is that the prophet has a great immediacy with God and he needs no outside permission. He does not ask for the permission of the priest to the kings or anyone else.
The prophet is accountable to One.
And so the Christian likewise has immediacy of access with God, by way of the indwelling Holy Spirit in his bosom.
In addition, the Christian has the cost that the prophet of the Old Covenant had:
If the Christian believes God expects anything from him, great or small, ridiculous or normal he cannot refuse it or he is walking a stray from his God.
If some great authority of “the church” be it preacher, pastor, bishop, archbishop, or some other lofty title given by organized religion commands the Christian to disobey God, he must refuse.
And just like the prophets, the Christian must point the church and the world to the Word. He must command to the rebels in and outside of God’s house to repent.
So you see Jesus in the Sermon On The Mount describe the situation of a true Christian as one who suffers like the prophets before him.
The false Christians, who walk the Broad Road as Jesus describes in the Sermon On The Mount are like Old Testament “normies.” They dutifully do what the priest says, but they themselves are spiritually dull. They do not have immediacy of access to God himself. They are seeking him, but only through rites and rituals - the veil always being between they and Himself.
I do not, of course, mean to say that all the “normies,” or non-prophets, of the Old Covenant were false, but I must at least describe them as disadvantaged spiritually compared to the prophets, for the prophets walked with such a closeness to God that our only contemporary example are the greatest of the Christians in the church age.
Application?
And given that this is something of a theological meditation, I do want to leave a clear application.
Reader: is your walk with God like the prophets?
Or is it like someone in the old covenant who only knows God based on shadows of rituals and rites… and a God, who dwells behind the veil (a God, you don't know well).
This is not necessarily meant to be a rebuke, although if you feel that close to your heart, I hope it hurts. Rather it should be a reminder that if indeed you are a Christian. If indeed, you are a member of the New Covenant. You have a right to virtually everything that the prophets of the Old Covenant had.
You have a right to know the will of God.
Without qualifying, we can say that "you need no one to teach you" for the "anointing leads you into all truth."
Only those with dead religion in their heart need to set up an abundance of structures and systems in order to "keep people from falling away."
Ironically just as the Judaism of Jeremiah's day, religion which is about rites and rituals, but ignores the Spirit of God in the present speaking prophetically - is the greatest obstruction to holy living (Jeremiah 7).
Make sure it is, indeed, the God of the New Covenant…
With the full measure of your benefits in the New Covenant that you are following….
And not a cold, dead, ritualistic, Christendom-Christianity which will not last the fire of God to come.
In other words, I hope that in every instance that you feel God is speaking to you, particularly through the Bible (although presumably, also through your conscience, and maybe even through a voice if you have confidence and faith to trust such a thing) that in every instance you yield to that command, that speech, that leading.
It is the New Testament and not merely the Old is the one that said, "today if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart as on the day of rebellion."
So, hopefully, the context police will not come out of their hiding when I say you need to hearken to the voice of God now.
Live - in other words - like the prophets who were before you.