Even Jesus likes prog rock.
or the Coffee with Jesus comics from Radio Free Babylon, but presuming to speak for Son of the Big Guy (SotBG) seems to be an awfully heavy load to carry. Even if we disclaim it as paraphrasing or going with the flow of the “spirit” of what he would say, I wouldn’t presume to be the one to do take a shot at it.
It’s not to be Levitical (actually, Deuteronimical) about it, but false prophets were stoned for a good reason. Pretend you’re God…an easy task for some of us. You’ve assembled an entire society and you need to maintain it around direct lines of communication with them—there’s not a closed canon of scripture to reference yet so your society has only mouthpieces, designated by you, for collective guidance. You’re going to have to make gosh darn sure that those who feign to speak for you are actually speaking for you, right? “Thus says the Lord God” should probably mean just that.
We have the voicemails now, but back then the phone line was wide open. Prophets were speaking the words as God would speak them: not preaching, not paraphrasing, not theologizing or theorizing. God, being the certain way that he is, wanted to make sure there weren’t errant freelancers wandering around claiming revelatory knowledge. Wouldn’t you be a little irritated if someone, by their own ambition, went around speaking your own words without your admonition*? Shoot, if the whole point of your society is to produce the savior of the world you need everything on lock.
No condemnation here for Ravi Zacharias or RFB…but as for me I wouldn’t want to burden myself with thinking I would know what SotBG would say.
* That might be one of the reasons prophecy, in the sense of “foretelling future events”, was employed. It was an easy way to separate the goofs from the genuine.