Prophecy was essential for the life of the early church, for if they despised prophecy, they despised God’s revelation and cut themselves off from any knowledge of the truth. However, the problem in our day is that our charismatic friends accuse us of blatantly disobeying the commands to not despise prophecy. There are a couple things to consider about that—The first is what we just learned from 1 Cor. 13—If we have the completed revelation from God that provides everything we need to know about Christ and how to follow him, why would we revert back to pursuing partial revelation, which Paul likens to being incomplete and temporary? As we saw, Paul would compare that to an adult returning to childishness. So we better not despise prophecy located in the Scriptures because that is authoritative revelation, but neither should we ever accept personal impressions from someone who claims to be receiving revelation from God. There are no prophets alive today, so therefore there is no prophecy being given from God. He has put an end to giving new, authoritative revelation because everything we need was given by the apostles and prophets, who represented the foundation of the church in Eph. 2:20. As we have been seeing in Acts, these sign gifts were designed to validate the message about the new phase of God’s redemptive plan unleashed through Jesus Christ. Then, because the apostles could not be present in every place as the church expanded, God had to continue to deliver his revelation through the gifts of prophecy, tongues and knowledge in order that the church would be built up in the truth.
So the takeaway for us in our time period from those verses about not despising prophecy or tongues is to rid ourselves from any quarreling with Almighty God’s revelation in the Scriptures. And then we are to reject any other revelation as being from God. So yes, do not despise prophecy, but that only is relevant to prophecy from God’s prophets as recorded in Scripture.