Prophet:
John Barrett, popular anchorman, finds himself suddenly lost in the comfortable world he thought he understood.
His producer seems to be hiding something big and lying to cover her tracks. His father’s “accidental” death isn’t looking quite so accidental. And his estranged son has returned search for the truth. On top of all this, John is starting to hear mysterious voices.
Prophet has all the hallmarks of Peretti’s fast-paced blockbuster fiction, and his clear understanding of the vast spiritual struggle over moral authority marks every page.
Frank Peretti:
With more than 12 million novels in print, Frank Peretti is nothing short of a publishing phenomenon and has been called “America’s hottest Christian novelist.” The Oath (Word Publishing 1995), sold more than half a million copies within the first six months of release. The Visitation (Word Publishing 1999), was #1 on the CBA Fiction Bestseller list for four months. Peretti is a natural storyteller who, as a youngster in Seattle, regularly gathered the neighborhood children for animated storytelling sessions. After graduating from high school, he began playing banjo with a local bluegrass group. He and his wife were married in 1972, and Peretti soon moved from touring with a pop band to launching a modest Christian music ministry. Peretti later spent time studying English, screen writing and film at UCLA and then assisted his father in pastoring a small Assembly of God church. In 1983, he gave up his pastoring position and began taking construction jobs to make ends meet. While working at a local ski factory, he began writing This Present Darkness, the book that would catapult him into the public eye. After numerous rejections from publishers and a slow start in sales, word-of-mouth enthusiasm finally lifted This Present Darkness onto a tidal wave of interest in spiritual warfare. The book appeared on Bookstore Journal’s bestseller list every month for more than eight years. Peretti’s two spiritual warfare novels, This Present Darkness (1998) and Piercing the Darkness (1989), captivated readers, together selling more than 3.5 million copies. The Oath was awarded the 1996 Gold Medallion Award for best fiction. Frank Peretti and his wife, Barbara Jean, live in the Western U.S. In spite of sudden fame and notoriety, Frank still lives a simple, well-rounded life that includes carpentry, banjo making, sculpturing, bicycling and hiking. He is also an avid pilot.
PROPHET
Howard Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1992 by Frank E. Peretti
Originally published in 1992 by Crossway Books in different form.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Howard Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Howard Books ebook edition February 2012
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Designed by Jaime Putorti
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Peretti, Frank E.
Prophet / Frank E. Peretti.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3566.E691317P76 2004
813'.54—dc20 92-4850
ISBN 978-1-4516-7335-7 (eBook)
TO JAN AND LANE, TRUE PROPHETS IN THEIR OWN RIGHT
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Illusion Excerpt
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I OWE A debt of thanks to many precious people whose invaluable experience, assistance, and advice helped bring this project together: Susan the anchorlady, who let me tag along with her throughout her workday and get a feel for her job.
Nick the jack-of-all-news-gathering-trades, who showed me around and checked hundreds of pages for accuracy.
Kevin the reporter and John the cameraman, who took me with them into the field and shared their perspective with such honesty.
Good ol’ Roger the attorney, who has helped me with more than one book, always explaining things so I understand them.
Bob the physician, who advised me on the medical aspects of the story and who also checked hundreds of pages for accuracy.
Frank the “Skank,” one terrific cop who was always available.
Dana and Joe, two dedicated men in the emergency profession who took me through their procedures.
Carol, the “Lady in Scarlet,” who knows the abortion industry firsthand.
Randy and friends, who shared their intimate sorrows with me and helped me understand the abortion experience.
Hey, all of you get the credit for the things I’ve captured accurately—I’ll take the blame for the mistakes.
Thanks.
FOREWORD
I CAN IMAGINE the “Peretti-ologists” of future days looking at this book as a key to what I was thinking during the late eighties and early nineties. Obviously I was preoccupied with truth and how it can be brokered, adjusted, censored, and selected by the gatekeepers of what we know and think. Chief among these gatekeepers is, of course, television, and chief among the mentalities and movements whose survival depends on the stringent control of knowledge is abortion. These two became the start of a story recipe:
Open a television newsroom, pour in the topic of abortion, add characters with divergent agendas, and then, stirring briskly, add an up-and-coming news anchor who abruptly finds God revealing to him the secrets of people’s hearts (1 Corinthians 14:25). He is seeing and hearing things that only God can see and hear, which leaves no room for the gray-shading, eye-closing, excuse-making, or rationalizing that smoothed his career.
With such ingredients, the pot will come to a boil all by itself—over the whole question of truth.
There are many subthemes woven through the story, of course, maybe too many. I just had to say something about consumerism, amusement dependence, image over substance, and feeling over thinking. But all these ingredients impel the main theme: The truth will hold us acc
ountable. Though we try to hide it, deny it, repackage it, or even amuse and consume our way around it, at the end of the day it will still be there waiting for us—no matter how we may feel about it.
My concern with truth has only intensified in the early 2000s; the cry of Prophet still has its place. Too many, especially among the young, think with their feelings and hear with their eyes. It’s no longer truth but tightly edited images splashed with color, backed by music, and coupled with pleasure that persuade. We can’t count on people to think, explore, question, or prove things; but we can count on them to sit and watch television hour after hour and accept without question almost everything they are told. Folks interviewed at the local mall can regurgitate commercial slogans, jingles, truisms, and temporal philosophies instantly upon request, but they stare vacantly when asked to recite the Ten Commandments or even name the first book of the Bible.
But who loses in the end? Not truth. Truth is a rock and doesn’t shift to accommodate our changing fashion. Wrong will never be right no matter how we may dress it in right’s clothing. A lie will never be true no matter how often or how loudly we repeat it. To deceive others is reprehensible; to deceive ourselves is a tragedy.
Most often the heroes in stories wake up to their errors, accept the truth, and turn themselves around. That’s because the storyteller hopes his readers will do the same.
That was my hope when I first wrote Prophet, and it is still my hope today.
Love truth.
Frank E. Peretti
January 2004
PROPHET
CHAPTER 1
JOHN BARRETT HEARD God speak when he was ten years old. Years later all he would clearly remember about that Sunday night meeting at the Rainier Gospel Tabernacle was that it was close and sweaty, in the dead center of summer’s heat. Noisy, too. It was altar time at the front of the church, the saints were praying and praising, and it was not the quiet, introspective kind of worship but the hollering kind, the throw-back-your-head-and-cry-to-Heaven kind as the women wept, the men shouted, and the piano kept playing over and over the strains of “I surrender all, I surrender all . . .”
Pastor Thompson, young and fiery, had preached a sermon that caught John by the heart. And when the altar call came and Pastor Thompson said, “If this word is for you, if God is speaking to your heart, I want you to come forward, lay your all on the altar . . .” John knew God was speaking to him, and he went forward, almost running, to kneel at that long mahogany prayer rail, his face flushed and his eyes streaming tears.
“‘Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world!’” Pastor Thompson quoted the Scripture. “Will you receive that Lamb tonight? Will you find Jesus?”
John was ready to receive the Lamb, he was ready to find Jesus, and as he called on the name of the Lord, he could even see a lamb, small, gentle, spotless, and white, right there in front of him, right on the other side of the prayer rail, so close he could have reached out and touched its nose. He was later told he’d had a vision, but at that moment he thought there really was a lamb in the church, as real as anything. The Lamb of God, like Pastor Thompson said. It was so real then, so long ago. It was a moment that truly stirred his soul.
But that moment, with all its feelings, its meanings, its transcendent, eternal words, even its little vision, would fade with time, and John would eventually tuck it away in a lost and forgotten corner of his memory.
He would not remember that he had done business with God, that he had made a covenant with the Creator when only a young boy—“Jesus, come into my heart and take away my sins. God, I give You my life. Use me, Lord. I’m Yours.”
The memory of his father’s hand on his shoulder would fade with time and adult ambitions, as would his father’s words, spoken loudly and prophetically in the child’s ear, as if from God Himself: “Ye are called, My son, ye are called. Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee, and before thou wert born I consecrated thee to My service. Walk in My Word, listen for My voice, for I will speak to thee and guide thee in all the paths you may take. Behold, I am with thee always . . .”
He would choose not to remember. “. . . in all thy ways acknowledge Me, and I shall direct thy paths . . .” Good words, useful words. Forgotten words. “And lo, I am with thee always, even unto the end of the age . . .” He would not remember.
But God remembered.
CHAPTER 2
GOVERNOR, I PLEAD with you, search your heart and change your course, for if you do not, God will change it for you. Though you have said to yourself, ‘No one sees, and no one hears,’ surely, the Lord sees, and He hears all that you think in your heart, all that you whisper, all that you speak in your private chambers. There is nothing hidden from the eyes of Him with whom we have to do!”
It was the Friday after Labor Day, still sunny, still summer, the early-evening shadows just beginning to stretch. Crowds of giddy party supporters were coming from their homes, jobs, early dinners, and schools to converge on The City’s Flag Plaza for Governor Hiram Slater’s big campaign kickoff rally. The Hi-yo, Hiram! straw hats were already blooming in profusion and floating along on hundreds of heads like leaves on a river. Before the backdrop of the plaza’s fifty state flags, a platform had been set up, draped in blue, festooned with red, white, and blue balloons and American flags, neatly arranged with rows of folding chairs and garnished with a full nursery’s worth of potted chrysanthemums. Soon the rally would begin, and Governor Slater would make his campaign kickoff speech.
But as people entered the plaza, a stocky, gray-haired man in blue warehouse coveralls was already making a speech, standing on the edge of a concrete planter box, primroses at his feet, his head well above the crowd. The governor may or may not have been within earshot, but this man was going to shout to the governor anyway, his voice tinged with pain, with desperation.
“Like Nebuchadnezzar of old, you have set up an image of yourself for all men to follow, a towering image, a mighty image, an image far greater than yourself. But please take heed: the Lord would remind you, you are not that image. Though you may say, ‘I am strong and invincible, I tower over the masses, I cannot be touched or harmed,’ yet in truth you are as weak as any man, about to be harmed, about to be toppled!”
“Why don’t you just shut up, big mouth!” yelled a beer-bellied contractor passing by.
“The Truth must be heard though the lie be a tumult,” the man replied.
“Not him again,” griped a mother with four children in tow.
“Get off that planter!” ordered a realtor in a business suit. “You don’t belong up there.”
A radical feminist publisher responded with the slogan “Hi-yo, Hiram!”
Those nearby picked up the slogan, louder and louder, and threw it at the man for pure spite. “Hi-yo, Hiram! Hi-yo, Hiram! Hi-yo, Hiram!”
They had stung him. He looked into their faces as pain filled his eyes, then pleaded, “The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth be silent before Him!”
Through the chanting a few voices could be heard responding in mock horror, “Ooooooooooo!”
“Our God is there, ever present, and touched with our infirmities. He is speaking. We must be silent and listen!”
“Hi-yo, Hiram! Hi-yo, Hiram!”
BEHIND THE PLATFORM, screened from visibility by blue curtains, Governor Slater, small, balding, with an unimpressively high-pitched voice, went over final details with the rally’s organizers.
“Thirty minutes,” he said. “I want thirty minutes even if you have to cut something.”
Wilma Benthoff, the governor’s campaign manager—and presently his harried rally organizer—pushed her wildly curled blonde hair away from her face so she could see her clipboard. “Okay, we’ll do the ‘National Anthem,’ then Marv will introduce the dignitaries. Marv!” Marv didn’t hear her; he was busy directing photographer traffic while tying balloons to the platform stairs. “MARV!”
He looked up. “The governor wants more
time, so keep the introductions brief!”
He nodded and said something they couldn’t hear. Benthoff went on, “Then the band will play . . . uh . . . Joyce, how many songs is the band going to play?” Joyce didn’t hear her; she was standing too close to the trombone player practicing his scales. “Oh, forget it. We’ll cut a tune out. I’ll tell her.”
The governor felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Martin Devin, one of the governor’s staff members and would-be chief of staff. The tall, former college linebacker had an amused sneer on his face. “Our old friend the prophet is here.”
The governor chuckled and shook his head. “As sure as the sun rises.” He sneaked a peek through the curtain and could just see the old man’s head above the crowd. “I wonder what his son must be thinking right now.”
“Especially when he sees the ruckus on his own newscast! I called a friend at Channel 6 and they’re moving their camera. They want it.”
The governor’s face brightened. “Always thinking, Martin, always thinking!”
Devin nodded, acknowledging the compliment. “So we just might have an opportunity coming up here . . .”
LESLIE ALBRIGHT, CHANNEL 6 news reporter, carefully placed a molded earpiece in her ear and then found one square foot of ground to call her own as Mel the long-haired cameraman brought her face into clear focus. There were better places to shoot this story, better views of the plaza, better backgrounds, but orders were orders. Someday she was going to shoot Tina Lewis.
“John, this is where it all begins for Governor Hiram Slater . . .” she rehearsed in her professional news voice. “Undaunted by challenger Bob Wilson’s showing in the polls . . .”
With one hand she held her NewsSix microphone and with the other her quickly jotted notes, which were trying to elude the grasp of the three fingers holding them. She tried to straighten her breeze-tousled blonde hair as she examined her reflection in the camera’s lens. Gawkers were already waving to Mom behind Leslie’s back.
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