Prophets are people who receive communication from God and relay it to other people. That's the most general definition I can give. In the Bible, prophets recieve these communications in different ways. They might hear an audible voice from God, see a vision, have a dream, or are just given some insight that they couldn't have otherwise known. Sometimes we aren't told how they acquired the information. The prophecies may concern the future, or it may concern the present. It can contains warnings, commands, explanations, or any number of things.
There are people in our present day who claim to receive communications from God, the dead, or other spiritual entities. Maybe you are one of those people. How can we know whether these things really come from God or whether they are just hallucinations, delusions, or misinterpreted dreams? How could anybody have ever known that? How do we know that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam aren't all ultimately rooted in false prophets or people with some sort of psychosis, like schizophrenia?
If you're an atheist, no doubt you'll think they are all rooted either in liars or in people with some kind of psychosis. If you're a naturalist, then you wouldn't think any sort of prophecy can take place. It must all be lies, delusions, and hallucinations.
If you're a Christian, then you can take the apologetic route. Historically, Jesus claimed to be sent from God, then rose from the dead, vindicating his claim. Then Jesus becomes a credible source. He endorsed the Old Testament prophets, so we should, too.
But what about those ancient Jews who pre-dated Jesus? How could they have known? The Bible gives two tests. The first test makes a lot of sense. If somebody claims to speak from God, and what they say doesn't happen, then they have spoken presumptuously. This test only applies to prophecies that make falsifiable claims, though. If they predict the future, for example, and things don't happen the way they said, then we know that didn't come from God. But not all prophecies can be checked out in that way.
This first test is a negative test--it can tell you if a prophecy does not come from God, but it can't tell you if a prophecy does come from God. It is possible for a false prophet to make accurate predictions about the future or to give accurate information about the world. This can happen because a person got lucky, or because a person can just see the trajectory of history, or because of some nefarious spiritual entity. So while making false prophecies does disprove that it came from God, making accurate prophecies is not sufficient to prove that a prophecy did come from God.
There's a second test in those cases. The second test is that if in the course of portraying oneself as a prophet, they attempt to lure you away from the one true God of Israel and toward some other god, then that person is also a false prophet. A test like that could be valuable if it has already been established that YHWH is the one true God, but it wouldn't be helpful in telling you which god is the one true God. How could Abraham have known that God was communicating with him? The fact that Sarah got pregnant might be a good sign, but it's not a guarantee.
There's a third way to test prophets in the Old Testament, and it involves signs and wonders. Moses parted the sea, and Elijah caused fire to come down from the sky. Only a mass hallucination could've faked those events.
I don't think people have changed all that much, physically and mentally, over the last three thousand years. I suspect that just as a certain fraction of the population today suffers from schizophrenia, the same was probably true in the past. So there likely were people in the past who had hallucinations, dreams, visions, and all sorts of things that they interpreted as being messages from God. They didn't have medication for it either. How might they have known (or their family and friends have known) whether they were mentally ill or were really receiving divine communication?
We have a couple of advantages today that they didn't have. First, we know more about mental illnesses today than they did then. Second, we have medication that can treat psychosis. Both of these can provide us with further tests.
If you or somebody you know experiences what appears to be visions, audible voices, impressions, or anything of a spiritual nature or that might have a supernatural source, one way to test that is to see whether medication makes any difference. For example, some Christians claim that demons are harrassing them. If you take medication for psychosis, this shouldn't do anything to prevent a demon from engaging in the same behavior. So if it really is a demon, then you shouldn't expect medication to make a difference. But if the medication does make a difference, then it probably wasn't demons. It was all in your head. The same is true for voices, visions, or anything.
People who suffer from schizophrenia often have multiple symptoms besides just hallucinations. People with schizophrenia often suffer depression and anxiety, have a tendency to withdraw from social interaction, are sometimes paranoid, irritable, and have a hard time getting along with others. If your exeriences are accompanied by all the other symptoms of schizophrenia, then it's more likely to be psychosis than real spiritual activity.
Concerning that last test, this is something ancient people would've noticed as well. One doesn't have to be a trained psychologist to recognize when somebody might have mental problems. So it may be than ancient people could distinguish between somebody in their right mind who claimed to have supernatural visions or receive messages, and somebody who wasn't in their right mind making the same claims.
There's always going to be some people who seem to be mentally healthy, still claim to receive prophecies or have other spiritual experiences, but who are either lying or delusional. If they don't make claims about the future, or reveal hidden things that can be checked out, or urge you to follow other gods, it can be hard to know what to make of it. If you're a cessationist, then you can dismiss it, but what if you're a non-cessationist?
In most cases, you can just ignore it. You don't need to know whether it's from God or not. The Bible is sufficient for theology, wisdom, and moral living. While some overt word from God might be useful to us, it isn't necessary to lead a full Christian life. So if somebody claims to be a prophet or to have a word from God on something, you don't need to stress out about whether it's from God or not. If you have no way to verify whether it's from God or not, you can take the advice on its own merits. If it's good advice, then do it. If it's bad advice, then don't do it. Most of these messages from God I hear from other Christians sound like something out of a fortune cookie. It's possible it's from God, but it doesn't really matter because it doesn't affect the decisions I make. In general, I tend to be skeptical. If God wants to get a message through to me, I think he will, so I don't wring my hands over whether somebody else's message from God really is from God or not even though I'm a non-cessationist.
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