Dear Omar:

God is the only one who knows the future. He can and does communicate that knowledge when He chooses to angels, His prophets, and others when it serves His purposes. But, angels, prophets, and others cannot "just know" the future or come to know it by their own initiative -- which is what is done by many so-called Christian prophets, especially in the Charismatic Renewal.

God will reveal this information only when it serves a specific purpose for His glory and His Salvation History. He does not reveal the future to self-appointed prophets like a parlor game. This is also true about other gifts of the spirit, such as Word of Knowledge, Word of Wisdom, and Discernment, for example.

By the way, the spiritual gift of prophecy is not what most charismatics think it is. Prophecy is "forth-telling" not "fore-telling". The best equivalent is that the gift of prophecy is the gift of preaching. While it may sometimes involve information about future events, as in the Old Testament prophets, the prophets of those times, and now, are mostly preachers.

Since this question touches on this issue of spirtual gifts I refer people to the essay, Charism Gifts Building Up the Church (pdf).

But to answer your question directly -- yes, God does sometimes, but rarely, reveal future events to people in their dreams or in other ways.

I was going to say that a common and ordinary way this may happen is when, for example, a person is about to board an airplane that will crash and decide not to board, or those people who didn't go to work on the day the Towers were destroyed on September 11th.

But, these things may have nothing to do with God revealing future events. This may be nothing more than the actions of Guardian Angels who knew all the factors taking place and thus knew from logic and intelligence of what was about to happen.

On September 11th, the Guardian Angels already knew what the terrorists were doing and planning before we did. That is an easy one to explain. As for a future plane crash and a Guardian Angel giving a person the inspiration to not board the plane, that again is easy to explain. The Angel knows the weather patterns, or the flaws in the plane, or the condition of the pilot, or the direction of flight of a flock of birds, or whatever variables that would lead to the plane crashing.

A lot that passes for prophetic knowledge of the future is merely a logical and intellectual assessment based on what is known of all the variables that go into the event. We humans do that all the time. We take a look at available evidence and make a prediction. We do not know all the variables so our predictions are not always right. The Angels, however, are privy to all variables, and thus they can appear to know the future when in fact they do not. They just see what is about to happen because they know there is a train around the bend that we do not see that will crash into us if we do not move off the rails.

Nevertheless, there are times, of course, that God does reveal the future supernaturally.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary