It will be appreciated by newcomers that we are in the course of a consideration, and it is impossible at this time to go right back over all the ground we have covered. We have yet much to consider today, and we must go right on. But, for your sake—and I am sure the others who have been here will be very patient—a very brief word of explanation is necessary.
We have the Bible, and when we take the Bible, our question is: What is it all about? What does it all mean? Is it just a collection of history, biography, and church affairs brought together and bound up in a volume? Or is there one thing that we could write down on a title page as containing everything that is in the Bible?
And there is. There is just one thing about which the whole Bible is concerned, and it is that one thing that we are occupied with at this time. We can only take it in fragments and in a very general way, but I trust with sufficient detail to bear out that this thing which we have said is the entire subject of the Bible.
So we would write on our title page, covering the whole of this volume: This book contains the revelation of an eternal purpose.
That purpose is that God desired to have a universe created by Himself, full of His glory, to express Himself in terms of glory throughout a vast creation, with man at its centre. That is the subject of the Bible, and everything, in some way or another, is related to this.
Taking that as the key, we read and study the Bible, and we find that we are able to arrange its matter in a certain order.
In the first place, we are told of a state of glory existing with the divine Persons before the world was, before creation. One of those divine Persons is known as the Son of God, Who Himself, here and there in prayer to His Father, referred to the glory which He had with the Father before the world was.
Then He introduced into those divine counsels of glory, before times eternal, those whom the Father had given Him. He asked that they might be with Him where He was, to behold His glory; and then said, “The glory which Thou hast given Me I have given unto them.”
In the illumination of the Spirit, a great apostle spoke about the mystery of God’s will being made known: that we—the Church—should be unto the praise of His glory. So that away back there, in the glory, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit determined that there should be a creation with man at its centre, reflecting and expressing the glory of God.
Out from those counsels creative activity proceeded, and the Godhead set to work to bring the creation into being. The first phase ended in a prophecy of glory, for all things were found to be to God’s complete satisfaction. He was able to say, “It is very good.” It was a prophecy of glory: that in the end everything should answer entirely to the divine mind and should be a glorious creation.
But that purpose was interrupted, as we have seen, in two realms: in heaven and on earth. The glory was suspended and held in reserve because of sin, because of rebellion, because of the entering in of that which could never pass with God as “very good,” but was now very bad, and therefore could never come to that ultimate glory.
From that point, God began a course by which all that should be remedied, repaired, and put right, so that His original intentions should be ultimately realised.
The first phase and stage of the Bible, as found in the first five books, introduces the great basic factor of sin’s atonement and removal: the altar, foreshadowing the cross of Christ; the sacrifice; the priesthood; that whole work of mediation concerning sin.
Really, dear friends, back in those books we are not reading so much about Abel, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. If we only knew it, we were reading about Christ. God has thrown the shadow of Christ crucified right down the ages.
In all these people of the altar, people of the sacrifice, people of the shed blood, people of the slain lamb, there is the picture and intimation of Christ crucified—God’s way of dealing with all that has entered into this universe in order to recover, restore, and establish the glory.
The first section of the Bible is particularly occupied with that.
The second section—the long one, as we saw this morning, from the book of Joshua through the little book of Esther—sees another stage and phase brought in. That is, the necessity of supreme government being established.
In a realm of rebellion, anarchy, division, disintegration, disruption, and people going their own way, the one great need is the establishment of a central government: everything united in a throne.
So that long section brings into view the whole matter of government, or authority. Essential to glory is the throne. How much Scripture floods in when we say that: a throne of glory, a glorious high throne, a glorious throne set on high, the throne of the Lord.
But I must leave that, because it occupied all our time this morning, and pass quickly to the next part of the Bible.
This third large section, running from Isaiah to the end of Malachi, introduces in a specific and emphatic way what is called the ministry and function of the prophet.
I put it that way—“in a specific and emphatic way”—because this is not the beginning of the prophetic function. It only comes up here in this pronounced and definite way because the situation calls for it in a special way. The situation has so developed that this is the thing, more than anything else at the moment, which is required.
The prophetic function has been operative right from the very beginning. Look at a passage or two in the Gospel of Luke. It is rather interesting that this little parenthesis is in brackets in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, at verse 70:
As He spake by the mouth of His holy prophets which have been since the world began.
“Prophets which have been since the world began.” That statement, interestingly, comes again from the same man, Luke, and is repeated in the book of Acts. In Acts 3:21 we read:
Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things, whereof God spake by the mouth of His holy prophets that have been since the world began.
So the prophetic function does not belong exclusively to what we call the prophets of the Old Testament—that is, the prophetic section. Indeed, the Hebrew Bible does not relate prophecy exclusively to those books which we call the books of the prophets.
The Hebrew Bible divides the prophets into the former and the latter. In the former prophets it includes Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. In the latter prophets are the three major and the twelve minor prophets. These all comprise the prophetic section of the Hebrew Bible.
That is only technical, by the way; it does not convey very much of a spiritual message. But my point is that this prophetic function has existed right from the beginning. You will see as we go on why—its nature, its value, and its importance.
At a certain time, because of certain conditions, this came out in its most emphatic and definite form, so that today, when we speak of the prophets, we really only think of those beginning with Isaiah and ending with Malachi.
Enoch was called a prophet. Abraham was called a prophet. The patriarchs generally were regarded as prophets, in addition to other functions which they fulfilled.
The call of the prophet—the demand for the prophet—is best understood by recognising the function. Or shall I take out the word his and say its function? For this ministry is a function before it is persons.
Because the function exists, the persons who fulfil it are raised up. But we tend very largely to lose sight of the function in the person, and fail to see what God is doing in the ministry and in the function.
The function of the prophet is, first of all, simply to speak for God: to speak for God, to be as God Himself speaking. “Thus saith the Lord” is the word of the prophet.
Perhaps the best illustration of that is found in the case of Moses and Aaron. The Lord said to Moses that Aaron should be his prophet. How did He define that? He went a long way—farther than we would ever venture to go. He said:
Thou shalt be to him as God, and he shall be thy prophet.
That clearly defines the function of the prophet: it is God speaking through a man. The man is the voice of God to the people; or the function is the voice of God speaking at any given time.
But that is only the inclusive definition. The function of prophecy, or of the prophet, is to represent God. I would prefer to break that word up, because you will get its significance more clearly if I say it as two words: re-present God.
Present God—in His thoughts, His mind, His heart, and His will—over again; bring God back again to the place that He has held and that He has claimed; represent God and God’s thought.
The prophet was to embody God’s heart. You cannot read the prophets to Israel without realising how they themselves embodied the heart of God. What cries come from their hearts to the people: “Oh, My people! Oh, My people! If only thou wouldest!”
It is a cry of the heart that comes through these men. It is God’s heart crying. You can hear God’s sob, God’s sigh, God’s groan, God’s longing, God’s disappointment, and God’s agony pouring out of the heart of the prophet. That is the prophetic function.
There is nothing merely official, ecclesiastical, or professional about this. There were plenty of professional prophets in Israel. For the most part, in those days, they were prostrate.
Some of the true prophets exposed them, because they were prophesying for gain and popularity. But the true prophet was a man with a heart of agony. You cannot read Jeremiah and his Lamentations without recognising that. It is God’s heart beating in sorrow and disappointment.
Some of the prophets express the heart of God in burning shame and boundless shame. I am not going to take you into the subject matter; you can see it for yourselves. But the point is that the prophetic function was to make the heart of God felt, as well as the thoughts of God known.
The will of God became an alternative with the most serious consequences. There was no option about this with the prophet. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate. For them, it was an imperative laid upon them, and there was no way out but to obey.
Further, this function was to restore God to His place in the midst of His people: to restore God to His place with His people, to recover God’s place for Him in the heart of His people.
So the prophet’s was an all-round ministry.
The prophet had to do with the priesthood, because a decadent and apostate priesthood was failing to deal with the whole matter of sin, and was rather making way for sin than putting it away.
The prophet had to do with a decadent priesthood and an ineffective altar: the prevalence of sin which the priesthood and altar had made possible. Thus the prophet’s function was to bring back the effectiveness of the altar and the sacrifice, and to put them in their right place.
Those of you who know your Bible will know how true that was.
Then the prophet had to do with the king. Some of these men really did have to do with kings. Think of Amos away there in the gate of Samaria, confronting the rulers and crying, “Hear, all ye kings of this land.” He did not mince his words at all.
The prophets in Judah, Jerusalem, Israel, and Samaria were dealing with this whole matter of false government—an evil rule which was not fulfilling the function of holding everything in righteous judgment and righteous balance.
Because of the breakdown of the true principle of authority, the people, rather than being united, were divided. Rather than receiving the good of administration, they were starving and impoverished. All the meaning of true government had gone.
The prophets had to deal with the king, or with the function of authority. How all-round was their business: the priesthood, the iniquity of the land, and the rebellion.
The prophet saw through things. The prophet never looked merely upon the surface—the face of things—and saw only what people were doing, whether robbery, theft, or all sorts of other things, and then stopped there.
What the prophet saw was what lay behind these things. They saw that this was connected with the devil himself, and that all this was really the result of the devil’s countering the value of the altar and the sacrifice, making a mockery of it and bringing shame and disgrace upon the very altar.
That is what the devil is always wanting to do: to make the cross of Christ either of no effect or to make it ridiculous.
The prophets saw through it. Behind all this there were other intelligences at work. Behind the collapse, breakdown, and disintegration of authority, they saw what they called iniquity.
That word iniquity means rebellion against God. It takes us further than the thing in which it is expressed. It may be iniquity to steal or to commit immorality, but that is not the heart and root of the Hebrew word. The Hebrew word for iniquity means rebellion—rebellion.
A great outstanding illustration is Saul, the first king of man’s choice. When he disobeyed the Lord—when the man who was ostensibly and professionally in the place of authority disobeyed the Lord in relation to the altar—Samuel confronted him and said:
Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.
Witchcraft? What is that? That relates to another world of evil spirits. There is something behind it. That is iniquity.
This is very serious. It is necessary to get right into the heart of this thing in order to recognise the function of the prophet: to deal with iniquity, which is expressed in rebellion; and to deal with authority gone wrong, manifested in disruption and division.
The symbol of the prophet is always a man. The symbol of the priest, as you know, is the ox. The symbol of the king is the lion. The symbol of the prophet is a man.
And what does a man signify? First of all, man signifies—or is supposed to signify, as distinct from all other creation—intelligence: intelligence, understanding, and knowledge; knowledge with understanding.
That is what the word intelligence means in a particular, peculiar, and unique way. Man is regarded by God as a responsible being because he has intelligence.
The symbol of the prophet is a man: a man who has intelligence as to God’s mind and God’s thought. He has intelligence.
What a long way that carries us, and carries things, does it not? Leaving all titles aside—and let me say most emphatically that no one should claim in our time to be a prophet in this sense, or take the title or the name—nevertheless, the function is still required.
The work is still needed, perhaps as much today as ever. Surely that is borne out in this: there is a crying need for an intelligent ministry as to God’s thoughts for His people in fullness.
We cannot help it. Like it or dislike it—and I know it will be very much disliked—nevertheless, you cannot get away from the fact that, speaking quite generally, the people of God in the world today have very little intelligence about God’s mind.
They may have intelligence about certain things that are in God’s mind, but concerning God’s full mind for His people there is very little intelligence. You are amazed and distressed to find how small the intelligence of Christians is, speaking generally.
It is not possible to go beyond a very limited range with a great mass of Christians before you get them right out of their depth, and they say, “It is all going over our heads. It is all too deep.”
They are only saying, “Our measure does not represent capacity, or anything more than the smallest measure.” It is sad, but it is true. It is true.
Again, I say: leave out the titles and leave out the person. Remember that God has always, from the beginning of the world, seen the necessity for the function of keeping His full thought for His people in view.
I believe we could say, although it might sound like adding to Scripture—and it is not meant to be that—that inasmuch as it is declared that it has been from the beginning of the world, it will be to the end of the world. There will never come a time when this function will be dispensed with.
God will always want a representation of His mind—His full mind, as far as He can have it on this earth. That is the function.
That, dear friends, sets the standard and nature of true service to God. Man is not only intelligence; he is service. The prophet peculiarly and particularly brings this idea of the servant of the Lord into view.
You read through Isaiah: “The servant of the Lord, the servant of the Lord.” Moses was known as the servant of the Lord, but Moses said:
A prophet shall the Lord thy God raise up unto thee, from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me.
What did Moses do in the prophetic ministry? He brought in, in a very rich way, God’s mind for His people. That is real service.
You may have to adjust your ideas of what it means to be a servant of the Lord in the light of this. The servant—the man-servant—is the one who keeps in view God’s mind for His people.
He may begin with the unsaved, to make God’s mind known to them, but it must not stop there. It must follow on to make those who are saved know, right from the beginning, that God has a very large thought for them.
It can only be calamitous to lead people there without making them know that they have come into an immense thing.
Some people argue that you must not go too deep with beginners. Well, I do not know. Who makes the best swimmer: the one who is taught to swim in the shallow where he can always put his feet on the bottom, or the one who is thrown into the deep from the beginning?
I am strongly of the opinion that you can only make weak Christians if you keep them in the shallows at the beginning, if you do not take them a bit out of their depth and make demands upon them.
At any rate, I think that is what God does before very long.
The knowledge of His will must come in ever greater fullness. Of course, not all at once—that is not what I mean—but more and more, and more and more.
The man, the symbol of the prophet, is intelligence, service, and likeness. “Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.” The idea of man is to represent God.
The prophet was therefore called to be so much more than a professional man saying things. There was wrought into the very fibre of his being the thing that he had to say.
Sometimes it is most depressing to read of what these prophets went through and had to do—how they suffered. It was carried into the innermost chambers of their lives.
One prophet had to marry a harlot, and another saw his wife becoming a harlot, in order to fulfil his ministry and bring home to the people that Israel was God’s wife, and had deserted Him, gone wrong, and become corrupt through illicit communion with the gods of the heathen.
It was all a spiritual matter, you see. But the man had to go into something in his own history and domestic life in order to make him feel as God felt, so that he could rightly represent God.
I say again, dear friends, true ministry is like that. We are not going merely to take up our Bibles, study subjects, and then give them out as information. If we are really going to serve God, this is going through us, and we are going through it.
Sooner or later, it will be brought home to us, and we shall be challenged by it. The Lord will say, “Now then, what about that which you said last Sunday? Here is the first-class opportunity for doing it, living up to it.”
I tell you, it is trying—so much so that some of our speakers often feel that they will never speak again. It is far too drastic. Jeremiah did that.
He said some things, and then it came home to him—came home hot and strong—until he said, “I will never speak again,” and decided to withdraw from the ministry. Then he said, “But I could not.”
His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones.
“I just could not keep silence. I had to go and do it again, and land myself in more trouble.” I tell you, that is the real nature of service. It is no laughing matter, though it works out like that.
God does not want profession. He does not want merely a caste or a class. He wants man. The symbol of the prophet is man.
Seeing, then, the weight of the glory, all this for the prophet was a real deep working in and out of the cross, was it not?
In some of the utterances of these prophets, you are not quite sure whether the prophet is speaking about himself or about some other man. Both are true.
Bible critics have taken the great Messianic chapters in Isaiah and related them wholly to Isaiah’s own agony, refusing to accept the predictive element as pointing on to Christ. They can argue a case and make out a case for their position, but, of course, we do not believe it, and we know they are wrong.
Nevertheless, there is the fact that something in the lives of the prophets who said these things gave colour to their prophecies. In a sense, they were suffering in this way.
Take that great cry of Jeremiah in Lamentations 1:
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?
Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.
It is not difficult to hear those words coming from the mouth of Christ on the cross. Surely their prophetic and predictive aspect belongs to Him; yet they ran out of Jeremiah’s own experience.
The cross, yes. Isaiah knew something about the cross in his life. Jeremiah did. Ezekiel did. Jonah did, in another way and for another reason.
Here is Jonah, right in the belly of the fish. Is it not a cry of agony? Is he not going through something whose meaning he does not fully know, but of which the Lord Jesus Himself would later say:
For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
These men were going through experiences whose full meaning they did not know, but they were baptised into the sufferings of Christ in order to fulfil their ministry. That is what constituted them.
There must be the cross. The cross must have a big, basic place in true service. Let it be said.
All this should take us out again and show us that the prophets were not prophets of final despair. Although they had such terrible things to say, and had to entreat the people to turn, and held up what seemed like doom before their eyes, they all looked beyond it.
Take the second part of Isaiah. What a transformation it is:
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing;
And everlasting joy shall be upon their heads:
They shall obtain gladness and joy;
And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Even Jeremiah, whom you might think the most hopeless of them all, went down to the potter’s house and saw the potter making a vessel. The clay was marred in the hand of the potter, and the potter made it another vessel, as seemed good to him to make it.
Jeremiah came out and said, in effect, “That is not the end. Israel is terribly marred, but God is not going to throw it away. He is going to make it again.” The note is the triumph of divine sovereignty.
So we can go on with the visions of Ezekiel. Yes, the glory goes, but the glory is going to come back. The Lord is going to come back. It is going to come back along this path: the path of the cross, the outworking of the cross.
Yes, the outworking of the cross in the prophet and in the people; the outworking of the cross in principle; but, of course, supremely, essentially, in the cross of the Lord Jesus. The glory is going to come.
I do not think I need to say more. The prophets, in a sense, all failed. Failure has to be written over their ministry, more or less. The prophetic section of the Old Testament closes with Malachi, and you might write over it all, “Failure.”
But there has come salvation and victory. They are all gathered up in the Person of the Lord Jesus. We must not go further for the moment, but they are all encompassed in Him. The glory is coming. It cannot fail. It cannot fail.
That is instruction in the Word of God. It brings into view what is in this book, but it is an enunciation of spiritual principles which abide right through the ages.
In their own way, these things apply to us. We do not assume anything about prophetic titles or offices continuing in precisely the same form, but this is the kind of thing that God has been doing and is always doing.
Let us forget the forms, frameworks, titles, designations, and all this, and see God working like this: trying to recover His people to His full thought by bringing out, here and there, something more of His original mind and making it known.
Many, as with the prophets, may hear, and many more may refuse to hear, even among the Lord’s people. But the word of the Lord is, “Go, speak, whether they will hear or whether they forbear.”
Dear friends, the most difficult ministry is often for Christians. The prophets proved that. The Lord said, in effect, “I send thee to this people, not to a people of a strange speech and of a hard language. If I had sent thee to them, they would have listened. But I send thee to the house of Israel, and they will not listen.”
Very often, tragically enough, the most difficult ministry is for the Lord’s people. When it goes beyond a certain point as to God’s full thought, it seems that all hell rises up against it. It seems that you are involved in every conceivable form of opposition and antagonism when you go beyond the minimum.
That is clear. I think it is quite apparent. But nevertheless, the Lord says, speaking of them, “I send thee to them. Go on with it. Go on with it.”
They may fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee.