The Prophets

Hey, everybody.
Thank you for tuning into the Pastor Talk podcast.
Good to be back with
you as we continue through our series,
Real People of the Faith.
And today we are really
for the first time in this series mashing a lot of people together.
We are going to
tackle the prophets today.
And I think admittedly,
Michael, we are kind of taking the easy way out.
Prophets are this major section of the Scripture.
And there are dozens of them that
we could talk about.
But in some ways,
they share some themes.
They have a sort of commonality
of purpose and of message to some degree.
And we felt like before we left the Old Testament,
we really needed to at least address some of these,
in most cases, men,
why they are here,
but especially what they offer the believer or what they challenge the church with in their messages.
Very much so.
It would be hard to really overstate how significant these texts are,
certainly in terms of just sheer space in the Old Testament,
the sheer number of pages it takes up,
but also the imagination of the Israelites as is reflected as we make our way towards the New
Testament.
It’s really the prophets that provide this sort of buffer zone between some of the
characters we’ve talked about and Jesus and the things that he read,
the spiritual texts that were
for him, the Bible.
And so these are unbelievably significant.
And in fact, Clint, I just got to admit to you,
to those joining us today,
you know, I think the prophets for me are a little
intimidating for a number of reasons,
one being at a friend and seminary who went on to study the
prophets and people who dig into the prophets.
There are so many layers that it’s intimidating
to even pretend like you could hold a conversation with all of the background and research and the
differing sociopolitical things.
And so I think there’s there’s a little bit of intimidation
there, but also the prophets are read differently in differing communities.
Clint, you know, some people turn to the prophets and they see in them very much sort of a pointer to our contemporary
lives, things happening there pointing forward.
Other Christians turn to the prophets and they
see in them messages towards power and to those who don’t have power.
Some turn to them and find
really spiritual voices about returning to the things that matter.
And we’ll cover some of those
themes in our conversation.
But all that to say, Clint,
this is a big topic and I show up
recognizing right from the start that,
you know, I’m only going to be able to contribute to some of it.
Yeah. And this is a different approach, I think, Michael.
In other words, I think it’s hard to
talk about the prophets as characters.
We’ve looked at characters, you know,
Joshua, Esther, Ruth, David.
It’s different when you come to Isaiah,
Jeremiah, because their stories are not told as narratives.
In other words,
I think the prophets are less about the characters and more about the content.
And they essentially deliver message.
You know,
the writings here in most of
the prophetic books are not the stories of the prophets.
They’re what they said.
They’re what they preached.
They’re what they declared.
And that gives them a very different flavor.
But I do think
there are some common themes that are helpful to us.
I do think we can look at some of the individual stories.
As we get started,
I think it’s helpful to realize that prophet is actually a Greek word.
And in the Old Testament,
which is written in Hebrew,
there are several different nuances of words.
Sometimes they’re called a seer.
Sometimes they’re called a speaker or one who speaks on behalf of.
When we get to Greek,
when the Greeks translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew,
they had one word,
prophet, and they applied it to all of these people.
And I think it’s helpful
to realize that as the language shows,
the prophets are not one thing.
The prophets don’t all say the same thing.
They don’t all live in the same time.
They don’t all live in the same place.
Some of them preach against people that others will later laud or they’re approved of.
Some warn of things that others say God did or didn’t do.
There’s a certain flexibility as we read through
the prophets.
And I think it’s helpful to know that going in because one shouldn’t think that
if I read something in Isaiah,
that’s what quote unquote the prophets say.
You have to understand
that’s what Isaiah said.
Yeah, it would be foolish.
It would be a mistake if you turn to the prophets
thinking that there was some sort of prophet certification program that when you became a prophet,
you therefore stood for these things and you spoke these things and you did so in a certain
way or with a certain amount of accountability.
That’s really not what we find here.
I think it would be more helpful to look at these as individual voices.
Though, Clint, importantly,
for most of the prophets,
it’s not that there’s a lot of biographical information about those voices.
So what you have is you have sometimes comfort being proclaimed.
Sometimes you have hard
symbolic and even dark imagery symbols being sort of presented.
There’s a lot of different ways in
which the prophets speak.
And fundamentally, as we talk about them today,
we’re less interested, I think,
in teasing out each one of these differing books and the voices that they have,
but rather pointing to some of these common themes that bind them together in their grouping in the
Old Testament and also how those themes do play forward as we sort of bridge into the New Testament.
Yeah, 100% in agreement, Michael.
And as we look for the things that might be generally true of the prophets,
I think one of the things we find is that they’re often experienced as fairly intense.
They are often kind of on the edge of society.
They’re not what we could call mainstream.
In fact, they often stand against.
Sometimes, in fact, initially, the prophets had mostly to do
with kings and the ruling class.
And later on, they become also generally critical,
occasionally supportive, but mostly advocates or,
I’m sorry, adversaries of the priests.
And as we think about the Old Testament,
that’s one of the ways we talk about the offices of the Old Testament,
the priests,
the prophet, and the king.
And really,
more than any other grouping,
it was the prophet’s job to call the priest and the king to accountability.
Later on,
particularly as we move toward the late Old Testament and the idea of exile,
that call becomes even more broad.
It’s not just the priests and the king anymore.
It’s the entire nation.
It’s all the people.
And so the prophets are usually people who kind of,
they’re a bit strange.
Their stories, the stories we do have of them biographically
are often weird,
some odd stuff in there.
They kind of are pulpit pounders.
When you hear a
prophet, you don’t hear them.
Much of the writing is poetic,
but you don’t hear it spoken softly.
You hear it as if it’s thundering,
as if they’re standing up and loudly confronting people with their truth.
Fascinating part of the Old Testament.
It is.
And I do think,
Clint, that most of us,
if we read the Old Testament,
are not going to walk
away from our time with the prophets thinking like,
“I would have been good friends with them.”
I think most of us would walk away thinking,
“Oh, man, I’m reading this because it’s in the Bible,
but I don’t think I would ask them out to dinner.”
Frederick Buechner says, “No one invites a prophet to dinner twice.”
You might make the mistake once,
but you would never do it twice.
The thing I want to give the prophets,
Michael, before we start talking about some of the individual stories,
the thing I want to give the prophets is they have this wonderful way of
coming back to the foundational promise of God’s love and grace.
They will preach gloom and doom.
They will celebrate defeat.
They will give, in the most graphic language,
warnings of what God is about to do to the people.
And in the next moment,
they will present God as weeping,
as being brokenhearted over the sin of the people.
And they do have this beautiful volatility to them where they seem to explode at times.
And yet,
fundamentally,
they cannot move away from the idea that ultimately God is faithful,
and God has promised he will always be with the people,
even in the midst of punishing them.
They see that as a reflection of God’s love.
There’s a sense in which if you read the Psalms, Clint,
you’re going to know that in there,
there’s these Psalms of lament,
of expressing grief and sadness to God.
When you get to the prophets,
you might miss that these are, in many ways,
full of lament.
They are written by people who are either just prior to or just after
the people of Israel being routed by enemies or deported or being militarily conquered.
There’s a lot of unrest and a lot of conflict that are written around these words,
Clint. And you do hear these prophets sharply rebuking the people for their part in unfaithfulness to God.
And in fact, the prophets make direct connections often between because you are unfaithful,
this judgment will come upon you.
The prophets are very much where that kind of language comes into the faith.
But what you might miss is that fundamentally,
the flip side of that coin always
comes back in some form in which the people are then reminded by the prophets that God is faithful
to be with them,
even in the midst of devastation,
even in the midst of that judgment,
God is for them.
And it’s that kind of mysterious turn,
I think, that makes the prophets compelling.
Yeah, they often say the things that people don’t want to hear.
They confront people.
They call people on their sinfulness.
They
point out the places where people are breaking the covenant.
And in that way, Michael,
a lot of what they do could probably be called preaching.
And what I mean by that is,
if you read the
prophets, they often speak for God.
They voice God’s opinion.
So the Lord said,
the Lord told me,
the Lord proclaims, hear,
oh, Israel, the Word of God.
They stand between God and the people,
and they deliver these messages, often of judgment,
but occasionally of mercy.
Not occasionally,
often of judgment, often of mercy.
And they stand in that middle place.
And as such,
I think that makes the prophets interesting because they are almost always solitary.
The prophets don’t work in groups.
There’s not a tribe of prophets.
They didn’t get to be…
The other thing that’s interesting,
the priests are priests by lineage,
and the kings are kings by coronation.
The prophets are prophets by call.
God lays a voice upon them,
a message upon them,
and calls them to share it with someone,
often the whole nation of Israel,
or at least the king in many cases.
And it is that calling that is fundamental upon their lives.
And we use that language to talk
even of the process of becoming pastors,
of feeling a call to try and somehow
share God’s Word or understand God’s Word,
and then in turn offer it as well.
And that’s what I think we see in the prophets.
Well,
you should name, right,
that these things are connected,
that they exist because they need to.
That prophets are often isolated.
They are often not in organizations or groups.
They’re often the person sort of on the outer edge,
as you said, Clint.
And the reason for that is because often
the voice that they speak to the community is one of external judgment.
When they speak for God,
they’re not speaking as those inside the circle.
They’re speaking towards the circle.
It is very much, by definition,
going to be an isolating place.
And fundamentally, I don’t think this is
going to surprise anyone.
That is, by definition,
a very tenuous place to be as a human.
In fact, it’s a tenuous place to talk about them as being real people of faith because most of us have spent
our lives trying to be in the circle.
We’ve tried to be part of a group and to be named
as part of a group.
But you need to recognize that one of the prophets’ core gifts and purposes
is to remind the people of what is true for the sake of the people.
But the only way that
they can do that is to be outside that circle.
Right.
And no one needs a prophet when things are going well.
No prophet ever stands up and says,
“Hey, you guys are being faithful.
Just keep it up.” The prophet exists in times of crisis.
The prophet exists for times of unfaithfulness and sinfulness.
The prophet is that warning light that the people have taken it upon themselves to
depart from the way of God.
And the prophet is trying to call them back,
to threaten them back,
to harangue them back.
Whatever it takes,
the prophet is willing to do that.
Michael, I wonder if it’s helpful to briefly cover this idea that we ran into in seminary,
minor and major prophets.
And if you thumb through the back of your Old Testament,
you’re going to see a couple of very large books,
Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and these really make up the
bulk of the canon of what we would call the major prophets.
And by major, we don’t mean more important.
We mean bigger.
And particularly in the case of Isaiah,
we may mean longer because
it looks like Isaiah is probably compiled of at least three different Isaiahs that have messages
for Israel at three very different times,
spread over a couple of centuries.
But if you were to
read Isaiah and Jeremiah,
you would cover a great deal of material.
They’re big books.
They’re weighty of circumstances for Israel and Judah.
They speak out against various kings and world powers.
And we call them the major prophets,
maybe to some extent because of the character of their message,
but largely because of the size and scope of their work.
Then we move to,
you’d find the smaller books.
Toward the end,
you would see Haggai and Micah and Jonah, Habakkuk,
Nahum.
We call these the
minor prophets.
And again, it’s not that they’re unimportant.
It’s that they’re a little more
select in their message.
They tend to be a little more specific in time and place,
and they’re a lot shorter.
So these are the books you could burn through fairly quickly.
And we call them minor,
not with any sense of value judgment,
simply a way of saying bigger books,
shorter books.
Daniel,
talk about it as a major prophet as well.
Ezekiel, I suspect is a major prophet,
though for my money,
one of the strangest books.
A hundred percent.
Yeah. And let me just make it clear here when we talk about major and minor,
it’s not only in terms of,
they’re not different in importance.
They’re also not different in terms
of style because you’re going to have books that are very much spoken word poetry,
very much thus says the Lord.
And then you’re going to have a book like Daniel or Jonah.
And both of them,
one major, one minor, both of them include more narrative storytelling kind of aspects.
And in fact, I’m sure that you probably remember the story of Daniel and we’ve already talked about Jonah.
So I think fundamentally that you’ve got to just factor that when they arrange the Bible,
they do it for a variety of different reasons.
And that’s not the purpose of this conversation,
but it is to say that each one of these voices is not only speaking at a particular place or time,
but you also need to be aware of the fact that,
as you’ve mentioned, Clint,
Isaiah is the very
much predominant scholarly opinion is that has multiple voices in that book.
And so as we come
to these texts and as we hear them and as we try to hear them rightly,
I think it’s far better for
us to come with a spirit of humility and a willingness to learn,
as opposed to what I think
is oftentimes maybe our temptation to come to the prophets looking for,
OK, so what does this have
to say for my moment on this day right now as I live?
And if you’re looking for the prophets to
speak into this exact moment,
you’re going to miss a lot of the richness,
Clint, of when they wrote and who they’re writing to and why these words are so powerful in the time that they’re
spoken, why a prophet needed to say them as opposed to a priest.
And the way that you’re going to be
able to dig into this as we’re not going to be able to cover all this in our conversation today
is really to start with a good study Bible.
I mean, a good study Bible helps create that context,
give you some of that context before you read one of these books.
And then that can help you
as you begin to try to engage in what was being said in the interest of keeping you from feeling
like we’ve given you a bait and switch with this real people of the faith idea.
Before we get into
some of the major themes of the prophets,
Michael, let’s let’s highlight a few of their stories.
And because I think many of their stories are most interesting where they’re also the strangest.
Let’s talk about a few of the prophets people might know.
They might know Elijah,
the story of Mount Carmel,
the prophets of Baal,
where Elijah stands on the mountain and challenges
them to call down fire,
and they can’t.
So then he does.
They might also know that the prophet, Elisha,
is known for having sick bears on children who made fun of him and called him bald.
You might know the story of Jeremiah who goes to the potter’s house and watches the potter
form clay.
And as the clay is off balance and spoiled,
he, he mashes it back down.
He, he unmakes what he had been making to start over again.
And Jeremiah says, as I watched that,
I heard the Lord say, this is Israel.
I’ve made you a nation,
but if you spoil,
I will remake you.
I will, I will crush you and start over again.
And we see in that, Michael,
one of the things the prophets are able to do is that they sometimes take these things that look common.
Maybe it’s the way that wheat grows,
or maybe it’s a fire,
or maybe it’s rain.
And they’re able to see in these kind of ordinary moments evidence of God and,
and sometimes metaphors or analogies for God and his people.
And in those moments,
they’re really, they’re, they’re really good preachers.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to say,
Clint, is that fundamentally that connects to your previous comment about how the prophets do serve
as preachers that fundamentally they stand up to say a word to the people,
which is a word
that is spoken by God and that God wants the community to know.
And to do that,
they have to sometimes challenge,
they have to sometimes comfort.
And that it does,
Clint, as in the role of preachers,
wear on them.
In fact, I think that you give the example of Elijah who
goes up to the Mount,
of course, famously,
fire comes down, consumes that offering immediately following that story.
Elijah flees out into the desert and is literally hiding in some rocks and
is essentially saying, Lord, take me now I’m done.
It is a lonely,
challenging journey to be the one
who sees in this image,
the image that you give,
right, of the clay being collapsed.
Nobody wants to hear that you’re part of the collapsing destruction so that it can be remade.
And that’s exactly what that prophet sees and says.
Yeah. And in those moments of their humanness,
I think we do see some very amazing stories.
In that instance,
when God says, Elijah, what are you doing out here?
He says, they’ve killed all your prophets and I’m the only one.
It is a lonely feeling to be the voice of judgment because no one wants to listen.
And in many cases,
scripturally speaking, at least,
no one does listen.
Then there are also,
Michael, those
stranger moments where the prophets sometimes have odd callings or odd behaviors.
I think it’s Isaiah
who spends three years naked without shoes as a sign that God will strip the people as a warning.
Maybe the oddest of all the prophet stories is Hosea.
God calls him to
go find a wife who is a prostitute.
Her name is Gomer.
And then she unsurprisingly is unfaithful to him.
And the narrative of Hosea is told in a way that compares his love of an unfaithful wife
to God’s love of an unfaithful people.
And it’s a painful story.
It’s a poignant story.
I think it’s told largely as illustration,
but for many people,
it hits home in a real and painful place.
But to see the vulnerability of God portrayed through the brokenness of a flawed human
relationship and a husband who longs after a wife lovingly who is unwilling or unable to
be faithful to him.
And to hear those words in God, again,
not an easy thing to read or to hear,
but a profound and powerful message of that prophet.
A weird story by any stretch,
a weird story, but a powerful one.
And there’s a diversity in the prophets that I think is helpful,
Michael, in some of them,
we get call stories.
Some of them are spectacular.
In others, we don’t, Jonah, for instance, we don’t have any idea of who he is or why he’s called a prophet.
That would be true of others as well.
Some of the prophets have the ability to do the miraculous.
They can make it stop raining.
They can make the sun stand still.
They can do miracles with the oil.
I’m the widow where he,
I believe it’s Elisha,
sorry, I get those too confused once in a while,
where the oil doesn’t run out.
And others don’t have a miraculous presence.
They simply,
they preach.
They give these analogies.
They give these illustrations.
Some of them predict the future.
And that has made them, unfortunately,
a target of the wrong kind of attention throughout the
years in the church.
But in others,
it’s more of a reflection on what currently is.
And so there’s a tremendous diversity.
When you read one prophet,
you should not think that you understand where
another one comes from or who another one is.
And I think it’s important to know that diversity.
Would you say, Clint, that fundamentally the prophets are interested in calling people back
to the purpose for which they were called?
In the sense that you’ve already spoken to these themes,
right, where you have the people of Israel being compared to an unfaithful wife.
You have the read these prophets.
We find those comparisons unbelievably challenging.
And the Christian church has actually inherited those comparisons as well.
We see lots of references to the prophets
and to their condemnations of Israel.
We even see Jesus quoting them in his response to the
religious leaders of his own time.
I think the point I’m trying to make here is that the prophets
witness against Israel isn’t time locked.
It’s not just that you are unfaithful then.
It’s also those seeking to follow God now struggle with the same distractions.
We struggle with the same desire
for self-advancement.
We just struggle with our own forms of idolatry.
And these prophets, as they did then,
still speak very poignantly against us.
Yeah.
And let’s maybe dig for a moment into some of the places where that happens,
the kind of main chords that the prophets strike.
And I think, Michael,
there’d be several places
we could start, but you couldn’t go wrong,
I think, to start with justice.
The idea that the
preach condemnation, that the people have been unjust,
that they have mistreated the vulnerable,
that they have oppressed the poor,
that they’ve not fed the hungry,
that they failed in that
fundamental calling that God has given them to be caregivers to those in need.
And when the people
do that, fascinatingly, they often do that by juxtaposing a kind of fake religion versus real faith.
And so they often contrast,
you go through these motions of being religious,
you go to the
temple, you give your sacrifices,
but you step over the poor.
You step on the poor to do it.
And the prophets bring together these two things,
I think, in a really powerful way.
Yeah.
And we should probably help nuance a little bit.
The prophets aren’t just your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving,
right?
They’re not just people who stand up and say difficult things that make people wince.
They do, but they’re saying those things with the force of reminding people of who God is
and what God wants for the world.
And the prophets are included in this canon because
the first,
the Jewish community and then later the Christian community found that these are
reliable witnesses to what God wants us to hear.
And that’s a significant difference,
Colleen. It’s not just people who are making oppositional or challenging statements.
It’s people who are calling people on where they have violated their covenant with God.
That’s an important language in this sense of justice for the prophets,
that God and the people have these
shared expectation of what it means to be faithful to God.
And the people have failed to live up to
it.
They failed to live up to the commandments.
They failed to love the least and the lost.
They failed to keep other gods out of their homes.
And so, therefore,
the only one left
who is faithful is God.
And therefore, God is righteous or God is in the right to bring
judgment on those people,
but God is also gracious and willing to provide comfort to
those people when judgment comes.
So I think it’s worth noting they stand for justice,
but not a kind of justice rooted in individualism or rooted in self-righteousness.
It’s rooted deeply in the righteousness of God,
and that’s why it’s included in Scripture.
Yeah, they’re not advocating for fairness in the sense that we might understand it.
Everybody has equal this or that.
It’s covenantal.
It is the idea that because God has been gracious,
because God rescued Israel when they were no one,
Israel should have a bias toward those in need
and a softness to those who are most at risk.
And when they have failed to do that,
they have transgressed what God has called them to be,
what God has invited them to be.
And similarly,
Michael, you mentioned idolatry.
One of the great themes of the prophets,
that whenever the people have chased something else,
literally in some moments,
foreign gods, other gods,
figuratively in other moments,
military might or wealth or security,
that they again have left the covenant agreement.
They have broken faith with God
because they’ve put something else first.
And I think for modern readers,
certainly justice is a powerful theme in our recent history and certainly in the last month.
I think we have lots of opportunity to reflect on justice,
on what social righteousness means.
But I don’t know if there’s a place that could convict us consistently and constantly more
than this theme of idolatry and our natural inclination as people to try to fill the number
one spot in our life with something we control and something we value and push God to the side.
There’s a plurality of voices in the Old Testament prophets,
Clint, so I’m kind of stepping on this pretty tenderly because there’s opposite examples.
But the prophets spare little,
they spare few words in judging the people of Israel who should
know better as opposed to those who shouldn’t.
That’s not always true.
Sometimes the people outside are also judged.
But fundamentally,
I do think you see something that Jesus is going to
take up later.
There is extreme criticism of those who should have known better.
When you’re thinking of idolatry,
the prophets are calling out the people who were given the revelation of God,
who were given the covenant by God,
who are supposed to be God’s children.
And they’re the ones who are abusing their privilege.
They’re the ones who are abusing the knowledge of who
God revealed Himself to them to be.
And when they do that, Clint,
the prophets just unleash
hellfire in some cases on them because of the privileged position that they were given.
And I do think that that sort of carries forward into Jesus’s own ministry.
Yeah, and there’s a practical example of that that we’ve seen in this podcast.
When David commits adultery with Bathsheba, the prophet Nathan comes to talk to him and says,
“David, there’s a man who
abused his power.
He stole a sheep,
a lamb that belonged to another man,
and he took it for his
own.” And David gets furious,
the idea that this person has been unjust,
that they’ve been unfaithful,
and he says, “Well, we have to deal with that.” And Nathan says,
“Well, David, that’s you.
I know what you did with Bathsheba,
and God has seen it,
and you are guilty.” And that’s what prophets do, right?
They convict.
And one of the reasons they’re unpopular is we don’t want to be
convicted.
We don’t want to be confronted in our idolatry.
And so,
the prophets stand in that
moment to say, “If you put anything else first,
you are guilty.
And if you continue to do it,
you will face consequences.” And the various prophets give various consequences.
That could be defeat.
It could be exile.
It could be plague.
It could be sickness.
But the prophets help us,
I think, by reminding us how deadly seriously God takes our faithfulness.
And the idea is not that
we seek to do what God would have us do when it’s comfortable,
when it’s convenient, or when it’s beneficial,
but that God expects of us,
even demands of us,
an allegiance that is
not shallow and is not inconsequential.
And when we break faith with God,
we do so very much at our own peril.
Now,
we could soften that.
We could nuance that,
talking about the grace of Christ in the New Testament.
And we will, but in this part of the Old Testament,
God’s judgment is swift,
and it is wrathful,
and it is painful.
It is that moment as a kid that you stepped over the line,
and you knew the paddle was coming out.
You had used up all your strikes,
and it was time to pay
for what you had done.
And the prophets often lead up to that moment,
and then we see it happen.
The word that I would use there,
Clint, is that the prophets assume agency.
They assume that you
are capable of doing what you know,
that you are making choices,
both for good and for bad,
and that when you make the bad choice,
you will be held to account for that choice.
And, you know,
realistically, I think some people live their lives not assuming agency.
Clint, they feel tossed by the waves.
They make decisions, and then things happen to them,
and they say, “Well, I didn’t deserve that.” The prophets don’t have a conversation to have with you.
When you step over the bounds,
when you make a choice,
you are the one who was free
to choose that or another way,
and when you chose the wrong way,
you will now be held to account
for it.
And I think maybe to nuance that for people who might struggle with that idea of being called
to account of judgment,
you’ve got a factor that God is a perfect God,
that God is the majestic,
sovereign Lord, that there is no sin in God,
that God can’t be held to account for doing wrong.
And when we violate the covenant that God made with us graciously,
that has no place in God.
There’s no place for these sinful,
self-righteous choices that we make that seek to elevate us
above God.
And so when it meets God,
it’s going to burn.
It’s chaff.
There’s nothing substantive to it when it comes in the presence of a substantive God.
And so I think the prophets assume that we have agency.
They assume that you could make the right choice and that you will be held to account when you don’t.
And that’s challenging.
Yeah.
And because this occupies the Old Testament,
again, we have maybe some conversation that we’d need to continue to have about sinfulness and about graciousness.
But the other thing I think that the prophets assume, Michael,
is that Israel’s
status is always inevitably tied to Israel’s faithfulness,
that they cannot occupy a station
that they don’t deserve,
that they cannot have good things while simultaneously doing bad things,
that those things are incompatible with being God’s people,
that God is gracious, God is loving,
but God is not going to allow them to trample the covenant and still provide them the benefit and
security that God provides,
that there’s a cost to sinfulness,
that there’s a price to be paid for unfaithfulness.
And this is the core message of the prophets that the people don’t hear.
And so ultimately,
the prophetic message is generally speaking in the Old Testament,
a warning that then comes through.
Very, very seldomly do the people hear the prophets and turn from their way and get
it right, and the prophet says,
“Good job.” That’s unfortunately not a very human kind of story.
Yeah.
And if you’re joining the conversation today and you’re hearing as we go through this,
I wouldn’t blame you if you feel like this is a little bit of a bait and switch.
Because, Clint,
most of us aren’t going to relate to these people as being real people of faith in the sense
that you might relate to like a Joseph or maybe you relate somehow to David.
These are people with
stories that you might feel like,
“Man, the prophets seem larger than life.
They don’t seem like real people.
They seem like super people.” And maybe a way that you could twist that, Clint, is ironically,
most of us I think could relate to being the people who hear the prophets speak.
If you can’t relate to the prophets as the real people of faith,
I think you could relate to the
people to whom the prophets are speaking.
At least I know that I can.
That I can see these words
hitting me at a very deep part of who I am, convicting me,
challenging me, in some cases comforting me.
And I do think as we come to the real people of faith series,
I think it does
challenge us to recognize and to maybe consider what happens in us when difficult words are spoken
to us.
And I think one of the spiritual gifts that we absolutely have to name as we come to
hear the prophets well,
Clint, is we have to practice humility as people.
We have to recognize
that regardless of how much it hurts,
there are times when the truth is speaking to something in
us that needs convicted,
that you actually were wrong.
It wasn’t that you were misunderstood.
It wasn’t that it was just an unfortunate circumstance.
There are times when humility
compels us to recognize,
“Yeah, you’re right.
I stepped over.
I shouldn’t have said that.
I shouldn’t have done that.
That was below my status or character or belief.” And in those moments in
the end, instead of running from it,
instead of being ashamed of it,
to name it and to say, “Yes,
as best as I can,
confess this sin that has been identified.” I think that’s a real response to the prophets.
Yeah.
And two of the most popular words that the prophets preach,
confess and repent.
In other words, be honest about your sin and then address it and turn direction from it.
And the prophets give that message over and over.
Declare your sinfulness, Israel.
Turn, O Israel, from your sin.
Repent,
O Israel.
They offer
that challenge.
They offer that
confrontation thousands and thousands of times in the hope that the people will respond
and avoid the harder lesson that God may have to bring them.
And then finally, Michael, and I think your words are helpful here because maybe
of the messages we hear from the prophets,
the one that is most surprising for its depth and its
consistency is hope.
When you push the prophets to their last word,
because they speak for God,
they can never give up on the people.
There is in the prophets,
surprisingly,
some of the most
people and the second and third and hundredth and thousandth chances that he will give them.
And sometimes that comes amidst very hard things to hear,
right?
There are these moments where the
prophet says, “God will destroy your cities.
God’s going to take your land.
God’s going to send you
into slavery.
God’s going to make your tears run like rivers,
but not forever.”
Because God ultimately wants to save you,
wants to renew you,
wants to redeem you.
And there are a couple of these that we may know.
Probably chief among them is in Ezekiel,
the Valley of the Dry Bones.
I think a lot of people have heard that story,
but it’s a vision that Ezekiel has of this field of bones that are dry and brittle and broken.
And then slowly they become knit together and eventually they get enfleshed and they are made to live.
And the prophet says in God’s word,
“These are the house of Israel.
They have been dry.
They have been desolate,
but they will live again.
They will breathe again.”
And it’s fascinating for a group that can be understood to be pretty angry, Michael.
The prophets have this just stunningly tender undercurrent that runs in and out through their preaching.
Yeah, Clint, that is really well said.
I think you’re pointing us towards the fact
that you cannot stereotype the prophets.
You cannot make them a simple thing.
They’re not just judgment bearers.
They’re not just comfort speakers.
They’re not just people speaking to
spiritual realities.
They’re not just people who care about social issues.
Clint, there are all of these things.
They have something to say that impacts every area of your life.
Why?
Because they’re speaking for God.
Because they’re speaking for someone who desperately
loves and is also
simultaneously repelled by sinfulness.
So fundamentally as we come to the prophets,
if you read through all the prophets tonight,
that would be quite an undertaking.
You’re going to be repulsed.
You’re going to be comforted.
You’re going to be challenged for your sin and idolatry.
You’re going to be just straight up confused.
And in the midst of all of that movement, Clint,
you’re once again finding what it means to be a real person of faith,
is that fundamentally that is a life lived,
is that we recognize that we will have error and
need to be called to account.
We will have time where that account will result in God comforting
us and saying, “I am near to you,” even in the midst of the painful results of your circumstances,
the results of your sinfulness.
“I am still with you.
I love you.” I mean,
there is nothing more human than that,
recognizing that life involves all of these tributaries and
turns, and God has a word for us at each and every step of it.
And at its heart,
anger and love
can occupy the same space.
So this will surprise no one.
When I was a child,
I was strong-willed
and occasionally went my own way.
And I would have those moments where as a young child, maybe
punished,
and then as an older child, maybe grounded.
And I remember my mom on many occasions
would say, “If I didn’t love you,
I wouldn’t have to do this.” And I remember thinking,
first of all, that makes no sense.
I wish she loved me less.
It would save me a couple
of acts on the back end,
or I’d get my weekend to myself.
And then as you live into that,
eventually parenting or being old enough to understand the words,
that an anger detached from love is dangerous and can be vicious.
But love that gives birth to anger
when the person is on the wrong path seeks not to be cruel,
but to be helpful,
to be corrective.
And that’s essentially the prophets,
that the harshest things that are attributed to God
are from a place of the depth of God’s love.
And if there’s a message in the prophets that I think is most compelling,
it may be that,
that God loves enough to hold accountable and to correct as necessary,
even harshly if his word won’t be hurt and heated.
And I think there is a softness to
the prophets that is unrecognized by people often who are put off by some of the tougher words.
Fundamentally,
we travel some strange ground here,
Clint, and yet we find,
as we make our way across this journey,
that it’s the central themes of these people’s lives that we’ve been studying
that continue on, right?
This idea of love,
this idea of God continuing to be with God’s people,
even when God needs to say some harsh things,
the prophets are a completely different group
of these real people of faith.
Maybe you would not even call them the real people,
but yet these words portray and represent and deliver to us another glimpse of who God is as
God tells this overarching story in scripture of his desire and will for us.
And it is rooted deeply in love,
and that brings it into our conversation.
Yeah, and maybe let’s close with some of their words.
This is from Micah,
words that may be familiar to many people with,
“What would I come before the Lord?
What would I bow myself with before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with year-old calves?
Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Should I give my firstborn for my sin,
the fruit of my body for the transgression of my soul?
Mortal, he has told you what is good.
What does the Lord require of you?
But to do justice,
to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God.”
And, Michael, if we could set our compass by that,
we would have learned much of what the prophets would have us know.
Well, friends, thanks for joining us for another Pastor Talk conversation as we continue this
series about the real people of faith.
Next conversation, we’re going to be jumping into the New Testament,
which is going to bring a whole new series of people who are written into God’s
story.
And we look forward to that conversation with you.
We’re grateful for all of you joining
us weekly.
It is really a privilege to get to spend this time with you.
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