A prophet is one who knows his times and what God is
trying to say to the people of his times.
What God says to His church at any given period depends altogether
upon her moral and spiritual condition and upon the spiritual need
of the hour. Religious leaders who continue mechanically to expound
the Scriptures without regard to the current religious situation are
no better than the scribes and lawyers of Jesus’ day who faithfully
parroted the Law without the remotest notion of what was going on
around them spiritually. They fed the same diet to all and seemed
wholly unaware that there was such a thing as meat in due season.
The prophets never made that mistake nor wasted their efforts in
that manner. They invariably spoke to the condition of the people of
their times.
Today we need prophetic preachers; not preachers of prophecy merely,
but preachers with a gift of prophecy. The word of wisdom is
missing. We need the gift of discernment again in our pulpits. It is
not ability to predict that we need, but the anointed eye, the power
of spiritual penetration and interpretation, the ability to appraise
the religious scene as viewed from God’s position, and to tell us
what is actually going on.
There has probably never been another time in the history of the
world when so many people knew so much about religious happenings as
they do today. The newspapers are eager to print religious news; the
secular news magazines devote several pages of each issue to the
doings of the church and the synagogue; a number of press
associations gather church news and make it available to the
religious journals at a small cost. Even the hiring of professional
publicity men to plug one or another preacher or religious movement
is no longer uncommon; the mails are stuffed with circulars and
“releases,” while radio and television join to tell the listening
public what religious people are doing throughout the world.
Greater publicity for religion may be well and I have no fault to
find with it. Surely religion should be the most newsworthy thing on
earth, and there may be some small encouragement in the thought that
vast numbers of persons want to read about it. What disturbs me is
that amidst all the religious hubbub hardly a voice is raised to
tell us what God thinks about the whole thing.
Where is the man who can see through the ticker tape and confetti to
discover which way the parade is headed, why it started in the first
place and, particularly, who is riding up front in the seat of
honor?
Not the fact that the churches are unusually active these days, not
what religious people are doing, should engage our attention, but
why these things are so. The big question is Why? And no one seems
to have an answer for it. Not only is there no answer, but scarcely
is there anyone to ask the question. It just never occurs to us that
such a question remains to be asked. Christian people continue to
gossip religious shoptalk with scarcely as much as a puzzled look.
The soundness of current Christianity is assumed by the religious
masses as was the soundness of Judaism when Christ appeared. People
know they are seeing certain activity, but just what it means they
do not know, nor have they the faintest idea of where God is or what
relation He has toward the whole thing.
What is needed desperately today is prophetic insight. Scholars can
interpret the past; it takes prophets to interpret the present.
Learning will enable a man to pass judgment on our yesterdays, but
it requires a gift of clear seeing to pass sentence on our own day.
One hundred years from now historians will know what was taking
place religiously in this year of our Lord; but that will be too
late for us. We should know right now.
If Christianity is to receive a rejuvenation it must be by other
means than any now being used. If the church in the second half of
this century is to recover from the injuries she suffered in the
first half, there must appear a new type of preacher. The proper,
ruler-of-the-synagogue type will never do. Neither will the priestly
type of man who carries out his duties, takes his pay and asks no
questions, nor the smooth-talking pastoral type who knows how to
make the Christian religion acceptable to everyone. All these have
been tried and found wanting.
Another kind of religious leader must arise among us. He must be of
the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions of God and has
heard a voice from the Throne. When he comes (and I pray God there
will be not one but many) he will stand in flat contradiction to
everything our smirking, smooth civilization holds dear. He will
contradict, denounce and protest in the name of God and will earn
the hatred and opposition of a large segment of Christendom. Such a
man is likely to be lean, rugged, blunt-spoken and a little bit
angry with the world. He will love Christ and the souls of men to
the point of willingness to die for the glory of the one and the
salvation of the other. But he will fear nothing that breathes with
mortal breath.
We need to have the gifts of the Spirit restored again to the
church, and it is my belief that the one gift we need most now is
the gift of prophecy.
