Voices of the Prophets 05

¨

Voices of the Prophets
by T. Austin-Sparks
Chapter 5 – The Voice of Jeremiah (continued)

“They knew not… the voices of the prophets which are read every sabbath” (Acts 13:27).
The Two Rolls (Jeremiah 36)

When the Apostle Paul made this reference to the Prophets, he was bringing their ministry right up to date some seven hundred years after the days of the Prophets. Thus he showed that those “Voices” were of enduring meaning. The context also shows that there is a voice in the Scriptures which is more than the words. The words could – and can – be heard “every Sabbath”, but the voice unheard. This is an indictment, a condemnation, a warning.

We have taken note of several of the double messages of Jeremiah; that is, two contrasting things set over against each other. In what we are now going to consider it is not a matter of contrast, but of duplication: the two rolls. It is the story of the king’s penknife with which he cut up the roll of prophecy and cast it to the flames.

This incident has – as far as our knowledge goes – been invariably fastened upon in relation to destructive criticism and the battle between conservative and liberal theologians or Bible interpreters. It certainly does provide a first-class instrument for such a controversy as to the authority of the Scriptures, but it is not our intention so to use it here. If we shut it up exclusively to such a connection we may miss a “voice” which has a spiritual meaning and message of – at least – equally important significance. This is connected more with the second roll than with the first.

The seriousness of this message is found in the judgment of God upon that offender. In fulfilment of the prophecy the body of Jehoiakim was thrown over the wall to the invaders by the very people who had not repudiated his action. That, however, is going a long way ahead in order to show that an action such as his does eventually issue in disaster and calamity; in shame and retribution, however long it may tarry.

What then is the message or “Voice” of the two rolls? The first was ruthlessly destroyed and cast away. No copy of it was kept by Jeremiah or Baruch, his scribe. There were no carbon copies of documents in those days. The reproduction had to be like the first, a direct inspiration by God. God had to speak the same thing a second time (although in the second there were additions). The point is that God did speak again in the same terms. Do what we may in repudiation of anything that God has revealed, either to neglect, brush aside, or – as in this case – vehemently throw to the flames, that which God has spoken will appear again, undiminished, and destiny will be determined thereby.
This fact appears again and again in the Bible. Two outstanding instances are Jesus Christ, and the churches in Asia. It is quite evident that, whether or not Saul of Tarsus was actually a participant in the crucifixion of Jesus, he was spiritually so, and having believed that the Leader had been well got rid of, he was going to send the followers also to their death. No doubt, when Jesus was killed, Saul’s idea was that He was for ever out of the way and had come to His deserved end. All that remained to be done was to wipe out all that remained in connection with Him. We can never, with the most vivid imagination, enter into the surprise, devastation, and shattering bewilderment of the man Saul when Jesus of Nazareth met him with the announcement of who He was on the road to Damascus: “I am Jesus.”

The second roll, so to speak, had turned up and confronted him. He – Saul – had used his penknife and cast Jesus of Nazareth to the flames. He had extended that work to Stephen. Now the encounter with Jesus Himself, but with additions. We cannot imagine what calamity would have befallen Saul of Tarsus if he had persisted like Jehoiakim in rebellion.

Paul wrote – perhaps with a sob – from his prison: “All that are in Asia turned away from me” (2 Timothy 1:15). Under God they owed everything to Paul. Now, at length, they have turned from him and perhaps repudiated his ministry of “the whole counsel of God”. Well, is that all that there is to it? No, only thirty or so years later and we have that matchless presentation and description of Paul’s Master given in the first chapter of the Revelation. That description and presentation needs to be considered in the light of what took place in the forsaking of Paul, and the development of the subsequent thirty years. With that detailed, symbolic presentation the churches in Asia are challenged, interrogated, and judged, with their destiny in the balances, as to their reaction to Jesus – yes – and to Paul’s “Voice”. The second roll came up, and it was decisive.

These instances are such as to give very forceful argument to this principle: we can never ultimately get away from anything that God has shown, whatever may be our present attitude. It will come back again, and our eternal position will be hanging upon it. This, of course, is of many-sided application.

In Acts 13 Paul is showing that Israel’s tragedy – which has lasted for these many centuries – was because they thought that their neglect, or violence, would not return upon them in judgment. But they are under the aegis of the Second Roll. “Today, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your heart.”

Voices of the Prophets 04

¨

Chapter 4 – The Voice of Jeremiah (continued)

“They knew not… the voices of the prophets which are read every sabbath” (Acts 13:27).

Two Realms of Glorying
“Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches: but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth, and knoweth me, that I am the Lord” (Jeremiah 9:23-24).

Of all the contrasts which gave occasion to the ministry of Jeremiah it is difficult to say which was the most significant. But the more we consider the one with which we now have to deal, the more we are impressed with both its range and its ultimate import. The Prophets certainly spoke with fuller meaning than they knew, but the Spirit of God who spoke through them knew it all, backward and forward. If they spoke to their own time and conditions, our foundation statement in Acts 13, at least, declares that they spoke to all following generations. But spiritual discernment and insight will see even more than that in their utterances. This is so very true of the passage now under consideration. Very much has been written on the place and significance of Israel in history, and no doubt much more will unfold with the unfolding of world history. There are two aspects of this which we must point to in order to understand the Prophets. Those two sides are two aspects of one thing, the right and the wrong. The one thing is:

Israel’s Representation in History
Has it been sufficiently recognized that God chose the Hebrew nation to be a representation in history of His eternal and heavenly thought for mankind and the world? This lay behind that nation’s election or selection. That explains His mighty sovereign acts and ways in securing that nation. That explains His infinite pains and patience in bearing with that people. That explains His grace and love toward a nation which tested Him to an extreme degree. In the constituting and formation of that nation’s life God introduced all the spiritual features of His Son in a symbolic way. From their father, Abraham, with his history and experience, into the redemption, separation, provisioning, discipline, ritual, laws, priests, sacrifices, tabernacle (in all its parts), conquests, inheritance, and much more, God had His Son ever and always in mind.

This all means that everything of principle and basis intended for mankind in God’s full and final economy was represented and inherent in an Israel according to the mind of God. If Israel failed God and their own vocation, the failure would be nothing less than a repetition of Adam’s failure, and a repetition of both the reasons for that ”Fall” and the consequences.

So we come to the Prophets, whose business it was to re-express God’s thoughts for Israel and the world; to show how those thoughts were violated; what the nature of the apostasy was; and what the terrible consequences would be. They were activated by God’s jealous love for His eternal concept, and, seeing that the concept was not a mere abstract idea, but a human embodiment and expression, the love and jealousy were for a people chosen to represent it.

By this so-much-wider view we are able to see the implications and significance of our present Scripture, Jeremiah 9:23-24. Here the Lord puts His disapproval and veto upon a primal principle working in a threefold direction. Let it be understood that when God says ”Not” in connection with ”wisdom”, ”might” and ”riches”, He is not condemning those things. Elsewhere He has put His blessing upon all the three things and has never said that, in themselves, they are wrong. One of Satan’s clever devices has ever been to make good things bad, and bad things good. In this threefold ”Not” God is speaking of the ’glorying’ in these things; that is, giving to them the glory of life. It is the old original subtlety of the serpent at work again to rob God of the glory; the one age-long jealousy and envy of Lucifer. It is the assertion of man’s selfhood, his ego, to know, to dominate, to possess without reference or deference to God; the independence of egoism. Hold on to that last word, as it is the key to everything against God.
We come, therefore, to the threefold outworking of the principle.

1. The Cult of Intellectualism
An ’ism’ is a cult. It means that the thing to which it refers has exceeded itself, gone beyond itself, its value and purpose, and become an object in itself, an ultimate and end; a purpose, a passion, a domination, an absorbing interest. As soon as you add ’ism’ to a thing you resolve the thing into something which is an end in itself. It will sooner or later take the form of a religion, that is, an object of worship, the thing to which the ’worthship’ is given, and so the glory.

How true this is of intellectualism! No sooner does a young man set out on the course of intellectualism and make intellectual knowledge his main business than the battle of faith in God begins. He becomes intellectually superior to faith in God.

It is at this point that we must indicate the ultimate and consummate development of that primal bid for knowledge with God ignored or repudiated. It is a law in this universe that a simple seed sown has in it the potentiality of filling the world if it is not frustrated or destroyed. The seed of an independent, egoistical bid for knowledge sown in a ’garden’ is now at the point of development where a terrible reaping is imminent. Why is it that knowledge – not essentially evil in itself – has reached a dimension which threatens any day to devastate this creation and all mankind? Why is it that man’s ranging into outer space and mastery of nuclear forces finds him totally unable to cope with the landslide and complete breakaway of moral laws and ideals? Why is it that in an age more advanced scientifically than any before, a new barbarism and inhumanity, cruelty, lust and destruction marks the life of the world?

Today the leaders of scientific research and discovery are having to warn the world of the unspeakable holocaust which can follow those researches. Why is it? Is it not patent to any observer that there is more ungodliness in the world than has been before?

God is given small public place in the politics, industry, society of countries formerly known as ’Christian’; and secularism, atheism and God-denying ideologies creep over more and more of the world. The point is that this all goes on while the cult of intellectualism and rationalism goes alongside of moral and religious decline.

If Israel’s sorry plight for so many centuries makes Israel the world’s representation of the reverse of God’s intention, is not the world in the way of that pathetic misdirection?

The Bible begins with chaos; proceeds to cosmos; reverts to chaos; and ends with cosmos – ”a new heaven and a new earth”; but the end will only be reached when God has His rightful place in the minds of men. There was an intellect nearly two thousand years ago which has kept intellectuals on full stretch through all the centuries since, and is still doing so. It might be a good thing to give more serious consideration to what that one said about the wisdom of this world; what its limits are; what it is capable of doing; and what God’s verdict upon it is. It can be found in the First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 1:18-2.

2. The Cult of Power
”Let not the mighty man glory in his might.”
Having traced the cult of intellectualism, the inordinate bid for knowledge, back to the beginning of man’s declension, it is not difficult to see that the bid for power in independence upon God is all of a piece with that. Adam is on record as having projected his will as well as his reason toward self-exaltation. He was, as the Bible says, ’made to have dominion’, but with a Head. He forsook his Head, violated Divine headship in order to be his own master, and lost the dominion intended by God. But he forced himself forward in independent self-sovereignty, and the world is what it is today as the result.

He never lost the sense that he was made for dominion, but alongside of it runs an innate sense that something has been lost, and he is driven by a sense of inferiority to try to recover that. That sense of loss lies behind all his strivings, wars, and straining after superiority. Sometimes defensive, sometimes offensive, sometimes the despair and suicide of frustration, often in make-believe, pretence, show, ostentation, noise. This will to power has destroyed peace and security which, like a phantom, lures him on to ever deeper frustration and defeat. It has invaded politics, industry, social life, national and international ambitions. It has not stopped short at religion, and shows its hand in the rivalries, jealousies, factions, and strivings in organized Christianity. The fabric of life is shot through and through with the expansion of the original, initial, primal assertion of the will to power, the ego or selfhood. This dislocated lust for power is working itself out to universal destruction, and ’wars to end wars’ is a fallacy, a delusion, a mockery. The one thing that man feels the need of mostly is a super-man, for he despairs of the world under its puppets. Surely history is evidencing the fatal mistake made at some time, and irrefutably testifying to man’s need of a Head. The bid for power as vested in man was, and is, a revolt against God and Divine authority; the result is anarchy.

The hopeful elements in all this are that a climax is so much nearer, and that God’s appointed Head over all, Heir of all, will the sooner come because the cup of this iniquity is near to being full.

3. The Cult of Riches
”Let not the rich man glory in his riches.”
Is it necessary to spend time in arguing or pointing to the fact that possessiveness in the matter of goods, money, and ’have all’ has become something worshipped by man beyond all limits? We will not extend this discussion to its full range, but bring this ”Voice of the Prophets” to the place where it was specifically addressed. The primal error included this feature. It can be summed up in three words:
”I saw.” ”I coveted.” ”I took.”

But it was to the Lord’s people that the Prophets spoke in the first instance.
The writer of these messages, over a long period of years, has travelled in many parts of the world with one object: that is, the increase and strengthening of the spiritual life of the people of God. He has been repeatedly impressed with the fact that where the greater concern for, and engrossment with, business life to make money dominates, there it is so much more difficult to speak about the things of the Spirit. This impression has been confirmed by the equally evident fact that where life is simpler or even difficult, there the outreach of heart to the fuller knowledge of the Lord is stronger and purer.

This other ’ism’ has strongly invaded Christianity, namely, ’commercialism’, and is sapping and draining the spiritual life. Indeed, it is a definite menace to spirituality. We are not speaking critically about the heavy weight of responsibility in business realms, or the great problems and demands on Christian men in business. We keep close to Jeremiah’s warning as to commercialism becoming a snare to pride, ambition, and ’glorying’ in riches. It was the Lord who made Jeremiah warn so strongly against the commercial snare. So much could be said regarding the subtlety of the serpent as he moves with his fascination and hypnotism toward his prey – the spiritual life of the people of God. As ”the serpent beguiled” to possess without consideration for, or reference to, fellowship with God, so it has ever been, and the world – and the Church – is too busy today to give adequate attention to spiritual principles and essentials. Many a great work initiated and used by God because of its spiritual character and purity has later lost its place in that realm by becoming big, with its organization, business, and commercial involvements and methods. ”How is the fine gold become dim!” If that were a question instead of an exclamation the answer would largely be ”commercialism”.

With so much on these three warnings having to be left unsaid, we have to pass to God’s “But”.
“But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth, and knoweth me, that I am the Lord.”
On the knowing and understanding of the Lord volumes could be written, but we can do no more here than note the ultimate implication of this alternative.

If knowledge, power, and riches bulk so large and mean so much in this world – and they do, immensely so – the Lord says here that it is going by history and destiny to be incontrovertibly proved that to know and understand the Lord in His estimate of values (see text) outweighs by far these transient glories.

The Apostle Paul said “Knowledge shall cease”; and he could and would have said the same of earthly might and riches, but the knowledge of the Lord outlives and outmeasures all.

Voices of Prophets 03

¨

Chapter 3 – The Voice of Jeremiah (continued)

”They knew not… the voices of the prophets which are read every sabbath” (Acts 13:27).

The Quest For A Man
”Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man… that seeketh the truth” (Jeremiah 5:1).

There are two preliminary words necessary to a consideration of this so terrible implication. One is that it can hardly be taken in its utter and final suggestion. It seems to imply that there was no such single man in Jerusalem. But we do know that Jeremiah was not absolutely alone in his quest for truth. There were, at least, a few who remained true in heart and desire, although the landslide to declension was so great. The other thing is that, appropriate as the challenge to our own time may be, we are not suggesting that there is in our day such a general state of positive rejection of, and rebellion against God and alliance with heathen gods as was the case amongst God’s people in Jeremiah’s time.

Having said that, we still feel that there is the occasion and the need for this part of the ’Voice’ to be heeded. It is the quest for a man, and the emphasis has to be put on ”a man”. God is revealed to us in the Bible as ever and always being in quest of a man. In creation and throughout history the Bible shows how God’s heart is set upon a man after His heart. One question raised by the Psalmist spans the ages – ”What is man that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:4).

With Jeremiah this quest becomes a challenge. It is the challenge as to where there is manhood according to God’s mind. It may be that there are exceedingly few who could answer that challenge utterly, but there are certain features which with God weigh heavily in constituting the man of His quest. Not all of the things which the world regard as making a man to be admired describe the man that God so characterizes.

When Pilate brought forth Jesus and cried ”Behold the man”, there was everything present with Jesus as to His position, His success, His associates, His physique, His apparent impotence, His inability to ”save Himself”, His prospects, etc., which put Him at an utter discount with the world and men. Paul was right when he said: ”Unto the Jews a scandal, and unto Greeks foolishness.” The world, and worldly-mindedness, demand for the ideal man success, prestige, means, reputation, and natural ability of one kind or another, such as social, physical, intellectual. Without these as obvious things the man is ”despised and rejected of men”.

Over against the world’s estimate and standard stands God’s assessment of a man’s values. What was it that Jeremiah challenged his hearers to find? Look at the description and you look straight into the eyes of God. There you will see that with God the features which characterize the man of God’s quest are spiritual and moral values.

One word or virtue covers a very great range. It is the word ”Truth”. Truth is elemental. That is, it is not manufactured or compounded. It is of first principles and in the very nature. What is made can be unmade. Truth is an essence. It is fundamental and indestructible. If anything can be destroyed, annihilated and brought to an end, it is not true. Truth is eternal. God will not countenance or commit Himself to anything that will ultimately be exposed to be a lie. Truth is a spiritual element.

There is the profoundest reason why God is so intensely jealous in His regard for truth. The entire history of the wreck and ruin, the sin and all its consequences in this world, is due to an initial and fundamental lie. It was a lie about God. It was a lie about man. It was a lie about human destiny. The lie was a deception, a misrepresentation, a trick and snare, a distortion, an invention and fabrication, a perversion, a myth, a subterfuge, a disguise, a counterfeit; it was hypocrisy and pretence. It was in nature a ’snake in the grass’, a ’wolf in sheep’s clothing’, a Satan ’as an angel of light’.

Like the venom of the serpent’s bite, it has entered the very blood of humanity and it has impregnated the very constitution of the world’s system. Its beginning appeared simple but its end will be so complex, so unmitigated and blatant that men will ”believe a lie instead of the truth” because thereby they more easily obtain their object. We are now living in the time when systems and ideologies reign which have repudiated the existence of such a thing as truth, and the idea of it is ridiculed or fought. Hence the world and society are disintegrating. There is no security or assurance anywhere.

No wonder that God hates every semblance of untruth, and that His hatred thereof was so fiercely demonstrated against the hypocrites, the pretenders of His time.

Thus it is that God puts such high value upon a man who ”speaks the truth to his own hurt”; a man who not only speaks true things but is true. Truth is something of ”the inward parts”. The framework, the instrumentalities, the means employed and blessed by God may pass away, but the inward spiritual value which is God Himself will abide for ever and never be destroyed.

Of all that may be said about the Prophets it is this ”Voice” that is the loudest and most challenging. They stood solidly against all forms of falsehood, and when Satan sought to discredit them by means of ”False Prophets” they withstood them and eventually God vindicated the true.

We must abide in the truth, for Satan’s downfall and all its devastating results are attributed to his not ”abiding in the truth”.

Hand-in-hand with the stand for truth is another virtue upon which God places very much value. The Bible makes so much of this in relation to the Man of God. This is more than the voice of words from the Prophets, it is characteristic of the Prophets themselves. I refer to spiritual courage.

This, as we know, was a very real feature of Christ, and it was one of the evident fruits of the Holy Spirit in the Apostles and others on, and after, the Day of Pentecost. We repeat: the Prophets were outstanding in the matter. As with truth, so with courage, a very great deal of ground is covered by it. A great modern soldier has ranked courage as supreme among the virtues. If we really analysed and defined courage and noted all its aspects we would go a long way toward agreeing with that estimate.

There are other words and other ways of saying the same thing. For instance, there is no word in this category that shows God’s estimate of this value more than the word faithfulness. Faithfulness is the very essence and embodiment of courage. God has linked the crown of life with that.

“Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” Faithful to God. Faithful to the truth. Faithful to what God has shown. Faithful to our trust. Faithful to our brother. A word which carries the same meaning and may bring us closer to the practical aspect is the word loyalty. It takes courage to be loyal. The opposite is cowardice, compromise, policy, diplomacy; and anything that sacrifices principle for personal gain, advantage, convenience. Disloyalty is a most contemptible feature.

It costs to be loyal, courageous, and faithful, and it sometimes means that it puts our popularity and acceptance in jeopardy. To sponsor an unpopular but valuable cause, ministry, and instrument of the Lord may cause real hesitation if policy and personal advantage have weight with us. Paul said to Timothy: ”Be not ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner.” It may have been costly in those times to stand with the testimony of Jesus, but it went right to the soul to show allegiance with that man of world-wide ostracism and now in prison. It was a great triumph in a young man that he stuck loyally to Paul to the end. He has ever since shared Paul’s vindication.

We now laud the Prophets and Apostles and Martyrs, but we must remember that in their time they were the sponsors of the most unpopular, and – apparently – the most forlorn causes, and they had to show a supreme courage in great aloneness and dislike.

Look and listen again to them and their ”Voice” as the embodiment of courage in the presence of every conceivable aspect of ’conformity to the death of Jesus’.

Voices of Prophets 02

¨

Chapter 2 – The Voice of Jeremiah

”They knew not… the voices of the prophets which are read every sabbath” (Acts 13:27).

”It shall come to pass, when seventy years are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon, and that nation, saith the Lord, for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans; and I will make it desolate for ever” (Jeremiah 25:12).

”Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom…” (2 Chronicles 36:22, Ezra 1:1 onwards: see also Isaiah 45:1-8).

Here then is the vindication of Jeremiah. But he never lived to see it. Therein lies one of the most testing things that a faithful and greatly opposed servant of the Lord can have to accept. Jeremiah had to fulfil his ministry knowing that, so far as his own time and the people thereof were concerned, it would be an apparent failure; he would not live to see that part of his commission fulfilled – ”To build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). How many of the servants of the Lord have been called upon to follow Him in this so searching and testing path! They, as He, have had to do their work for a time to come.

We observe the seeming failure of the Lord’s own earthly life and labours when ”He was crucified through weakness”. We see the desertion, forsaking, discrediting, and discounting which marked the closing days of the Apostle Paul’s earthly course. What a galaxy of lonely heroes of the faith compose the noble army of the ”despised and rejected of men”, upon whose costly ministry men passed the verdict ’It was to no purpose’! But if their ministry and labours had anything of God in them, that element is eternal and immortal, and it will live again: God will vindicate, and ”the men of Anathoth” (Jeremiah 11:21, 23) will be the ones upon whom history and eternity will heap the shame. The tears of the Jeremiahs will – as the Psalmist says – be kept in God’s bottle. This is one of ”the voices of the prophets” which, although not heard by dull spiritual ears, will be shouted for all to hear by the events of history. Ezra and Nehemiah, and Daniel’s visions in fulfilment, will be the answer to Jeremiah’s rejected ministry.

Cyrus may be a pagan, having no personal knowledge of the Lord, but his irreligious solicitude for God’s interests will declare for all time that, while Jeremiah may be ignored or discounted, the God who called and appointed him cannot be so dismissed. If there is one voice that shouts from the book of Jeremiah it is the voice of Divine Sovereignty. The whole book is contracted in the Lord’s words to His servant in the Potter’s House: ”Cannot I do with you…?” (Jeremiah 18:1-11). The Sovereignty of God is a difficult thing to be against. Ask Jerusalem and the Jewish nation about that in the year A.D. 70 when the sovereign words of Jesus Christ as recorded in Luke 19:41-44 were so literally fulfilled.

So much, then, for the inclusive ’voice’ of Jeremiah. But what were some of the things that our Prophet had specifically to encounter and cry against? We can put these into a phrase. He cried concerning certain basic and fundamental contrasts. We point to three:

1. The Fountain and the Cisterns
This is a contrast that the Lord vehemently called an ”evil” – ”My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Let us be duly impressed – before we pass on – with the Lord’s judgment upon this alternative procedure, it is Evil! The Lord says that it is a fundamental evil.
There are several features of these alternatives.

(a) The feature of the One and the many: the one Fountain; the many cisterns.
Here we have a voice of the Prophet which, having been missed, has resulted in – not only Israel’s undoing – but, largely in that of organized Christianity, and is not absent from evangelical Christianity. It is a matter to which the Bible gives the most serious attention, and upon which the New Testament is very largely built. It is no less a question than that of the all-sufficiency of God or – alternatively – the many devices of men. It is just the exclusive and final fulness of God or the independent or plus resource of human effort. This is the inherent principle of the One Fountain or of the many hewn out cisterns. Into what a lot of Christian work and activity this issue has become real!

From the dawn of man’s active relationship with God there has been this incorrigible propensity of man to ”put forth his hand” and lay it possessively or controllingly upon God’s things. Probably this is Satan’s (Lucifer’s) sin which led to his fall, and was the very nature of his ’tempting’ and deceiving Adam. That is why God calls this ’evil’. It is the evil of dividing God’s place; of insinuating man’s independence, and implying man’s ability. It is at the heart of humanism, of autocracy, of dictatorship. It is the essence of that so oft-referred to symbolic term in the New Testament – ”the flesh”. It is the principle of the ’uncircumcised heart’, which – like the ’uncircumcised Philistines’ – insinuates itself in the things of God. It is full of significance that it was not until David came fully and pre-eminently to the throne that the Philistines were finally subdued. Theirs was a hand against the throne. Not until Christ is absolutely Lord will this tendency to self-assertion be overruled.

What the many ”cisterns” represent in their form and nature is just legion; too many things produced by human strength, intelligence, and ingenuity to tabulate or catalogue.
There is a very serious and solemn precautionary reason why, after having given the command and commission to His Apostles to go into all the world, He added ”But, tarry ye… until ye be clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49); ”He charged them not to depart… but to wait for the promise of the Father” (Acts 1:4). The world-commission must never be taken upon any kind of natural energy. The Holy Spirit alone, and that as a definite bit of personal history, is to be the source of God’s work.

(b) Another difference is indicated in our text.
The cisterns of religious man’s hewing can ”hold no water”. Perhaps the emphasis should be upon the word ”hold”. They are ’empty’ because they are leaky. They have to be repeatedly and continually filled artificially. Their hewers are involved in the arduous task of finding and replenishing the resources. They get something and it leaks away, and dryness demands more and more human effort to defeat it. What a true description of all that comes from man putting his hand upon God’s work! His are indeed leaky cisterns. On the other hand there is the Fountain. Full, final, inexhaustible, and ever fresh, never stagnant.

”The water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life” (John 4:14).
”Out of him shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38).

What a thing it is to have an opened Heaven, and never to have to hew out a message, a discourse, a ministry, an enterprise! It was against this weary, disappointing, laborious life that Jeremiah testified, and his ”Voice” must be listened for in this matter today for an evil thing has limited the life of the Lord. Fulness is always a mark of the good pleasure of the Lord.

2. The Wheat and the Chaff
”What is the chaff to the wheat, saith the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:28 AV).
The first contrast which gave point to Jeremiah’s ministry had to do with the source of the life of God’s people; the second had to do with the ministry to them and the teaching. This challenge and interrogation direct from “the Lord of Hosts”, as the context shows, was directed to the false Prophets. “I have heard what the prophets have said”, etc. (verse 25 onwards). The Prophets claimed to have a vision, a dream, a revelation from the Lord, but it was as empty and unreal as chaff.

What are the characteristics of chaff? The answer to the question will prove whether the ministry is of man or of God; whether it is false or true. Note that the immediate connection here is that of the Word of God, and what is indicated by the whole paragraph is that there is much that claims to be, and is affirmed to be the Word of God which is not so. Between that which is offered as God’s Word and the true Word there is all the difference, as between chaff and wheat.

(a) Chaff is so light and unsubstantial as to be carried away by any wind and not found again. Spiritual weight is in minus quantity. It is the ministry (?) to please itching ears. It is wholly superficial, without depth. There is nothing solid about it and there is no ‘body’ in it. Pretty, clever, and wordy, with facility of speech, diffuse but powerless.
Jeremiah was very strong against the men who offered such light stuff to a needy people.

(b) Together with this aspect goes the fact that chaff deceives. It has an appearance of wheat and is associated with it, but it is not it. It may be a pretence and not the reality. It has the language, the phraseology, the terms, but it is different, it misleads. It is something on the outside and will not stand up to reality.

(c) Chaff is not food. It will never satisfy. It will not nourish. Spiritual malnutrition will result from such a diet. There is no nourishment and building property in it. Hungry souls look up and are not fed. They are famished for bread. The kind of people, as to their spiritual measure will show what they have been fed on.

The real Word of God is different from chaff in all the above respects. It is effective. Note what immediately follows our text. A series of other contrasts is implied.
”Is not my word like as fire? saith the Lord.” It burns, it melts, it purifies, it tests.
”And like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?” Sooner or later the word truly given by God will undo all resistance and self-assurance. Jesus said: ”The word that I spake, the same shall judge him in the last day” (John 12:48). True ministry of the Lord builds, satisfies, abides, and – in time or eternity – determines.

The final admonition in ministry as in the ”voice” of this Prophet is ”faithfully” – ”Let him speak my word faithfully”.
Jeremiah was himself as great an example of this as any man before or since. It cost him dearly. Rejection, ostracism, smiting, the muddy dungeon, shame, reproach, loneliness, and much more; but God vindicated him in history, and, say what you will about his ’melancholy’, his pessimism, he is – as we have said – as near to the Lord Jesus as a ”suffering servant” as any man has been. His sufferings had their fruit in ’the remnant that returned’, and he has an honoured place in the New Testament. (See our next ’Contrast’.)

3. The Two Covenants
”Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel…, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers… which my covenant they brake” (Jeremiah 31:31-32).

The immensity of this ”Voice” of the Prophet can be detected, if not comprehended, in that Christianity and the whole dispensation from the first to the second advents of Christ are built upon and constituted thereby. The Letter to the Hebrews is a comprehensive delineation of the nature of this dispensation, and at the heart of that Letter lies this very quotation from Jeremiah. (See Hebrews 8:6, 9:15, 12:24.)

Moreover, it was to this that Jesus referred when He said ”This is the new covenant in my blood.” Surely Jeremiah is vindicated! The context of Jeremiah 31:31 is that of ”the Branch” and that ”Branch” is called ”Jehovah-Tsidkenu” – the Lord our Righteousness (Jeremiah 23:6, 33:16). Upon this all our salvation – in Christ – rests. It is too vast to even approach here.

What we are immediately concerned with is the contrast of the two covenants. For the Old we have but to read the Letters to the Romans and Galatians, and to see the deplorable situation that the Jews were in in the days of Christ’s earthly life. One word covers a many-sided condition which was just terrible; that word is ‘bondage’. That is how the Old Covenant resulted in life – or existence. Why? Because it was all on the outside! It was a structure built upon the sinking sand of human weakness and depravity. Its demands only exposed the helplessness of human nature. In its presence the convicted cry of one man was the cry of all men: “O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?” (Romans 7:24). It is a long and heart-breaking story of man’s failure because of man’s nature. Righteousness is the big issue. Which means God having all that He has a right to in man as to character. And man just cannot rise to it. But he has got to! and that is the trouble. God has got to be satisfied or man is condemned. Well, that firstly is the whole case for justification and glory.

Here, then, enters the New Covenant, the terms of which are forecast by Jeremiah. There are two aspects of this: one the nature, the other the Means.
Jeremiah 31:33 – quoted by the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews: ”I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it.” We supply the italics – ”inward parts… their heart”. In this dispensation everything is inward. This determines whether the Christianity is true or false. This is the great terminal point represented by the Letter to the Galatians. As to the Means – note the capital M – the Apostle Paul has two great words: ”God… who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”; and note, the context of that statement is the Old Covenant – 2 Corinthians 4:6: and ”Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

The Means is Christ within by the Holy Spirit.
This was a saving revelation to Jeremiah. The book bearing his name is just about as hopeless a revelation of man’s miserable state as could be. Well might the Prophet weep and cry out in mortal distress! But it is not eternally hopeless. The ”Branch of Righteousness” will be ’raised up’ – ”The Lord our Righteousness”. What a ’voice’ of a Prophet! ’Every Sabbath, but they knew Him not.’ Hopelessness doubled and confirmed because of hardness of heart, pride, prejudice.

God uncover our inner ears!

Voices of Prophets 01

¨

The Voices of the Prophets
by T. Austin-Sparks

01.

Introductory

”They knew not… the voices of the prophets which are read every sabbath” (Acts 13:27).
”God having… spoken… in the prophets… in divers manners” (Hebrews 1:1).

Our object in these chapters will be to see what those divers voices and manners of God’s speaking mean for us in our time and our lives: not a fullscale study of the Prophets, but just the salient message for our instruction, comfort, guidance and – perhaps – warning.

The statement made by the Apostle Paul in the first quotation above is a very astonishing and arresting one, and itself becomes a message and a warning from the Prophets. It says precisely that on every Sabbath day, over a long period of years, the Prophets were read in the hearing of a people, in a great centre like Jerusalem, and in numerous synagogues far and wide, and, while the words were read and heard, and while the Prophets were speaking through the mouths of priests and synagogue-rulers, the people and their rulers ”knew not the voices of the prophets”. Words, Scriptures, sounds, times without number, but the ’Voice’ undiscerned and undetected; that inner meaning, that vital message, that one inclusive Object unrecognized. But not only so. The tragic result of all the hearing was a violent, positive and grievous contradiction; a doing indeed, but a doing of just the opposite of what the Prophets meant for the people concerned. They should have profited by the ’voices’, but they were condemned.

Thus, at the very outset, we are challenged as to the result, of all our hearing and the value of all that has come to us. What will the verdict be when the ’voices’ are no longer to be heard? It is, however, important that we are aware of the issue upon which the final judgment and verdict will rest. From many Scriptures, and focused in Hebrews 1:1, that issue is clearly stated to be the place and measure given to Jesus Christ, God’s Son. This is the consummate issue in our basic quotation of Acts 13:27: ”They knew him not”. Jesus said that all the Prophets spoke of Him. The Prophets had much to say about many things: idolatry, bad moral conditions, formal and merely external religion, etc., but Jesus saw and pointed to Himself in all the Prophets, and at last made the significance of the Prophets a personal one as to Himself. All judgment ultimately will turn, not upon sins, more or less, few or numerous, but upon the place and measure given to Christ. Thus the issue bound up with hearing the Prophets, i.e. the Scriptures, is: how much of Christ is resultant in us. Not one or many of the things which comprise Christianity, but the degree of Himself in us. In the Old Testament Prophets it is the place of Christ. In the New Testament it is firstly the place, and then the measure.

All the New Testament Letters (Epistles) are primarily concerned with the measure of Christ in believers, individually and corporately. This final outcome is, according to Acts 13:27 and other Scriptures (such as Isaiah 6:9, 10, and Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 29, etc.), a matter of spiritual hearing, or ”an ear to hear what the Spirit saith”. How many, like those referred to above, hear the Scriptures as such, maybe ”every sabbath”, but fail to hear ’the voice’. It is with the object of catching the voice of the Prophets that we essay to consider them and their message. This preliminary word is important so that it will not be just and only ’the letter of the Word’.

Let us note that the failure and its consequences on the part of the people referred to was not because the Prophets were not faithful. While it may be true in many cases that the people are in a tragic or pathetic position because their teachers and leaders are not faithful, this is not always the case. That a child at school does not pass the examinations cannot always be honestly blamed upon the teacher. The child may be lazy, indolent, careless, or rebellious. The best and most painstaking teacher has his – or her – failures. The Prophets gave all that they had, but still the terrible verdict of Acts 13:27 was true. The blame rested upon the hearers.

Burden in the Valley

¨

 

The Burden of the Valley of Vision

 

Reading: Isaiah 22:1

 

The word “burden” here just does mean a load or weight, as much as a man can carry. Thus the Prophets felt what the Lord had shown them to be something that weighed heavily upon them and often overwhelmed them.

 

The prophetic function is brought into operation at a time when things are not well with the people and work of God, when declension has set in; when things have lost their distinctive Divine character; when there is a falling short or an accretion of features which were never intended by God.

 

The Prophet in principle is one who represents, in himself and his vision, God’s reaction to either a dangerous tendency or a positive deviation. He stands on God’s full ground and the trend breaks on him.

 

That which constitutes this prophetic function is spiritual perception, discernment, and insight. The Prophet sees, and he sees what others are not seeing. It is vision, and this vision is not just of an enterprise, a “work,” a venture; it is a state, a condition. It is not for the work as such that he is concerned, but for the spiritual state that dishonors and grieves the Lord.

 

This faculty of spiritual discernment makes the Prophet a very lonely man, and brings upon him all the charges of being singular, extreme, idealistic, unbalanced, spiritually proud, and even schismatic. He makes many enemies for himself.

 

Sometimes he is not vindicated until after he has left the earthly scene of his testimony. Nevertheless, the Prophet is the instrument of keeping the Lord’s full thought alive, and of maintaining vision without which the people are doomed to disintegration.

 

While it has so often been an individual with whom the Lord has deposited His fuller thought and made His prophetic vessel, it has also very frequently been a company of His people in which He has been more utterly represented. Such companies are seen scattered down the ages. They were the Lord’s reactionary vessels. Such, surely, are the “Overcomers” of every “end-time.”

 

The mass of Christians may be too taken up with the externals and accepted ways of Christianity; too spiritually satisfied with the lesser; too bound by tradition and fettered by the established order. The Lord cannot do His full thing with them because He does not put His new wine into old wineskins; the skins would burst and the life be wasted, not conserved to definite purpose.

 

He finds Himself limited by an order which, while it may have been right at a certain time and for a certain period to carry His testimony up to a certain point, yet now remains as the fixed bound, and for want of an essential adjustableness His fuller purposes are impossible of realization. So it was with Judaism, so it has become with Christianity, and so it is with many an instrumentality which has been greatly used by Him.

 

There is no finality with us here, and it is dangerous to the Lord’s interest to conclude that, because the Lord led and gave a pattern at a certain time, that was full and final and must remain. Every bit of new revelation will call for adjustment, but revelation waits for such a sense of need as to at least make for willingness to adjust.

 

The Lord needs that which really does represent His fullest possible thought, and not those who are just doing a good work. But it costs; and this is the “burden of the valley of vision.”

 

T. Austin-Sparks

Overcomers

 

You see, the Remnant and Overcomers have as their function to be God’s vantage ground in a day of widespread spiritual declension and failure, to be vantage points, that upon which God can act and say. Here is my thought positively expressed; here is the thing that I am after! ‘That is the function of Overcomers to be to God like that. ‘Here is the thing ’(God is saying); ‘look at this….. look at Christ and His own as God wills them to be and you have what I am after, what My mind is!’ The Remnant is for that: God’s vantage ground in a day of declension to show the thing to others.

 

God’s thought concerning His Church is that it should be gathered out of the nations, slowly but surely formed into a bride worthy of giving to His Son as a gift, without spot or blemish or any such thing – given to Christ as His bride to be for Him the instrument, the agency, of filling and fulfilling the coming Kingdom throughout the ages. That is God’s thought about the Church.

 

Can we say that that is being realized in any commensurate way? No, but God holds to His thought and He seeks an inner company whom we are calling a Remnant or an Overcomer Company to stand for Him in this service, to be a link between Him and His full thought in His people, and to be that instrument for the realization of His full thought, to serve Him, to see His face. What is that? To be to His Son the agency of filling the Kingdom and fulfilling the Kingdom in the days to come. That is tremendous service. It is unto that that the Overcomers are called.

 

If you want to be in the work of the Lord, if you want to be the Lord’s servants, it is not given to a special class called ministers and missionaries. It is to a whole company, to every one who overcomes. “He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with Me in My throne” (Rev. 3:21); “…will I give to eat of the tree of life” (Rev. 2:7). These are all things symbolic of that full thought of God concerning His Church, gathered up and expressed firstly in Overcomers.

 

TAS