He had to be brought out and down
by the hand of the Lord and the
Spirit of God into the valley of dry
bones.
He had to see Israel's condition and plight,
not as he would have liked to have
seen it, or colored it romantically or idealistically
or with a false hope.
He had to see it in its grim
and ugly truth as it in fact is
as God himself sees it.
And only from that place could he then
speak.
See what I mean?
Seeing precedes speaking.
So the call of the prophet is to
see as God sees.
And it's often painful before it's glorious.
So how does the prophet see the Word
of God, which is altogether a condition for
speaking the Word of God, prophetically speaking it?
And it's foundational and fundamental to the prophet's
whole existence.
If he is pre-eminently a seer, he's
also pre-eminently a spokesman.
He's the mouthpiece of the living God.
So his attitude toward the Word, how he
views the Word, will affect how he speaks
it.
And one thing we know is that unlike
ourselves, the prophet sees the Word of God,
even issuing out of his own mouth, as
an event.
We see the Word as instruction.
We see the Word as descriptive.
And it has that function.
But its ultimate consideration as the Word of
God is that it affects something.
It does something.
It performs something.
The Word of God, when it comes, is
an event.
It raises the dead.
When the Son of Man speaks to the
bones, they come together.
That's not to say that it's always going
to be visible to us, but it will
have its effect and it will not return
to the Lord void, but fulfill the purpose
whereunto it is sent.
So the prophet is a sent man with
a sent word that will not return to
God void.
You may think so, and in fact part
of the frustration and the suffering of the
prophet, the perpetual martyrdom of the prophet, is
that very often, if not invariably, it will
seem as if his word has been without
effect.
Men will ho-hum and look at the
ceiling and look at their watches and look
at their clocks and flip through pages while
you're pouring out your soul and you feel
like the word has gone utterly without effect.
That's why Paul encourages us and reminds us
that our labors are not in vain.
Why does he have to say that?
Because he knows very often we're going to
feel like they are in vain.
And if we're going to look with our
natural eye at the result of our labors
or our speaking, we will shut ourselves up
in a closet and not go out.
We will be defeated before we begin.
There will be a sense of futility like
it's altogether without purpose and without effect.
So we have to have the prophetic faith
that though we do not see the evidence
of the word, God tells us that it's
not void and it shall not return to
him void.
So he gives it, it comes from him
and it returns to him.
And we are the instrumentality through which that
word is spoken.
But if we don't believe those things about
the word, if we have not that prophetic
faith about the word, it will not be
that.
Because as your faith is, so be it
unto you.
So what is required from us first is
a renewed appreciation, an exalted view of the
word.
Because if we have a debased view, what
shall we expect from those who hear us?
And in fact, isn't that the attitude of
the congregations that come to services?
They do not expect that the word that
they're hearing is God's word.
What they're hearing is an opinion, a man's
view.
It might be interesting, it might be amusing,
it might be instructive, but it's not going
to be an event.
It's only a man's word.
So maybe it's an ultimate act of faith
to believe that a word coming from a
man and through a man is the word
of God.
All the more when we know the man.
If we didn't know him, then we would
be helped because he's God's man of faith
and power and he comes out of the
wings mysteriously and disappears again after he delivers
it.
And we have more hope to believe that
that could be God's word because there's a
mystique.
But if we know the man and see
him in his humanity, see him in his
weakness, in his frailty, or as God himself
even teased the prophet of Ezekiel 37 and
said, son of man, can these bones live?
He was rubbing in to the teeth of
the prophet, his own awareness of his own
humanity, his own mortality, his own weakness.
So you, you will be reminded of that
continually.
And if the congregation has trouble to believe
that the word of God is God's word
through your mouth, how much greater is your
problem to believe it?
Can you believe the word of God through
your mouth?
You might believe it through art, but can
you believe it through you?
You know what I mean?
That's the ultimate faith that God can even
speak through you because who is more conversant
and more familiar with your fallibility and weakness
and contradiction and defect than yourself.
But isn't that the whole genius of the
faith is the incarnation of God in flesh?
And that God is somehow more glorified through
that.
That there's more honor to God in speaking
through frail vessels like Frieda at 2.30
this afternoon over a telephone than if God
had thundered in Phoenix, Arizona out of the
blue and thus saith the Lord King right
through the ceiling.
It's more glory to God to express himself
through Frieda than through some kind of anonymous
airy vacuum into which his voice comes.
It's God in the flesh that is the
glory.
We have this treasure in earthen vessels and
our own faith needs to be kindled that
God's word can come forth even out of
us.
The prophets had that exact struggle.
No man was more aware of his own
infirmity than the prophets of God.
Looking back now and reading them, we might
think that they were great giants of faith
and that they never had a moment's doubt.
You could believe that they went through the
same fits and the same doubts and the
same struggles as ourselves.
All the more when they're bearing a word
of impending judgment and they're the only one
bearing it.
And all of the other prophets whose credentials
are as impressive or more impressive than theirs
are saying exactly the opposite.
No, destruction will not come.
This is, after all, Israel.
Have you forgotten?
This is the covenantal nation and this is
Jerusalem, the sanctuary and the dwelling of God.
And this is his holy temple where he
said his presence would abide forever.
So you have got to be wrong.
You cannot talk about destruction to that nation
and to that city.
God's presence is here.
They're coming from another theological perspective that has
a foundation in the word to sustain it.
And they're a majority and they are all
saying the same thing.
Only you are taking another view.
So maybe you're wrong.
Maybe you're all wet and there'll be someone
at your elbow to tell you that.
You're all wet.
Where did you get that?
This is coming out of your own perverse
spirit.
This is because you didn't have a happy
childhood and your father was not the kind
of father that would have given you a
healthy foundation.
And therefore there's a warp in your soul.
And that's why you take a negative view.
And you're always talking about judgment because you
have never been right.
And so desire the best gifts.
Who's going to desire to be a prophet
if he has to go through this continual
anguish of doubt even about himself and the
word that proceeds from his own mouth.
And yet when it comes time to speak
and that time does come and must come,
he has got to speak.
For if he withholds the word in the
moment that God has appointed, the moment is
lost.
He might try to make it up later.
It will not be the same.
He has got to be obedient and got
to bring it forth against the face of
all doubt, against all voices raised against it,
against people falling asleep while he's speaking or
looking at the ceiling or gazing at the
clock or giving him looks that could kill
as if he's public enemy number one and
that he's a traitor to the faith and
that he's false.
He has still got to persist.
And that's why God says, don't look at
their faces.
I have made you a fortified city.
Well, you're not going to feel like it
in that moment.
You're going to feel like nothing other than
weakness and you're still required to speak.
It's the cross.
That moment of obedience is a suffering.
And that's why you'll often hear men like
me when they get up before they even
begin speaking, what you can hear is they're
signing, sighing and groaning.
You can almost hear them panting.
Here we go again.
Lord, a crisis moment has come and everyone,
everything is conspiring against what I think your
word is.
I must be wrong.
Everybody's rejoicing and having a ball and I'm
bringing and I have this negative thought and
yet the moment has come and I'm required
to speak it.
So it's an obedience unto death again and
again and again.
But you will not do it unless you
have a belief about that word.
You're not just bringing a piece of information
or an alternative opinion.
You're bringing God's own perspective and God's own
view that if men disregard and reject that,
the consequence for them is fearful.
There's a weight of responsibility and it all
comes together in a given moment.
And it's not just a crisis time of
issue of judgment.
It's like right now today, August 18th, right
now at this table, what's coming forth?
Is it human instruction?
Well, don't get so caught up with it.
Don't exaggerate.
This is just a little class and we're
examining a subject.
That's not the way a prophet would look
at it or an apostle.
For those men, every moment is an eternal
moment.
Every moment is charged with eternality and the
issues of life and death.
They have an exaggerated, compounded and intensive view
that no moment is just a moment and
that we can afford to relax or it
doesn't mean all that much.
For them it does mean all that much
and that's why it's an anguish.
If it was just a casual thing, well,
a man's opinion, we can afford to take
it or leave it.
But if it's a moment that shall not
be given again, and it's a once and
for all time, and this is the way
in which these foundational men perceive their moments,
charged and fraught with all significance, that they
would have to cry out with Paul, who
is sufficient for these things?
It'll crowd you into your prayer closet.
It'll bring you to the cross.
You'll recognize that in me is no good
thing at all.
And unless God has made something available through
his death and resurrection, we of all men
are most to be pitied.
If all we can hear is a man
with his own opinion, how pathetic, how weak,
how inept when we see the desperate condition
of the world and the need to hear
from God.
So we have to become serious about have
we really been crucified with Christ and died
to ourselves and have risen with him to
newness of life?
Who is it who's speaking?
Who is it who alone has the wisdom
and the ability and the authority to speak
a word in a crisis moment where life
and death is at stake and eternity is
at stake?
Will that be true at 2.30 when
Frieda speaks over the telephone on the issue
of syncretism about Indian religion and culture and
the Christian faith?
Is it exaggeration to say it's life and
death?
It's not an exaggeration.
We may not see the life and death
thing, but it will become one day a
life and death issue of what my brother
John will be saying in South Africa at
a critical juncture will very much reflect what
is being sewn into his spirit and understanding
now and will be called forth at that
time.
And if it had, if he had not
this preparation, death would have ensued rather than
life.
So I'm not getting dramatic.
In fact, I despise drama.
I despise melodrama.
I despise accentuating something unnecessarily or trying to
beef something up.
We don't need that.
The faith itself is charged by its very
nature with eternal consequence.
It's only the matter of our understanding that
and taking that into our deepest spirit and
the way that you will know that you've
come to that understanding, which is foundational for
both prophetic and apostolic men is when you
will cry together with Paul, who is sufficient
for these things.
When you cry that and it's a continual
cry, you're always saying that if not verbally,
you're crying it in your spirit.
You'll know that you understand the weight of
this life and its requirement.
And unless there's a resurrection, unless Jesus has
been raised from the dead and we with
him, we of all men are most to
be pitied.
For the issues are so grave, so utterly
significant that they can only be answered from
the ground of resurrection or not at all.
Resurrection is no longer a mere issue of
doctrine.
It's the issue of everything.
If there's no resurrection, not only are we
most to be pitied, but there's no hope
for anything in the world.
There's no hope through the church.
It has no message.
It has no vitality.
It has no authority.
It has no answer.
It has only problem.
It has only credo that is dry as
dust that has no life giving property.
Resurrection is the issue.
And we'll never see it more desperately than
when we believe that the word of God
is that issue.
And it's that issue through us in a
given moment when life and death and eternity
are at stake.
And that's what our life is.
And that's what our calling is.
That will save us from church becoming a
mere succession of Sundays and community becoming, what
do you call it?
Trailer houses, a trailer court.
The very same physical thing can become the
one or the other, depending on our attitude
toward it.
It's either a trailer court where we're living
in a happy rural setting and away from
the noise of the cities, or it's an
apostolic community fraught with the great issues that
are being worked out in our own relationship.
How do we see it?
Prophet is one who sees as God sees.
So we don't have to exaggerate anything.
The issues themselves, especially at the end of
the age, we're called to the consummation of
all things.
And that's why there's an invisible cloud of
witnesses overhead this morning.
Do you believe that?
Oh, come on, cats.
Now you're really going off the deep end.
God would bother to dispense a cloud of
witnesses over this little scrubby place because there's
a handful of students around a table.
He would reserve that for some more momentous
occasion.
Oh, yeah.
I wouldn't be surprised if Gihad Van Raad
himself is in the cloud overhead waiting to
see what we're going to do with his
material.
Because the scholarship has not done all that
much.
How will it feed itself into the life
stream of the church and have consequence in
the last days of the profoundest kind that
the church will take on a character and
a conduct that would not have been theirs
except God had given us through this man
precious insight and treasure.
And we're going to consider it today.
We need that presence.
We need the invisible cloud of witnesses.
They're not just passive idle observers.
They exert something.
I don't know what it is, but I
know they're exerting something because they are not
complete without us.
We're called to finish what they have begun.
And they have paid the price in sacrifice.
If you think scholarship is merely sitting down
at a desk, you don't know what you
want to know.
It's a continual suffering.
It's gut busting and brain busting to wade
in and root out and look at the
original language, the etymology of the word and
its origin.
What did God mean when he said to
Jeremiah, what do you see?
I see an almond tree.
What's the big deal?
It's only a big deal when you know
that in Hebrew, the word almond and the
word chosen are exactly the same consonants except
for one vowel.
And that in the use of the Hebrew
language, which this is the genius of Hebrew,
that words have valences and meanings and a
play on words that God often uses to
the prophets and through the prophets.
And when God said, what did you see?
And he says an almond in Hebrew, what
he's seeing is something chosen.
He's seeing a burden.
He's seeing an oracle, but that's lost to
us in English, but it's not lost to
Gehad Van Raad.
Why?
Because he broke his brains to learn Hebrew.
That's what scholarship is, the original language.
He wants to understand what was God saying
in that, that the German translation does not
yield, nor English.
And what have other scholars said about the
same thing?
What did Kyle and Dale say when they
wrote their commentary on the book of Jeremiah
or this one or that one?
Well, then you have to read what that
one said and ponder and wait.
One of the most remarkable things is to
read someone like Karl Barth, B-A-R
-T-H, and see how he reviews what
other scholars have said.
And you realize this is no cheapy.
He's not just dismissing these guys with a
wave of the hand.
He has really invested them himself in what
they have said.
He's really seriously considered what they have said.
He doesn't necessarily approve it, but he will
not reject it without first considering it deeply.
And it's a lifetime of study.
That's sacrifice.
And I've done all kinds of hard work
in my life.
Plumbing, pipe fitting, water, what do they call
that?
If there's a fire, sprinkler fitting, where the
pipes were six inches in diameter and we
had to cut the threads by hand or
take them up and tighten and put them
in place 65 feet off the ground on
a moving, what do you call it, platform.
And I'm a young Jewish squirt, an idealistic
kid, an adventurer in San Francisco finding a
job.
And the guys down below pushed the thing
away.
And I'm hanging 65 feet up in the
air on the pipe by the wrench.
And they're laughing below.
I mean, I've done hard work.
I've dug ditches.
I've been a seaman.
The hardest work I have ever done is
to be a teacher.
From that, I came home from school in
the afternoons absolutely wasted.
I went right to my bed.
I plopped down and I went out.
I was unconscious.
Body and soul, mind and spirit spent in
wrestling with students over words.
So I appreciate scholarship and we need to
appreciate it.
It's not anti-spiritual, that if you're of
the spirit, you don't need that.
God has given us great inheritance, a heritage,
and we want to receive that benefit.
So the prophet is the man of the
word.
It's fundamental, the basis of his existence and
the object of their theological reflection.
Their relationship to it was so personal and
direct.
The word was so exclusively bound up with
them at a specific time in the message
which God gave them that they found it
impossible to think of the word in some
objective way.
It had become specifically their own.
They had taken it into themselves.
They internalized it.
It was their own gut when they spoke
it.
And that's why the thing that distinguishes a
prophet from a teacher is that he's required
to live his word.
That's why Hosea had to marry a prostitute
and that's why Isaiah had to lose his
wife and not mourn publicly for her because
that loss was a statement to the nation.
Prophets invariably have to live their word, comes
out of their experience.
And so it's not some abstract thing.
It has been internalized and sifted through the
grid of their own experience.
And you can tell the difference when you
hear a man speak, whether the word is
just something clever that he has read, learned,
or heard from another tape and is now
speaking.
It's true, but it's not a compelling truth.
It's true, but it's not an event.
It bounces off rather than penetrates.
We can hear another man say the same
thing, and we're gasping.
We've been pierced through.
What's the difference?
For that man, the word has been sifted
and refined and brought through the furnace of
the earth of his own humanity seven times.
It's been put through the fire and it
comes out as a living word.
And the man is the word.
And that's why prophets are killed because you
cannot disassociate the word from the man.
And if you want to reject the word,
you have necessarily to put away the man.
So the prophetic word as the word of
God is its ultimate expression.
And I believe that the apostle subsumes all
of the other fivefold ministries.
He could do the work of an evangelist.
He's a teacher.
He's pastoral and he's also prophetic.
And when you read Paul, he's the supreme
apostle.
You could know when he's speaking prophetically.
So much of what Paul says is prophetic
proclamation.
He's speaking in that office subsumed in his
apostolic calling.
So isn't it remarkable that a German scholar
should see that and understand that?
Would to God that Germany raised up not
only scholars who understood it, but men who
portrayed it, particularly in the Nazi time, or
I would say even more before the Nazi
time, during the 1800s and the 1900s, when
German culture was effete, E-F-F-E
-T-E, when German culture was man honoring
and where Goethe, the great German poet, found
the cross abrasive and said that it need
to be garlanded with roses.
It's too rough to take it in its
biblical perspective that we need to soften it.
Where then was the prophet of God to
cry out against this stream of culture that
was adversely affecting the Christian faith itself?
Would to God that there were prophetic men
in Germany, there would probably not have been
a Hitler.
There would not have been a Nazism.
They would have called the German reformed church
to repentance for having moved away from Luther
and from its own foundations and had become
just a mere Sunday phenomenon.
If you want to hear that cry, you'll
need to hear the last message I spoke
in Germany on this very recent trip at
Nuremberg.
I sent that same tape to a German
brother in Australia.
I'll have to read you his email reply.
He was astonished, stupefied.
He was aghast.
He listened to it on his car radio.
It's a wonder he didn't go into a
ditch.
He said he was brought to depths of
repentance himself for that word, because in that
word, I was charging the German church with
its failure, its historic failure, and that its
repentance for the Jew, toward the Jew was
false and sentimental and shallow, because it had
not recognized what it itself needs to repent
for, that the sin of Germany is the
sin of Israel, one and the same, two
religious bodies who have forfeited God and had
kept the husk of their faith and lost
its vitality and meaning, because it had become
subservient to its culture and to its economy
and to its way of life.
It had become a Saturday and a Sunday
addendum, rather than the foremost purpose for their
being.
And when these Germans heard that cry, the
wife of the pastor said to me afterwards,
from the moment that the first word came
out of your mouth, it was like a
sword.
And they came forward and proliferated their bodies
all over the orphan and cried out before
God in great depth of anguish of soul
and repentance that broke forth later into singing
in the spirit.
And I said, this, now that what you're
doing, you'll hear this on the tape, is
more terrifying to the powers of darkness over
Nuremberg and Germany than all of your charismatic
worship to this time, because this song is
born out of authentic repentance that came to
you through the word that was sent.
Got the picture?
You can hear that tape and see if
I'm exaggerating.
Well, would to God that they had heard
words like that before the advent of Hitler
in the 19th century, when they were promoting
a syncretistic culture that was at harmony with
philosophy and ethics and morality and poetry to
diffuse and lose the apostolic character of the
faith.
Where was the prophet then who would cry
out?
There was one.
Anybody got to guess what his name is?
Karl Marx?
No.
I'm talking about the 1800s.
Nietzsche.
You ever hear of him?
You have an obligation to hear of him.
You have an obligation to understand history and
to know what takes place in time, because
it's the story of God.
Well, this is a man who died in
insane asylum.
I'm not sure if he committed suicide, but
I think he went insane.
He was very much like his Danish counterpart
who cried out against the same bourgeois culture
in Denmark, whose name was Kierkegaard.
What's his first name?
Sorin.
S-O-R-I-N.
You guys writing this down?
Hey, Kierkegaard, K-I-E-R-G-E
-G-A-A-R-D.
You need to read him.
One of his books is called The Heresy
of Heart.
No.
Yeah.
But I'm talking about the one, the word
Christianity.
It's argument against, attack on Christianity.
What a title.
Attack on Christianity.
He could not stand this middle-class bourgeois
effete Christianity that was subservient to the prevailing
culture and had lost its prophetic and apostolic
character.
You know where I had my wilderness experience?
In Denmark, my wife's country.
After I was kicked out as the head
of the New York branch of this Jewish
Mission Society, the Lord sent us to Denmark,
and there was my wilderness experience.
Not because it was rough, but because it
was effete, E-double-F-E-T-E.
Because it was coffee at four o'clock,
no matter if the world was coming to
an end, with three different kinds of cake
every time.
It's because of the creature life, the good
life that the Danes celebrate over every other
consideration.
It was because even charismatic men were terrified
of being baptized in water, where they looked
upon an adult believer's baptism as the forfeiture
of their infant sprinkling and were terrified even
to consider it, let alone to do it.
It was for me an anguish to live
in such a nation for those months.
It was a wilderness.
And so it was for Kierkegaard, who died
in his 30s.
It killed him.
So there were voices raised up, but they
were not heard by their nation.
And many of these same conditions prevail today
that only a prophetic cry can answer.
People need to hear God's view of it,
or otherwise they think that what they're experiencing
is normative.
Their life is dying by degrees.
There's a daily death, and they don't know
it.
Their life is a death.
Their days are predictable, mundane, ordinary, insignificant, feeding
their creature life.
It has no eternal consequence or meaning.
And they think that that's it.
They go to the entertainments of a ballgame
to break the monotony or steep themselves under
stupefaction before the TV set, and they're dying
by the millions.
And no one is raising their voice to
cry out against the whole way of life
that is full of death.
So there's a great need for the prophetic
voice and the prophetic word.
Okay.
A critical account of the prophetic concept of
the word is needed all the more urgently
today in that we simply cannot assume that
our conception of the word of God or
of the function of words in general is
identical with that held by the prophets.
Oh, what a juicy statement.
We cannot assume that their concept is our
concept, not only of the word of God,
but of words itself, the phenomenon of word,
the phenomenon of speaking, that they have the
same attitude about it that we have.
We need to go back and find out
how they viewed it because very likely their
prophetic and Hebraic sense of words and their
meanings was far different than what we understand
as modern Western people today.
We see language only as a conveyance to
give meaning or illustration or explanation, but they
saw the word, not just the word of
God, but words as having an inherent power
in themselves, that the faculty of speech was
the most significant gift of God of what
was essential to his own deity given to
men, that no other thing that he created
has the capacity for speech than man.
They had an exalted view of speaking itself
and of words that we have lost in
our generation because our generation has become psychobabble.
Our generation is blah.
Ours is sound and fury signifying nothing.
Whose quotation is that?
Shakespeare.
Boy, did he ever hit the nail on
the head.
There's more blah, more profusion of words in
our generation and our than ever in the
history of mankind.
You want to see what I throw away
every day in mail that comes to me.
I throw it on the floor as I'm
reading it from the bed.
And when I have to get up later,
the floor is littered with religious propaganda and
four color appeals and societies and newspapers and
into the garbage can.
I thought, my God, what a waste of
all that paper, all that ink, all that
human.
And what is it?
It's a beep.
So it's a remarkable paradox that in all
of this profusion of much worse, what are
these TV program?
These hosts, these talk shows, talk, talk, talk.
I don't think I've watched the program in
the last 50 years, but when I visit
my mother, whose TV set in Florida is
on continually, it includes the late show or
the talk shows.
And I listened for a few minutes to
the cheap, profane, vulgar and obscene, sexually loaded
innuendos and so-called human.
I want to gag and people will run
and don't on these personalities with their blah.
If you don't think that word and speaking
is being daily debased, you don't know.
And to have speech debased and the faculty
of speech denigrated is to rob men of
their humanity.
And that's why they're shooting each other in
schools.
They're capable of the most atrocious acts.
And this jerk can walk into the Jewish
community center in Los Angeles and shoot five
kids and an adult.
And there's this picture in Time magazine as
he's being taken by the authorities.
And he's got a smile on his face
as if he's done God's service.
There was a review in yesterday's Time magazine
about Princess Diane.
Some woman has made a psychological study and
called her a nitwit that she had very,
very little mental faculty.
And though she had the most pressing psychological
and emotional problems of personality, she went to
astrologists or took pressure baths or milk baths
or I don't know, just a nitwit attitude
toward life and yet one of the most
celebrated personalities.
There's a whole profusion of words, but there's
a famine for the word of God in
the land.
People are perishing for the want of a
true word.
One brother was saying, if you go back
and look at the papers of the 1700s,
as opposed to now, he said, you wouldn't
believe that.
Almost back then you would have to take
out a dictionary to read the newspaper, as
opposed to now.
So we have to begin not just with
an understanding of the word of God, but
an understanding of words, period, per se.
And the heightened respect for the faculty of
speech, which will be reflected in the way
in which we ourselves exercise it.
We ourselves will not give ourselves to blab.
Our words will be fewer, but more worth
hearing.
So the way in which speaking and words
are understood today is different from the way
it was understood by prophets.
Today it's an aggregate of sounds to convey
meaning.
It's a phonetic entity which enables men to
communicate with one another and is therefore a
vehicle used for purposes of intellectual self-expression.
This function of the word, the conception of
it as bearing and conveying an idea, is
however far from covering the meaning which language
had for ancient peoples, not only Israel, but
other of the ancient peoples of the world.
Pagans had a view of words very much
in keeping with the way Hebrews looked upon
the word.
And that's why they could bestow curses and
blessings.
And that if a man said something fearful,
it was something that would be consequential.
Because a word set something in motion.
A word became an event.
And they had, even as pagans, a greater
respect for what is spoken than we today.
But in fact our view today may be
completely opposite to the conception with which words
were held in that earlier time.
Because then a word was much more than
something which indicates or designates a certain object.
Man's perception of the world about him was
more unified.
That there was not secular and sacred the
way we see it today.
And that the sacred thing takes place on
Sunday and that the weekdays are something else.
The whole thing was sacred.
There was not the disparity or the breaking
up or the categorizing of things that we
have as modern men.
But they saw things whole.
The whole of life was charged with meaning.
The secular thing was a sacred thing.
And we see that as a carryover in
primitive religions where they see in rocks and
nature significant things.
I'm not saying that God is invested in
those things.
But there's something to be said for a
mentality and a perception of reality that does
not categorize and compartmentalize.
And that we have acceded to that and
allowed the world to define what reality is
as sacred and secular.
That is a lie.
For us, it is all sacred.
That's the way God sees it.
And that's the way that God would have
meant to see it.
Because once they have made such a separation,
then the secular thing becomes a cheap thing.
And the sacred thing is no longer sacred.
It's just a Sunday phenomenon.
So we're called to bring a world into
seeing as God sees.
And words are the instrument for that.
Between spiritual and material, the ideal and the
real, word and object.
The prophets believed that the Hebrew way of
understanding words is that the word had to
do with the object itself.
The Hebrew word for word, Daba, D-A
-B-A-R or D-A-V-A
-R, means the same thing as word and
as event.
The word Daba means event, but it also
means word.
Because they saw the word as an event.
The word was a happening.
To say it and to name it was
to cause it.
And it's not coincidental that the first function
that God gives to Adam is to name
the animals.
That when he named them, so to speak,
not that he created them, he gave them
its authentic identity and meaning.
The word that he chose to employ was
not just a label, it was an event.
It was involved, so to speak, in the
bringing forth of what God had created into
its actuality.
Can you picture that?
Our words are charged.
Well, we know that with the mouth is
the power to bless but to curse.
And fools in the book of Proverbs are
those who speak words mindlessly.
Even today, in Proverbs 18, in the tongue
is the power to bless but to curse.
And that's the Hebraic view, but it's not
the modern view.
And though modern man does not see it
that way, that's the way it in fact
is.
And his words will either injure, cripple, kill,
or bless.
And what goes on behind closed doors and
drawn shades, only God knows.
And what men speak, rail, shout, yell, curse,
or listen to.
And when their kids freak out, they wonder
how come.
Because something has gone into the spirit, the
human spirit of these kids from the volume
of things that they have heard.
When you think about all that rap music
and all that kind of thing, it just
totally devastates.
When you just barely listen, I hate that,
just a beat of it.
And we could say something about silence.
You can't speak about speaking and not speak
about silence.
That there's something to be said for silence.
That unless there's a respect, if not a
reverence for silence and for quiet, speaking will
then necessarily be debased.
That we'll appreciate sound because we appreciate quiet.
And there's not enough of that appreciation.
This is a whole generation that has always
something glued to its ears.
It's wearing its sound thing as it carries
the thing, as it jogs, as they do
their homework.
This generation can't stand silence.
But silence is precious.
And maybe it's foundational to understanding the value
of words because it comes out of a
respect first for quiet.
So Van Raad says it was only when
men gave the animals their names that they
existed for him and were available to his
use.
The word that he gave and the name
that he gave established the identity of the
reality of that thing.
That's the way the Hebrews saw it.
It brings those things into being when it
is recited.
Maybe that's why the early church recited the
Apostles' Creed.
Because when you recite it, it's not just
a mindless articulation.
You're bringing again the reality of those words
into your spirit as faith.
So this is a conception of the word
which was more dynamic, where a word stood
for something, affected something, created something.
How much more when it's the word of
God if that's the nature of mere words
themselves?
He says, one can well ask whether language
has not become impoverished because it has lost
functions which at an earlier cultural level had
once belonged to it.
Isn't that a beautiful statement?
Has language become impoverished?
Has it become a blah because we have
lost the sense of what words mean and
what they convey?
Truly.
And if words and language have become impoverished,
what about those who bear them, who are
affected by them?
The whole of life is impoverished.
Mankind is impoverished even to the point of
losing its divine identity and reflecting the image
of him who made it.
Satan is busy in defacing man and destroying
the image of God in man and making
man a blob.
And the surest way is to attack the
issue of speech itself and to debase it
and to impoverish it.
And that's why our kids are hardly capable,
I'm speaking very generally, of more than grunts.
You'll ask them a question, how did you
feel?
They don't know how to frame a thought.
They're impoverished.
They don't know how to assess, to evaluate,
to reflect.
A brother here brought up a precious insight
on the word amusement.
We are an amused generation.
The amusement industry is on the stock market.
Disney Studios is one of the leading parameters
of the health of the economy and what
its status is in terms of its rise
and fall in percentage points.
Because it's got Disneyland and it's got movie
producing faculties and the entertainment thing is an
industry, maybe the most massive industry.
And $19 billion a year is spent by
teenagers and kids on amusement.
Toys, films, video, their electronic gimmicks, it's all
to be amused.
So a brother once shared with us a
very precious insight.
When you look at the etymology and the
root meaning of the word amused, as we
ought to look, the prefix a- before
any word negates the word.
Atheist is denying Theo, God.
An atheist is one who denies God.
What is amusement?
It denies and negates musing.
What does muse mean?
M-U-S-E.
To reflect, to ponder, to consider, to weigh
up, to analyze, to critique, to examine.
And I would say that those functions are
the very genius of what it means to
be human.
That one who cannot assess, evaluate, critique, and
examine has forfeited his humanity.
He's just a metabolism.
He's something that will consume so many meals
and wear out so many clothes and occupy
so much space, but his life is without
any telling value.
And if we prophetic men need to stand
for anything, we need to stand for what
God has created in his own image.
Man is the statement of God.
And if that is debased and made animalistic
and cheap and a mere physical kind of
thing that gorges itself and has nothing but
to be amused and to sit before TV
sets and burp, it's a disgrace to God.
It's a dishonoring of his name and of
the model of creation itself.
We need to stand for that reality.
That's why I had to write a letter
to the editor about Star Wars, that this
commercialization, that Pepsi-Cola Corporation paid George Lucas
$2.5 billion for the exclusive rights to
use the Star Wars themes and entities for
the promotion of its products so that you
can collect its Pepsi-Cola cans because every
can has another figure.
And so there's a continuation of this product
materialistic thing that's tied in with the entertainment
until you're satiated, until you're wallowing, until you're
drowned in it and debased in it.
You become to look like and to be
the same as these demonic figures.
You have become demonized and it's part of
mass saturation and the process of merchandise that
they will make as much if not more
from the spin-off products of little dolls
and Pepsi-Cola than they made from the
film itself, though the film itself is a
multi-million dollar epic.
They'll get back their investment.
One of the most expensive films ever made
in the first weeks in which it is
shown around the world.
Power of mammon and of money and of
profit and of greed debasing what is made
in God's image, ruining an entire generation of
youth and preparing them to be the cruel
masters who will persecute the church in the
last days without pity and without compassion for
they are without natural affection.
How do they become that where they can
murder and spill blood because by the time
that they're 15 they have seen 40,000
murders on TV and rape and pillage and
looting and the so-called news is itself
atrocious.
And while we're silent and our voice is
not heard in crying out prophetically against this
attack on God's image.
So there's a, Gerhard von Rath says, there's
a mysterious power of creation in words itself.
Language can produce something new or an intensified
form of something already in existence.
That is to say language itself became creative
and this is a possibility which language has
never lost even to this day.
That's it.
I wish you'd been here for morning prayer
time where we read through a psalm and
the psalmist co-joined two words, refuge and
saving.
He said, you're a saving refuge.
It's like touching two wires and the electric,
the bringing together of two words in a
creative juxtaposition transformed both words spoken separately.
It was the bringing together of them in
a new form and pattern that opened up
a creative possibility and makes you gasp.
See what I mean?
That possibility is with us always.
Words have that creative possibility but I doubt
very much if we're going to see it
unless there are men who believe it and
desire it and will express it.
So we know about the power of blessing
and curse and if there's anything that distinguishes
Jeremiah and the prophets was to bring to
the attention of an apostate generation that the
covenant of which you are heir has at
his heart and pivot this prospect that for
Israel there's no middle route.
There's no getting by and that's the mentality
of the modern world today.
As the students used to come up to
my desk at the beginning of school years,
Mr. Katz, what do I need to do
to get by?
There's no getting by for Israel.
It's either blessing or curse.
Radical alternative and it's in the code.
It's in Deuteronomy.
It's in the word of God.
It's in the promise of the covenant.
If you'll walk in my way and walk
in my ordinances in a way pleasing before
me and do all that I speak to
you this day, you will be blessed.
Your enemies will be routed.
The fear of you will go before you.
One will overcome a thousand, but if you
turn from my way, if you reject my
word, if you despise my Sabbaths, this is
what will befall you.
You'll be cast out of the land.
The sword will pursue you.
At night you will wish it were day.
At day you will wish it were night.
Blessing or curse through the word and so
the prophet who has steeped himself in the
word of God and in Deuteronomy and the
law of God, which word is timeless, is
now required to bring that consciousness to a
generation to which it's entirely lost and is
standing at the very threshold of experiencing that
curse.
Talk about a weight of responsibility.
Von Raad being the scholar that he is,
who knows not only Hebrew as an original
language, knew also Greek as well as Latin.
That was once called classical education and I've
got two advanced degrees and I don't know
a word of Latin or Greek and what
I know of Hebrew you can give to
any kid who has had any exposure to
Hebrew school because we moved away from classical
education.
It's too hard.
Do you know that in Europe kids go
to school five and a half days a
week?
Do you know that Japanese students have a
third more hours of instruction than American kids?
And that's, having been a teacher, I know
how much of those hours are waste and
sound and furious against it and find nothing
and doing little exercises or projects and stuff
like that.
The classical education centered in languages, but the
center in languages, the center in the culture
of those languages is to understand the mindset.
What is the Greek mentality?
How do they view life?
What is their understanding about time?
How do they understand history?
What did they value?
How is it that the Greeks gave us
the philosophers, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle were
Greek and a classic education was to read
their works in their language.
No wonder that we have men like the
scholar in England who wrote a whole series
of books, the tales, something.
C.S. Lewis, scholar, classical scholar.
But when he came to the faith and
brought that whole background into his examination of
scripture, what a wealth for those of us.
And his mind and skill and articulation brought
even a depth of understanding about the scripture
itself.
His mind had been shaped and formed and
schooled in languages and the cultures of ancient
civilization.
So here's a little note that Gehart von
Raad brings about Greek understanding of language, that
it not only conveyed meaning, but it brought
a certain music, that Greek has a lyrical
and musical quality that even Hebrew does not
have.
And that the Greeks so celebrated that, that
their dramas and plays and poems and recitations
were not only enjoyed for the content and
the meaning, but for the sound of it.
It was both an aesthetic as well as
an intellectual experience.
It was like a full meal.
Well, once in a while when I get
carried away, I think, what would a real
sermon be?
A prophetic word of God that not only
bore great meaning, but had a symphonic quality
to it.
Like when you listen to Beethoven and his
fifth symphony, that
theme walks all the way through
this entire symphony and comes to a great
epic of conclusion that's majestic.
And when it's over here, it's an experience.
How would the word of God be if
it had symphonic proportions?
It began with and then it would rise
in crescendo and come to a great and
awesome climax that you've not only heard a
meaning, but something has been conveyed with it
that comes in the totality of yourself in
all your humanity, you have experienced a word
as well as heard it.
That's preaching.
The prophets were called preachers and preaching itself
is a lost art.
And it's more than homiletics on how to
do it.
It's how to convey the word that will
become an experience for the hearer, an event
of a life-changing and transfiguring kind.
And I'll tell you that if we had
a church like that, hearing from preachers like
that, you would not only be the church
that would be transfigured, but society itself.
Something of that has got to spill over
into the world.
So may the Lord heighten and renew our
respect for words and their use, their creative
possibility, even their melody and their rhythm as
well as their content.
And I can't believe that the instrument through
which those things pass will himself be unaffected.
That is if he's himself just a vehicle
for the transmission and he himself is not
affected by what passes through him.
He has got to be affected.
He's changed even as he's communicating to others.
That word itself has a salutary effect on
his own spirit, his own understanding.
Often he's instructing himself out of his own
mouth.
He's not only speaking to his hearers, he's
speaking to himself.
Because as I've often said, I can't wait
to sound this, to speak this, because I
want to hear what I'm saying.
I want to hear what God is saying.
That's how I waited for this class to
begin.
I had never spoken this before about the
freedom of a prophet or the word of
God in this way.
And I'm wanting to hear it.
I need to hear it for myself, but
I will not hear it until it's spoken
for you.
It's an experience for me as it is
for you.
I'm transformed and affected myself in the speaking
as you are in the hearing.
And that's the way it ought to be.
And that's how the church will move from
faith to faith and glory to glory.
It's transformed by its own word, both in
the speaking and in the hearing.
And if transformation will not come through, that
means it will not come at all, because
it is the sole, exclusive instrumentality of God
will not employ another, for he himself is
the word.
See what we're doing even now?
I'm glancing down at things that I've marked,
picking up a word or phrase and then
letting the Lord round it out.
So there's a creative process taking place right
now, even in sharing this, that is exclusive
to the word.
What a privilege to be involved in a
creative process.
I hope you'll understand me rightly when I
say, like unto God, that he brooded over
the chaos, his spirit moved and he spoke
and he created.
And that we are also invited in some
measure to the same privilege.
And it's happening right now over this table.
It happened this morning in our devotional time.
It may happen tonight.
The possibility is always before us.
We should have the faith to anticipate it
and expect it, because faith is expectation and
will actually draw it out of God's heart.
We're called to be co-creators.
Isn't that remarkable?
Through the faculty of speech.
The words of a verse in Greek, it
can be said of it that it's also
a music as well as a meaning.
And that this is equally true of many
of the utterances of the Old Testament prophets.
They were poets.
We think that a poet is some kind
of pansy.
We might even question whether he is fully
a man.
I could tell you that the Psalmists and
the prophets, as we said, were manly men,
but they were also poets.
What's the genius of poetry?
What's the difference between poetry and prose?
It has a rhythm.
Poetry has a rhythm?
Definitely.
It is a kind of music.
It's a lyrical thing.
It's a delight to read.
Even the sound of it falls on the
ear.
How else is it different?
What is prose?
We call people prosaic.
To be prosaic is to be ordinary.
Prose is the ordinary use of words for
mere communication.
To expound an idea or to describe something
or to instruct.
I'm not knocking that.
We need that.
But what is the distinction of poetry that
the Psalms are poetic?
What we read this morning was poetic.
Certain rhythm, a certain play on words, a
certain repetition of words, a certain contrast between
the wicked men and the works of their
hands who despise the work of God's own
hand.
It's a play on the word hands and
work.
It's poetic.
After all, it's only one and a half
pages long.
It's only several verses, but in that is
compressed a meaning that if it were expounded
in prose would take several pages.
So poetry is a more intensive form of
communication than prose.
It's one thing to write a novel or
a book, but try writing a poem.
How many drafts must you make for the
rhythm, for the assonance, for the sound, the
quality of sound, for the rhyme, for the
penetration?
I'm trying to think of some poems.
I like William Wordsworth, the English poet, who
greatly offended by the commercialization of his own
age in England and the Industrial Revolution and
how it was destroying the souls of men,
wrote a poem in which he said, in
getting and spending we make waste our powers.
Little we find in nature that is ours.
We've lost even the capacity to benefit from
God's creation.
We've lost the faculty and the power because
of the commercialization of the age.
He says, standing on this lee, looking out
at the sea, he describes himself as standing
on a kind of a cliff looking out
at the ocean.
He said that Triton would rise, the ancient
mythical god of the sea, with his trident.
I'd much rather have
a faith of a pagan than be forlorn
and wasted as a modern person who has
lost everything and whose Christianity is pablum because
it has become victim to the age.
I'd rather be a pagan with a faith
in something rising out of the sea than
I should come to a destitute condition, impoverished,
where I'm incapable of even benefiting from nature.
In another poem he speaks of himself as
a lad.
He grew up in the lake country.
I've never been there in England.
He said, when then I was a lad.
Instead of saying, when I was a young
man, he said, when then I was a
lad.
He's saying the same thing, but he's saying
it in an unusual word form.
Where do we get an image of a
young man walking through the flowers and the
grass and the nature and the trees?
When then a lad I was, I forgot,
something like that.
That's poetry.
Poetry is a more intensive form of communication
and a more penetrating way of piercing the
consciousness of the hearer than the ordinary conveyance
of words.
Prophets and psalmists were poets.
Isaiah is a poet.
When you read him, remarkable what is compressed
and condensed in one chapter.
Chapter 35 of Isaiah, nature itself.
He talks about hills skipping like lambs and
trees clapping their hands.
These are poetic figures.
He says more in one chapter in Isaiah
35 about Israel's exile and movement through the
wilderness of the nations.
That would have taken chapters and prose to
describe.
The wilderness and the dry land shall be
glad.
He's ascribing to inanimate nature the ability to
observe and have an understanding and even to
have an emotion.
Where does he take that liberty?
He's wanting to make a point.
And so he invests nature with qualities that
it probably does not have.
But it says something.
Right away your attention is grabbed.
What?
Nature is observing something and is glad about
something?
What must that something be?
The desert shall rejoice and blossom at this
something.
It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with singing,
with joy and singing.
The glory of Lebanon shall be given to
it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.
They shall see the glory of the Lord,
the majesty of our God.
What in fact shall they see?
They're going to see Jews in their bedraggled
condition, having been cast out of their nation
and their places of security in the world,
being forced apart, so to speak, through the
wilderness of the nations.
It's a despairing sight and yet nature is
rejoicing over it and abounding and for having
them pass through itself because when they see
that they know that the end is near.
That this last trial of Israel, however grim
it now is, will end with blessing and
rejoicing as God restores this nation and the
remnant of it through the very trial and
establishes his coming in his kingdom.
And that the nation, that creation that is
under a curse, Paul speaks about that, that
is groaning and travailing till now will rejoice
for the sons of God that are coming
into fulfillment.
You can look at that at your own
leisure.
He's writing prophetically and poetically to convey remarkable
meaning in few words.
So if we're not all poets, we all
ought to bear some resonance of this in
our speaking.
If nature will respond to words and sound,
what of men?
Well, let's have a little break, a little
prayer, and come back for, have a little
word, conclude.
One of the things I want to do
today, perhaps tonight, is to read prophecy in
this edition of the most significant journal on
the prophetic phenomenon published in England, Prophecy Today,
in which they actually publish a prophetic statement
that says, Thus saith the Lord, and what
I'm going to ask you is, do you
witness the Lord in that statement?
Here's a prophetic magazine printing, so to speak
in italics, a statement that they believe that
they have received prophetically, and you'll not find
anything in that statement to contest.
It's full of truth, it's descriptive of the
condition of the world and what it speaks
of, everything in it is true.
My question is, the fact that it's true,
is it the word of God?
Can we put the appellation and the title,
Thus saith the Lord, to a statement that
did not come to us from God, but
that we imagined it did, or that it's
just something in our own thought and spirit
that happens to be true, and call that
a Thus saith the Lord?
And if we do, what are we doing
to the word of God?
What are we affecting, even though the content
may be true, if it's not actually God's
own word, however true it is, what are
we doing in the name of prophecy against
the prophetic word?
Do you understand what I'm saying?
And I'm not saying that it's not the
word of God, I'm going to ask you
if you witness it.
Do you see how subtle this is?
The content is unquestionably true, but does that
make it God's own word?
The fact that something is true, and that
we can state it, can we call that
the word of the Lord?
Or is there really something beyond that, that
is so sacred, that can only come out
of the counsel of God?
Maybe after the break we'll come in Jeremiah
himself, where Jeremiah speaks about the false prophets
and God's condemnation of them, because they have
not spoken his word, because they ran when
they were not sent, and because they expressed
as a Thus saith the Lord that which
they had never been given.
If that is not a description of the
prophetic phenomenon today that is being so celebrated,
I don't know what is.
So how jealous we need to be for
that word that has its origin in God.
That's not to say that truthful things should
not be spoken, but let's not label them
as a Thus saith the Lord if the
Lord himself has not said that.
So Lord, grow us up in these things,
sharpen our discernment, my God, as men who
are not amused, but as men who muse,
who reflect, who weigh up, who consider, who
are critical in the best sense of the
word, who evaluate, who can tell the difference
between a word that is true and a
word that is from God, because we're called,
my God, to convey those things.
So thank you for today, Lord, and enlarge
our cup to receive all that you're saying.
It will not return to you void, because
if it's sent, it will accomplish that purpose
for which it is sent, and we bless
you in that.
Thank you for this day, Lord.
Honor our fasting.
No big deal, but we're willing to put
aside the gratification of natural food, making more
room for you, Lord, and we pray that
you'll honor and bless it and give us
from your table something more precious for that
reason.
Give us a little breather now and bring
us back with renewed ability, my God, to
hear your continuation and conclusion of these matters.
We thank and give you praise for the
privilege.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.