Over verse 9 in italics, you know the
way that often there will be a designation
to indicate what the content that follows is
about.
My statement in italics over verse 9 of
chapter 23 says, false prophets of hope denounced.
Then it goes on to say, concerning the
prophets, my heart is crushed within me.
All my bones shake.
I have become like a drunkard, like one
overcome by wine because of the Lord and
because of his holy words.
For the land is full of adulterers because
of the curse.
The land mourns.
The pastures of the wilderness are dried up.
Their course has been evil.
Their might is not right.
Both prophet and priest are ungodly.
Even in my house, I have found their
wickedness.
So one of the last and ultimate symptoms
of the decay of a civilization, of a
society that had its origin in God is
the collapse of prophet and priest.
And there's a remarkable conjunction between these two
callings.
Elsewhere, we read that the prophets prophesy falsely
and the priests bear rule by their means.
There's a kind of a fraternity between religious
functionaries, men who may have one time have
had authentic calling and have allowed it to
slip over a process of time and to
be corrupted, find themselves in some kind of
mutual agreement by which one affirms the other.
But it's in a lie.
It's in something false.
It is something that has turned from spirituality
to religion.
And the consequence is a moral collapse of
the nation itself.
As the priest, so also the people.
As the prophets, so also the priest.
So I can't say enough for the centrality
or the significance of the priestly function in
the church of God, in the society of
God, in the Israel of God, for which
the nation Israel is our textbook.
And we're seeing a reiteration as we come
to the end of the age, some of
the same factors and issues that were in
the time of Jeremiah are becoming now our
own.
It's for that reason, unconsciously, without being aware
of this fully, that the Lord had us
to give our entire last summer's prophetical school
to the prophet Jeremiah.
And the subtitle was Prophet of the Last
Days.
The ancient prophet is the prophet of the
last days because we sense his anguish.
We know his loneliness.
We understand why he was cast into a
cistern, not just as a kind of a
statement of the irritation of a society that
didn't want to hear his ungainly words, but
as a condemnation unto death.
There's no word to describe what that must
have been like to have been put into
that muddy hole that was once a cistern
that held water and to be sucked into
that clammy mud and the terrible blackness without
so much as a water, a piece of
food or bread or anything, but just to
expire and to be extinguished in that lonely
place was the fate to which he was
consigned by his king and by a society
that rejected his word and therefore rejected the
man.
Because you can't separate the man from the
word.
They are one and the same.
And if we don't want to receive the
word, we'll find a way to renounce the
man and to condemn and to reject him.
The fact that he was pulled out of
that cistern by a black man, an Ethiopian
eunuch, is not an accident of history, but
I think a remarkably significant statement of what
will be a saving grace for men like
myself or maybe the whole prophetic entity of
the last days, that a eunuch who is
the least in the household of the king
had the audacity, the courage to say to
this king, you shouldn't allow this prophet to
expire and let me go and pull him
out and made cord out of rags and
let it down and to pull the prophet
up by the most unseemly and humble means
of extraction, a black servant, a eunuch, the
lowest of the esteem in the household of
a king, using rags to form a rope,
pulls the prophet up out of his muddy
grave.
So who knows what the implications are for
our black brothers in the last generation and
us prophetic men in the kind of a
saving grace that will come to us through
them because they have the courage even to
defy a king because though the court of
the king and the false prophets of the
king damned the true prophet and loved to
see him to expire in that hole, a
black man was able to perceive that this
is the servant of God and that it
would dishonor the nation to allow him so
to expire and whatever the risk to himself
in coming to the king and asking for
permission to pull him out, he was yet
willing to make that request.
There's so much here that's why I'm frustrated
and it is so overwhelming where God's grief
is expressed when the index of the state
of the house of Israel is reflected in
the condition of both its prophets and its
priests and that would be a statement for
us in the end also.
That's why we need to be so jealous
with regard to this calling.
If we allow that to slip, we allow
that to fall, if we accept questionable definitions
or understanding, if we allow a too frequent
even use of the word as a designation
where it's not appropriate, we're already losing enormously
significant ground.
Well, in verse 15, therefore says the Lord
of hosts concerning the prophets, I'm going to
make them eat wormwood and give them poisoned
water to drink for from the prophets of
Jerusalem ungodliness has spread throughout the land.
So you can see that the prophet is
not a peripheral thing but a central thing
and what his position and condition is, is
not on the index but the cause of
affecting the entire nation and bringing it to
such a place of low condition before God.
Verse 16, thus says the Lord God of
hosts, do not listen to the words of
the prophets who prophesy to you.
They are diluting you.
They speak visions of their own minds, not
from the mouth of the Lord.
They keep saying to those who despise the
word of the Lord, it shall be well
with you.
And to all who stubbornly follow their own
stubborn hearts, they say, no calamity will come
upon you.
This is so representative.
This is so much at the heart of
what is false.
It's a false assurance, a false comfort given
to those who even despise the word of
God and yet don't despise the false prophets
because the false prophets serve a function to
reinforce them and give them a kind of
thing that they want to hear by which
they will have an assurance.
There's always a market.
There's always a ready audience for the false
prophet.
In fact, the greater numbers will run to
him than the one who is true.
And if we're interested in numbers and the
response that numbers bring, we will already be
on a track to becoming false if we
need that kind of overt recognition.
So for who has stood in verse 18
in the counsel of the Lord so as
to see and hear his word?
Who has given heed to his word so
as to proclaim it?
The word who indicates that there are not
many who it's like the like the eye
of God roving to and forth over the
face of the earth seeking that one who
is there one who has stood in the
counsel of the Lord so as to hear
the word of God to give heed to
it so as to proclaim it?
Is there so much as one?
Because evidently it's not the way of convenience.
The cheap and easy way is to occasion
words out of your own imagination, words that
men desire to hear and which you're quick
to supply.
But to find the word of God requires
some kind of seeking God, some kind of
an ability even to be in his presence
in order to hear his counsel, to understand
what God's word is that might be in
the disjuncture with the way that men think
and the way that society is going and
with what men would like to hear.
Because his thoughts are not our thoughts, nor
are his ways our ways.
As high as the heaven is from the
earth, so great is the distance and the
difference between his thoughts and our thoughts.
Who knows the mind of the Lord?
Who has been his counselor?
Who knows what his strategy is?
Who knows how far he's willing to go?
Who's to say to him that you can't
twice in one generation afflict the people of
Israel with a devastation that can only be
summed up in the word holocaust?
Who's going to tell him?
And so my detractors say, are you trying
to say, Art, that God is going to
allow Russian Jews to come back to Israel
in great numbers?
And even from Ethiopia, and there they're going
to find devastation, violence, and destruction?
It doesn't figure that God would allow.
God would not allow people to come only
to face judgment and devastation.
Well, by whose reckoning?
Who are you saying?
Are you speaking the mind of the Lord?
Or are you projecting upon him what you
think ought to be appropriate to God?
Don't tell me what God will do and
will not do.
You evidently betray a lack of understanding of
what God has already done in the history
of Israel, and how many devastations have already
afflicted that people, and how far God has
gone in his wrath, and how great is
the judgment double upon those who have had
the privilege of the call and covenant and
knowledge of God that Israel has had.
Don't tell God what he can do and
what he cannot do.
One of our current controversies in our own
little fellowship is with a young, how shall
I say this?
I want to be polite, whippersnapper, hotshot, self
-congratulatory, and confident, charismatic type believer who came
to us believing it was the call of
God and found to his displeasure we were
not what he had expected.
And I brought three successive Sunday messages addressed
to the crisis precipitated by this brother in
our midst.
It was not that I was looking for
a word so as to get even or
even to address the situation.
It was a word given out of the
counsel of God.
It was not a word of experience to
fit a situation.
It just was the word of the Lord.
But being the word of the Lord, it
was addressed to our situation.
It did apply to this brother, but he
interpreted it as my finding a word that
would serve my purposes to his discomfort and
would not receive it as being the counsel
and the word of the Lord.
And the basis for his rejection was, I
know God and God would never say that.
God would never do that.
Don't tell God what he will never do
and what he will never say.
Who has stood in the counsel of the
Lord?
Who has been humbled to know that God's
thoughts are not our thoughts and are willing
to receive those thoughts that are not for
our convenience, but for our requirement, often calling
us to sacrifice and to conditions and things
from which our own flesh shrinks?
Who has stood in the counsel of the
Lord?
Who?
Is there one in our generation?
Will there be?
When there's a popularity for the prophetic calling
and they know which way the wind is
blowing and what is the current fad and
what is the popular thing to be spoken,
and because it's been tested and others have
already sounded it and it has found acceptance,
where is the one who doesn't put out
the feeler to see what the current popularity
is, but knows and finds the word of
the Lord in that lonely place which is
called the counsel of God?
And therefore comes the judgment, the storm of
the Lord in verse 19.
Wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest that
will burst upon the head of the wicked.
The anger of the Lord will not turn
back until he has executed and accomplished the
intents of his mind.
In the latter days, you will understand it
clearly.
So here is prophet Jeremiah speaking about God
and his wrath bursting upon the heads of
the wicked.
The anger of the Lord will not turn
back until he has executed and accomplished.
There is no problem with Jeremiah in reconciling
himself with a God who can be angry,
who can express wrath, who can bring judgment
and bring it in violence.
God resumes in verse 21, I did not
send the prophets, yet they ran.
I did not speak to them, yet they
prophesied.
But if they had stood in my counsel,
then they would have proclaimed my words to
my people and they would have turned them
from the evil way and from the evil
of their doings.
Am I a God nearby, says the Lord,
and not a God far off?
Who can hide in secret places I cannot
see them, says the Lord?
Do I not fill heaven and the earth?
Have I heard what the prophets have said
who prophesy lies in my name saying, I
have dreamed the dream?
How long will the heart of the prophets
ever turn back to those who prophesy lies
and who prophesy the deceit of their own
heart?
They plan to make my people forget my
name by their dreams that they tell one
another just as their ancestors forgot my name
for Baal.
The word Baal actually means Lord, and it
was not hard for Israel over a process
of time through the generation of their spiritual
condition to use the word interchangeably both to
speak of the God of Israel and to
speak of the false gods until there was
such a blurring and such a loss of
distinction that the one had become the other.
And that's why Elijah had to confront the
people at Carmel and say, how long do
you hold between two opinions?
Which one is God?
Which Baal?
Which who is Lord?
Let God be God.
Whoever consumes the sacrifice by fire, he's the
Lord.
Don't use your words indiscriminately and mindlessly to
think that you're referring to the God of
Israel when you employ the word Baal.
Don't think that because you use the word
Jesus that you're referring to the Son of
God.
There are cults that use the word Jesus.
There are...
The most subtle of all deceptions is the
use of legitimate vocabulary for illegitimate reasons.
And it's easy to employ religious terminology once
it has lost its meaning and becomes merely
a vehicle for the serving of our own
purposes and sanctifies even our own selfishness and
our own deeds and our own acts.
Language is critical, particularly holy language, the language
of God, the language of the name of
God, the words of God.
And the prophet is the guardian over that
language.
And therefore he's jealous about how Israel uses
the word Lord.
I would say a prophet of our own
generation would be equally as jealous and as
concerned for the mindless way in which the
word Lord is used in our generation until
finally it loses its currency and cogency and
doesn't even refer to the Lord anymore.
It becomes a kind of a reflex action
that gilds over something and allows us to
live a lie.
Can you understand the jealousy of the prophet
over language and over reality, particularly of a
spiritual kind?
These prophets who prophesy lies in my name,
they say, thus saith the Lord.
Can you believe the audacity?
I don't think I'll ever forget an occasion
in Europe when I was at a full
gospel breakfast and the speaker was a well
-known Swedish evangelical figure dressed to kill.
And he was a Gucci masterpiece, he had
silk.
And he began his remarks by saying, and
this morning the Lord gave me a word
for you.
And oh, I leaned forward to hear, and
not one syllable should fall to the ground.
And then he began to speak what that
word was, and I fell back in my
seat in a complete prostration.
It was not the word of the Lord
at all.
It was a commonplace, it was a cheapie,
it was a little genuflection, it was a
little play on words that had a kind
of religious seemliness, but it was not any
word of the Lord.
And yet the man had the audacity to
introduce his remarks by saying, the Lord has
spoke to me this morning, and thus saith
the Lord.
Dear saints, when we have come to an
hour where men can without blushing and without
hesitation preface their remarks by saying, thus saith
the Lord, when the Lord is not saying,
we are very near the end.
If we have to stand guard over anything,
it's the invocation of the name of the
Lord, not to justify any thought that we
might have or comment that is not His.
This is the audacity that God looks upon
of those prophets who are false, and somehow
do not blush, and even come to the
place where they believe that is the Lord
saying.
Because it becomes the deceit of their own
heart, and they become deceived by it, even
as they deceive others.
They plan to make my people forget my
name by their dreams.
What does that mean, forget my name?
Forget what my name means, because what I
am as God is caught up in my
name.
But if they continue with the kind of
drivel that they bring, saying that it's I
who am saying that, it demeans me, it
deprecates me, it lessens me, it minimizes me,
it changes me in the understanding of the
people.
I become a commonplace, I become a household
fixture, I become an easy errand boy, I
become the Jesus who finds you a boyfriend,
girlfriend, health, prosperity.
God becomes disfigured, He becomes a non-God.
They forget my name because men are employing
my name deceitfully.
But let the one who has my word
speak my word faithfully.
What has straw in common with wheat, says
the Lord, is not my word like fire,
says the Lord, and like a hammer that
breaks a rock in pieces.
See, therefore, I am against the prophets, say
the Lord, who steal my words from one
another.
I see I am against the prophets, says
the Lord, who use their own tongues and
say, sayeth the Lord, see, I'm against those
who prophesy lying dreams, says the Lord, and
who tell them, and who lead my people
astray by their lies and their recklessness, when
I did not send them or appoint them,
so they do not profit this people at
all, says the Lord.
Well, you can read that chapter at leisure,
painstakingly, looking also at chapter 13 of Ezekiel,
where there's another profound statement of false prophets
who follow their own spirit.
In verse 3 of chapter 13 of Ezekiel,
they're called senseless prophets who follow their own
spirit, senseless, reckless, mischievous, taking great liberties with
God without fear of consequence, and they have
seen nothing.
You have not gone up to the breaches,
it says in verse 5, or repaired a
wall for the house of Israel so that
it might stand in battle on the day
of the Lord.
They have envisioned falsehood and lying divination.
They say, sayeth the Lord, when the Lord
has not sent them, and yet they wait
for the fulfillment of their word.
Talk about deception by men who are reckless,
taking liberty, saying, thus sayeth the Lord, and
lying divinations out of their own imagination, and
yet by their own deceit are themselves deceived,
even to expect that there will be a
fulfillment of that word.
That's the last, what shall I say, the
last statement of deception is that the deceived
one expects that the lie itself is going
to find fulfillment.
And we saw that in Elijah with the
false prophets of Baal who accepted Elijah's challenge
to put up their own sacrifice, and he
would put up his and let that God
who answers by fire be God.
They expected to have an answer, and when
their answer didn't come, they leaped furiously, and
they danced, and they cut themselves, and they
drew their own blood, and they conducted themselves
maniacally until Elijah had to come and tease
them, provoke them.
Where's your God?
Maybe he's asleep.
They say that the Hebrew says maybe he's
in the lavatory.
Elijah even uses a kind of a profane
attack to taunt and mock these false prophets.
Where's your God?
The remarkable thing is they seem to have
expected him.
They seem to have expected fire.
They actually believed that they were in communion
with God who is God, but of course
there was none to answer because the God
whom they had been serving is the God
Baal and not the God Israel, and the
God who is God refused to answer by
fire.
He only answered the lonely prophet's sacrifice, which
he saturated with water 12 times over, so
much as almost to say if God be
God, let him see what he'll do with
this against every human natural reckoning.
Let him consume this, and the fire of
God fell on Elijah's sacrifice.
It did not fall on the false prophets
and consume not only the sacrifice, but the
altar, the stones, the dirt, everything, licked up
the water until the people fell on their
faces, and they cried, the Lord, he is
God.
The Lord, he is God.
We may come to that, and I'm sure
that those who'll be dancing on the false
sacrifice actually believe that they're in touch with
the God who is God, but there'll be
no answer.
They're deceived, and yet the fact that they
expect an answer shows them the effect of
the deceit upon themselves, and not only falsely
lying to others, but to themselves.
It's a terrible corruption, and I don't think
it happens in a day.
I don't think it's a momentary thing.
I think it's a process by erosion, by
carelessness, by neglect, by taking the word of
the Lord cheaply, by using the name of
the Lord glibly, by punctuating our hopeful prophecies
by saying, thus saith the Lord, when the
Lord has not said.
How jealous must we be?
I've always been astonished at how prolific and
vocal God has become in our generation.
I don't think that he says all that
much.
I don't think he needs to.
There seems to be too great a frequency
of prophecy, and that we can't even discern
that which has its origin in God, and
that which originates out of the souls of
men, that we already are set in the
process by which we will lose any ability
to distinguish.
There's a jealousy that needs to be with
God's people over the phrase, thus saith the
Lord.
What would be the provocation?
What would be an environment that would be
conducive to drawing us onto false ground, to
encouraging false prophecy, to encouraging a kind of
religious recklessness and carelessness by which we say
the Lord said when he didn't say?
I think it's the expectation of men.
I think it's a necessity to have successful
meetings.
I think that a desire to see some
measure of excitement and something that meets the
grayness of our ordinary Christian life would be
a temptation to break into that and to
bring something of a scintillating kind and the
hopeful thought that it might well be God
who's saying.
He said, but I did not send them,
but yet they ran.
I did not give them a word, yet
they spoke.
They envisioned falsehood and lying divination.
They say, thus saith the Lord when the
Lord has not sent them, and yet they
wait for the fulfillment of their word.
Have you not seen a false vision or
uttered a lying divination when you have said,
says the Lord, even though I did not
speak?
Therefore, thus says the Lord God, because you
have uttered falsehood and envisioned lies, I am
against you, says the Lord God.
My hand will be against the prophets who
see false visions and utter lying divinations, who
say peace when there is no peace, and
who whitewash the wall and say to those
who, and I say to those who smear
whitewash on it in verse 11, that it
shall fall.
Whatever is false, whatever has been lightly gilded
over, whatever has been disguised, whatever has been
made acceptable by a glib and easy use
of words, if its foundation is false, it
will fall no matter how the wall has
been smeared.
In my wrath, I will make a stormy
wind break out, and in my anger, there
shall be a deluge of rain and hailstones
and wrath to destroy it.
I will break down the wall that you
have smeared with whitewash and bring it to
the ground so that its foundations will be
laid bare.
When it falls, you shall perish within it,
and you shall know that I am the
Lord.
Thus, I will spend my wrath upon the
wall and upon those who have smeared it
with whitewash.
It's not if it falls, it's when it
falls.
Why wasn't the false foundation recognized?
Why was it covered over with a kind
of whitewash by which the truth of its
condition and its need could have been revealed?
Because there are men who are accommodating, men
who want to go along, men who want
to sanctify the things that are, even when
they need to be identified as being in
error, needing to be corrected because the fall
will come.
So I'm concerned now for the great popularity
of the prophetic call and the numbers of
men who are being designated or called or
allow themselves to be identified as prophets, as
the oracles of the hour.
And I would ask, have they been sent?
God says, I did not send you.
What is the nexus?
What is the origin of the one who
is true?
There's a place of sending.
He doesn't come out of the air.
He doesn't suddenly come on the stage of
history and religious society and find the ready
acceptance.
So I would ask, what are the formative
relationships in the body from which these prophets
have come?
Where have they been nurtured, not only in
their gift but their character, before they were
visited on the church?
How long and rightly had they been part
of a local fellowship?
Had they been sent out by the same
in ascending that is more than a ceremonial
thing?
God said, I did not send them, and
yet they ran.
There's got to be ascending.
There's got to be a place from which
a prophet is sent.
There's got to be an environment that is
conducive to the growth of prophets.
When I look back with embarrassment over a
more than quarter of a century history, my
God, how ungainly a man is in that
calling in its first expression.
What a mixture there is of things that
emanate out of his own soul and are
coupled with that which is given by the
spirit.
God is not going to send men out
in that condition who are first not groomed
in the fellowship that can hear them, receive
them, lovingly counsel them, and say, you were
doing beautifully until you mentioned this.
When you said that, I felt that you
had lapsed out from God and had come
into yourself.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Now that you say it, you see the
kind of a prophet needs to be in
a prophetic context.
There's a church.
There's ascending.
There's a body.
They don't come out of the air.
They're not your men of the hour that
have no history, no background.
I did not send them, yet they ran.
Not only were they audacious to say, thus
saith the Lord, but they ran in saying,
thus saith the Lord, and expected to see
the fulfillment of their false words.
So the question of false prophet is really
the question of that which is false itself.
I wonder if the symptom of false prophets
is a statement of an age that is
becoming increasingly false, that they're reflecting cheap and
easy standards where truth is falling and where
we're not requiring, we're not fastidious, we're not
careful, where there's not a church that can
send.
There's not a church that even has a
concept of sending and that sending itself has
lost its meaning.
That will be an environment that will be
conducive to men, therefore, who can run though
they were not sent.
So what is the source of their prophetic
speaking if they did not receive it in
the counsel of God?
Where does the prophet get his word if
not out of that secret place?
And how is it then God's word?
And if men claim to be conditioned, we
have every right to look for the evidence
that they have stood in that place, that
they have been in the secret place and
in the counsel of God, that the word
is not their own but the Lord's.
It's going to be rare because who has
stood in that place?
How many real prophets are there?
I don't know.
There may not be all that many.
It may be a very rare phenomenon.
How many Jeremiah's were there for his own
generation?
And the very multiplicity, the numbers that are
available today are already a disturbing sign.
And yet God calls them prophets because maybe
the gifts and callings of God is without
repentance and they had the calling to begin
with, but over a process of time became
false.
I sent out this circular letter to 50
men concerned over the prophetic call and I
raised the question about whether a prophet is
to be determined by the accuracy of his
prediction or the quality of his statement.
And I said something like, prophets need to
be protected and to be observed, watched, exhorted,
even rebuked in a fellowship where men have
access to them.
But if they are in some kind of
institutional mode or ministerial setting where they have
only a circle of paid employees to affirm
them, where will the corrective word comes that
a prophet most desperately needs?
I think Dale this morning said that there's
no ministry more dangerous than the prophetic call.
There's no ministry more susceptible to the propensity
for error and for deception than in the
prophetic person.
If anyone needs to be guarded, needs to
be observed, needs to be counseled, needs to
be exhorted, it's such a one.
But are these men in such a place?
And if they're in a ministry where the
salaries are paid to those who are around
them, they're necessarily going to be affirmed and
not be challenged.
And yet God calls them prophets.
They still retain their title, but what they
are performing under that title in God's sight
is an abomination because there's nothing more profane
when the sacred is no longer sacred.
When you say, thus saith the Lord, and
the Lord has not said, you're taking what
is sacred and rendering it profane.
You're cheapening it, you're controverting its value, and
you've let go a leaven that comes into
the whole society, into the whole nation, into
the whole church that is corruptive.
The priest shall teach the people the difference
between the sacred and the profane.
And if the prophets profanate the name of
the Lord, if they use it cheaply, commercially,
commercially, then the word sacred itself has suffered
because it has become a device to win
the attention of the hearers.
But in the use of it, God himself
is desecrated.
The sacred, the holy, is made unholy.
Thus saith the Lord becomes a cheapie, becomes
a cliche, becomes a kind of a thing
that anyone can invoke to sanction whatever thought
they have as being the Lord's.
And that must be the essence of what
a false prophet is, who gives false comfort
and false assurance of peace and does not
regard the truth of the conditions that need
to be faced.
He will not see the corrupting foundation.
He will not see a wall that must
fall, but will rather disguise that condition, flatter
people, give them a false sense of security,
encourage them, because that's what men want to
hear and will pay to hear.
And those who bring that kind of word
will receive the congratulations and the applause of
those who are comforted by it.
But who has stood in the counsel of
the Lord?
Because the counsel of the Lord is the
place of relationship.
And you don't go into the counsel of
the Lord to obtain the word of God
as an expediency.
When God called Moses up to the mount,
he said, come up onto the mount and
be there.
And I will give you the tablets of
the law that you might teach them.
So Moses took 40 days, neither eating nor
drinking to ascend to the mount.
And at the base of the peak, he
remained for six days in the thick smoke
of the cloud that was the effulgence of
God's glory.
Smoke is the most disorienting of all phenomena.
And Moses, however much he was a prince
of Egypt and a Levitical giant in himself,
had to come in to the smoke before
he could ascend to God.
He had to be thoroughly disoriented, not just
from error, but things that are correct.
He had to be stripped.
He had to be removed before he could
come up unto me and be there.
Not for what I'm going to give you,
not for what you'll be able to employ,
not for the expediency that will help you
in your ministry, but come up unto me
and be there.
And then I will give you, then you
might teach the tablets of the law.
You know, dear saints, this is an expedient
generation.
This is a utilitarian society.
This is an age in which we give
in order to get, we extend something in
order to obtain something.
It's utility.
There's a lot of use, there's manipulation, even
with God.
But the counsel of God is not a
place where you go to get.
It's a place where you go to be.
It's a place where God is.
Come up unto me and be there.
And in the being there, something can be
communicated.
But you're not going there for the convenience
of the obtaining of a word, for the
goal for convenience is already to destroy the
counsel of God.
It's already to negate the thing that God
wants to communicate.
If we come seeking God in order to
obtain the word, we're already on the false
ground that is no longer holy, but profane.
Am I getting too fancy?
Am I wildly speculative?
Is that...
Because the word of the Lord that will
be given is going to be contrary to
the whole tenor of the society in which
it's going to be addressed.
It's going to come out of his holy
heart.
It's going to be other.
It comes from a God who is other,
that men need to hear or to be
lost and dissolved in their own wisdom, their
own understanding, their own values.
It's God himself.
It's what he is in himself that is
being communicated.
And so anyone who comes up in the
hope of obtaining a word only to speak
it and is not jealous for the relationship
out of which the word is given and
comes for the expediency of the word is
already contradicting the prophetic call.
Because the prophet is a foundational man like
the apostle and the foundation of the church
is not the heady knowledge and understanding of
its principles and its dynamics, however important that
is.
The foundation is the knowledge of God as
God.
It's communicating what God is in himself.
So little wonder that Moses describes himself as
being the author of the five books of
Moses as the meekest man upon the face
of the earth.
Sounds almost like Paul.
Follow me as I follow Christ.
That's either audacity and arrogance or it's humility
of a kind that we have not understood.
That a man can say of himself, I'm
the meekest man on the face of the
earth.
It's because he knows that it's not an
accomplishment that he has achieved, but a sense
of what God is in himself that he
has obtained by being in communion with that
God in the holy place in the council
of God.
And that's how you'll tell true and false.
The false is arrogant, pretentious, lying, confident in
the lie, expecting to see its fulfillment, disappointed
if it doesn't come.
But the true apostle or prophet has an
appropriate meekness.
Now, if they're going to, if they'll speak
with audacity, when they will say, you know
what the ironic thing is?
They will be accused of arrogance.
And yet the false one will have a
seeming humility and a seeming deference and a
kind of commercial salesman like ability to be
self effacing.
But the truth of that is arrogance and
conceit and posturing and presumption.
Are we in a place to discern one
from the other?
Can we recognize the humility of God when
a man will say that, that the word
that he's speaking is the word of the
Lord and it, and it indeed is because
he has received it out from God.
Because when it comes and when it's spoken,
it will be with a certain, a certainty
and a certain assurance that there's no question.
When I, when I say that disaster will
come to Israel, that there's a calamity, that's
future for Israel and for Jews worldwide in
a time of Jacob's trouble, I'm not giving
an opinion.
I'm giving a statement that I believe has
come out of the heart of God and
the counsel of God, not by dream, not
by vision, but by a progressive, uh, which
I don't even like to use the word
revelation, a progressive increase of understanding and conviction
that comes out of being steeped in the
prophetic word of God.
Because I believe that to the office of
prophet, God gives a key of interpretation of
prophetic scripture that he does not give to
others.
So we can read Ezekiel 37, the valley
of dry bones as being something out of
Israel's past.
That was the Holocaust.
They were the dry bones.
They were the skeletons.
Well, how then do you understand where it
says in verse 11, and they themselves say
we are cut off.
We are without hope.
We are as dry bones.
When Israel has not yet ever made that
statement, the nation has never yet acknowledged that
it's without hope and without dry bones.
It's a future condition brought about by a
future tribulation that we need to expect.
Well, art, that's just your interpretation.
Yes.
It's the way that I read those prophetic
scriptures in the context of history and of
current event in time.
And in, and in the context of the
call and the distinctive thing to which I
have been called by God.
I praise God that I, that I don't,
I would say it didn't come to me
through a flash of revelation.
It's not something that came in a dream.
It's the cumulative increase of a deepening apprehension
of a truth of reality of that, which
must necessarily come to pass in judgment and
chastisement through Israel that will reduce a proud
nation to a people who will say we
are cut off.
We are without hope.
And how do you know that the son
of man who God commands to speak to
those bones is the church?
Why doesn't God himself address those bones?
Why does he turn to another and say
to that son of man, you prophesy to
those bones and command him?
Because I believe that God is speaking symbolically
of a last days phenomenon that of which
Ezekiel could not have known that the son
of man is a mystical designation for a
corporate entity that can be commanded by God
in a moment of Israel's ultimate distress, where
word has to come to it of resurrection,
power, and authority that can raise it from
the dead that God will not himself speak,
but requires it from another who's a son
of man, who even doubts that those bones
can live.
Son of man, could these bones live?
Lord thou knowest.
The great prophet himself staggered when he saw
the grim reality of Israel's death as dry
bones.
He had not even the prophetic, let alone
charismatic faith to believe that they could live.
He was being summoned to a faith beyond
his own ability to conjure.
A faith that had to work for by
a love that believes and desires for those
bones to become yet again a great nation.
The whole premium is on the son of
man.
Man, that sweating thing, that frail thing that
doubts what he's about in God and that
he has the faith and the ability or
desire even to address those bones.
The issue of Israel's calamity in the last
days is the issue of a church called
to be a son of man company that
can be commanded.
I'll tell you, I didn't want to get
out of my seat tonight for whatever, everything
that took place tonight was not something conducive
for me to speak the word on false
prophets.
I thought, what Lord, how did I get
into a situation?
This is not a setting for this kind
of word.
This is something else.
It's precious.
I love it.
I just let me observe, but don't call
me to speak in it.
Well, you don't have that option cats.
You're not going to get your favorable conditions
where you feel like it.
When I call you, you speak.
When I command you to prophesy, you prophesy
irrespective of what you think your mood or
your condition or ability is.
When is God going to have a church
that could be commanded to speak one thing
at one time to one condition with a
desire to see that people.
Over verse nine in italics, know the way
that often there'll be a designation to indicate
what the content that follows is about.
My statement in italics over verse nine of
chapter 23 says false prophets of hope denounced.
Then it goes on to say concerning the
prophets, my heart is crushed within me.
All my bones shake.
I have become like a drunkard, like one
overcome by wine because of the Lord, because
of his holy words.
For the land is full of adulterers because
of the curse.
The land mourns.
The pastures of the wilderness are dried up.
Their course has been evil.
Their might is not right.
Both prophet and priest are ungodly.
Even in my house, I have found their
wickedness.
So one of the last and ultimate symptoms
of the decay of a civilization of a
society that had its origin in God is
the collapse of prophet and priest.
And there's a remarkable conjunction between these two
callings.
Elsewhere, we read that the prophets prophesy falsely
and the priest bear rule by their means.
There's a kind of a fraternity between religious
functionaries, men who may have one time have
had authentic calling and have allowed it to
slip over a process of time and to
be corrupted, find themselves in some kind of
mutual agreement by which one affirms the other.
But it's in a lie.
It's in something false.
It is something that has turned from spirituality
to religion.
And the consequence is a moral collapse of
the nation itself.
As the priest, so also the people.
As the prophets, so also the priest.
So I can't say enough for the centrality
or the significance of the priestly function in
the church of God, in the society of
God, in the Israel of God, for which
the nation Israel is our textbook.
And we're seeing a reiteration as we come
to the end of the age, some of
the same factors and issues that were in
the time of Jeremiah are becoming now our
own.
It's for that reason, unconsciously without being aware
of this fully, that the Lord had us
to give our entire last summer's prophetical school
to the prophet Jeremiah.
And the subtitle was Prophet of the Last
Days.
The ancient prophet is the prophet of the
last days, because we sense his anguish.
We know his loneliness.
We understand why he was cast into a
cistern, not just as a kind of statement
of the irritation of a society that didn't
want to hear his ungainly words, but as
a condemnation unto death.
There's no word to describe what that must
have been like to have been put into
that muddy hole that was once a cistern
that held water and to be sucked into
that clammy mud and the terrible blackness without
so much as a water, a piece of
food or bread or anything, but just to
expire and to be extinguished in that lonely
place was the fate to which he was
consigned by his king and by a society
that rejected his word and therefore rejected the
man.
Because you can't separate the man from the
word.
They are one and the same.
And if we don't want to receive the
word, we'll find a way to renounce the
man and to condemn and to reject him.
The fact that he was pulled out of
that cistern by a black man, an Ethiopian
eunuch, is not an accident of history, but
I think a remarkably significant statement of what
will be a saving grace for men like
myself or maybe the whole prophetic entity of
the last days, that a eunuch who is
the least in the household of the king
had the audacity, the courage to say to
this king, you shouldn't allow this prophet to
expire and let me go and and pull
him out and made cord out of rags
and let it down and to pull the
prophet up by the most unseemly and humble
means of extraction.
A black servant, a eunuch, the lowest of
the esteem in the household of a king,
using rags to form a rope, pulls the
prophet up out of his muddy grave.
So who knows what the implications are for
our black brothers in the last generation and
us prophetic men in the kind of a
saving grace that will come to us through
them because they have the courage even to
defy a king because though the court of
the king and the false prophets of the
king damn the true prophet and love to
see him to expire in that hole, a
black man was able to perceive that this
is the the servant of God and that
it would dishonor the nation to allow him
so to expire and whatever the risk to
himself in coming to the king and asking
for permission to pull him out, he was
yet willing to make that request.
There's so much here that's why I'm frustrated
and it is so overwhelming where God's grief
is expressed when the index of the state
of the house of Israel is reflected in
the condition of both its prophets and its
priests and that would be a statement for
us in the end also.
That's why we need to be so jealous
with regard to this calling.
If we allow that to slip, we allow
that to fall, if we accept questionable definitions
or understanding, if we allow a too frequent
even use of the word as a designation
where it's not appropriate, we're already losing enormously
significant grounds.
Well, in verse 15, therefore says the Lord
of hosts concerning the prophets, I'm going to
make them eat wormwood and give them poisoned
water to drink for from the prophets of
Jerusalem ungodliness has spread throughout the land.
So you can see that the prophet is
not a peripheral thing but a central thing
and what his position and condition is, is
not on the index but the cause of
affecting the entire nation and bringing it to
such a place of low condition before God.
Verse 16, thus says the Lord God of
hosts, do not listen to the words of
the prophets who prophesy to you.
They are deluding you.
They speak visions of their own minds, not
from the mouth of the Lord.
They keep saying to those who despise the
word of the Lord, it shall be well
with you.
And to all who stubbornly follow their own
stubborn hearts, they say, no calamity will come
upon you.
This is so representative.
This is so much at the heart of
what is false.
It's in a false assurance, a false comfort
given to those who even despise the word
of God and yet don't despise the false
prophets because the false prophets serve a function
to reinforce them and give them a kind
of thing that they want to hear by
which they will have an assurance.
There's always a market.
There's always a ready audience for the false
prophet.
In fact, the greater numbers will run to
him than the one who is true.
And if we're interested in numbers and the
response that numbers bring, we will already be
on a track to becoming false if we
need that kind of overt recognition.
So, for who has stood in verse 18
in the counsel of the Lord so as
to see and hear his word?
Who has given heed to his word so
as to proclaim it?
The word who indicates that there are not
many.
Who?
It's like the eye of God roving to
and forth over the face of the earth,
seeking that one.
Who?
Is there one who has stood in the
counsel of the Lord so as to hear
the word of God, to give heed to
it, so as to proclaim it?
Is there so much as one?
Because evidently, it's not the way of convenience.
The cheap and easy way is to occasion
words out of your own imagination, words that
men desire to hear and which you're quick
to supply.
But to find the word of God requires
some kind of seeking God, some kind of
an ability even to be in his presence
in order to hear his counsel, to understand
what God's word is that might be in
the disjuncture with the way that men think
and the way that society is going and
with what men would like to hear.
Because his thoughts are not our thoughts, nor
are his ways our ways.
As high as the heaven is from the
earth, so great is the distance and the
difference between his thoughts and our thoughts.
Who knows the mind of the Lord?
Who has been his counselor?
Who knows what his strategy is?
Who knows how far he's willing to go?
Who's to say to him that you can't
twice in one generation afflict the people of
Israel with a devastation that can only be
summed up in the word holocaust?
Who's going to tell him?
And so my detractors say, are you trying
to say, Art, that God is going to
allow Russian Jews to come back to Israel
in great numbers?
And even from Ethiopia?
And there they're going to find devastation, violence,
and destruction?
It doesn't figure that God would allow.
God would not allow people to come only
to face judgment and devastation.
Well, by whose reckoning?
Who are you saying?
Are you speaking the mind of the Lord?
Are you projecting upon him what you think
ought to be appropriate to God?
Don't tell me what God will do and
will not do.
You evidently betray a lack of understanding of
what God has already done in the history
of Israel, and how many devastations have already
afflicted that people, and how far God has
gone in his wrath, and how great is
the judgment double upon those who have had
the privilege of the call and covenant and
knowledge of God that Israel has had.
Don't tell God what he can do and
what he cannot do.
One of our current controversies in our own
little fellowship is with a young, how shall
I say this, I want to be polite,
whippersnapper, hotshot, self-congratulatory and confident charismatic type
believer who came to us believing was the
call of God and found to his displeasure
we were not what he had expected.
And I brought three successive Sunday messages addressed
to the crisis precipitated by this brother in
our midst.
It was not that I was looking for
a word so as to get even or
even to address the situation.
It was a word given out of the
counsel of God.
It was not a word of expedience to
fit a situation.
It just was the word of the Lord.
But being the word of the Lord, it
was addressed to our situation.
It did apply to this brother, but he
interpreted as my finding a word that would
serve my purposes to his discomfort and would
not receive it as being the counsel and
the word of the Lord.
And the basis for his rejection was, I
know God and God would never say that.
God would never do that.
Don't tell God what he will never do
and what he will never say.
Who has stood in the counsel of the
Lord?
Who has been humbled to know that God's
thoughts are not our thoughts and are willing
to receive those thoughts that are not for
our convenience, but for our requirement, often calling
us to sacrifice and to conditions and things
from which our own flesh shrinks.
Who has stood in the counsel of the
Lord?
Who?
Is there one in our generation?
Will there be?
When there's a popularity for the prophetic calling
and they know which way the wind is
blowing and what is the current fad and
what is the popular thing to be spoken
and because it's been tested and others have
already sounded it and it has found acceptance,
where is the one who doesn't put out
the feeler to see what the current popularity
is, but knows and finds the word of
the Lord in that lonely place, which is
called the counsel of God.
And therefore comes the judgment, the storm of
the Lord in verse 19.
Wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest that
will burst upon the head of the wicked.
The anger of the Lord will not turn
back until he has executed and accomplished the
intents of his mind.
In the latter days, you will understand it
clearly.
So here is prophet Jeremiah speaking about God
and his wrath bursting upon the heads of
the wicked.
The anger of the Lord will not turn
back until he has executed and accomplished.
There's no problem with Jeremiah in reconciling himself
with a God who can be angry, who
can express wrath, who can bring judgment and
bring it in violence.
God resumes in verse 21.
I did not send the prophets, yet they
ran.
I did not speak to them, yet they
prophesied.
But if they had stood in my counsel,
then they would have proclaimed my words to
my people and they would have turned them
from the evil way and from the evil
of their doings.
Am I a God nearby, says the Lord,
and not a God far off?
Who can hide in secret places I cannot
see them, says the Lord.
Do I not fill heaven and the earth?
Have I heard what the prophets have said
who prophesy lies in my name, saying I
have dreamed the dream?
How long will the heart of the prophets
ever turn back to those who prophesy lies
and who prophesy the deceit of their own
heart?
They plan to make my people forget my
name by their dreams that they tell one
another, just as their ancestors forgot my name
for Baal.
The word Baal actually means Lord.
And it was not hard for Israel over
a process of time through the generation of
their spiritual condition to use the word interchangeably,
both to speak of the God of Israel
and to speak of the false gods, until
there was such a blurring and such a
loss of distinction that the one had become
the other.
And that's why Elijah had to confront the
people at Carmel and say, how long do
you hold between two opinions?
Which one is God?
Which Baal?
Which who is Lord?
Let God be God.
Whoever consumes the sacrifice by fire, he's the
Lord.
Don't use your words indiscriminately and mindlessly to
think that you're referring to the God of
Israel when you employ the word Baal.
Don't think that because you use the word
Jesus that you're referring to the Son of
God.
There are cults that use the word Jesus.
The most subtle of all deceptions is the
use of legitimate vocabulary for illegitimate reasons.
And it's easy to employ religious terminology once
it has lost its meaning and becomes merely
a vehicle for the serving of our own
purposes and sanctifies even our own selfishness and
our own deeds and our own acts.
Language is critical, particularly holy language, the language
of God, the language of the name of
God, the words of God.
And the prophet is the guardian over that
language.
And therefore he's jealous about how Israel uses
the word Lord.
I would say a prophet of our own
generation would be equally as jealous and as
concerned for the mindless way in which the
word Lord is used in our generation until
finally it loses its currency and cogency and
doesn't even refer to the Lord anymore.
It becomes a kind of a reflex action
that gilds over something and allows us to
live a lie.
Can you understand the jealousy of the prophet
over language and over reality, particularly of a
spiritual kind?
These prophets who prophesy lies in my name,
they say, thus saith the Lord.
Can you believe the audacity?
I don't think I'll ever forget an occasion
in Europe when I was at a full
gospel breakfast and the speaker was a well
-known Swedish evangelical figure dressed to kill.
And he was a Gucci masterpiece.
He had silk.
And he began his remarks by saying, and
this morning the Lord gave me a word
for you.
And oh, I leaned forward to hear and
not one syllable should fall to the ground.
And then he began to speak with that
word was, and I fell back in my
seat in a complete prostration.
It was not the word of the Lord
at all.
It was a commonplace.
It was a cheapie.
It was a little genuflection.
It was a little play on words that
had a kind of religious seemliness, but it
was not any word of the Lord.
And yet the man had the audacity to
introduce his remarks by saying the Lord has
spoke to me this morning.
And thus saith the Lord, dear saints, when
we have come to an hour where men
can, without blushing and without hesitation, preface their
remarks by saying, thus saith the Lord, when
the Lord is not saying we are very
near the end.
If we have to stand guard over anything,
it's the invocation of the name of the
Lord, not to justify any thought that we
might have or comment that is not his.
This is the audacity that God looks upon
of those prophets who are false and somehow
do not blush and even come to the
place where they believe that is the Lord
saying.
Because it becomes the deceit of their own
heart and they become deceived by it, even
as they deceive others.
They plan to make my people forget my
name by their dreams.
What does that mean?
Forget my name.
Forget what my name means, because what I
am as God is caught up in my
name.
But if they continue with the kind of
drivel that they bring, saying that it's I
who am saying that, it demeans me.
It deprecates me.
It lessens me.
It minimizes me.
It changes me in the understanding of the
people.
I become a commonplace.
I become a household fixture.
I become an easy errand boy.
I become the Jesus who finds you a
boyfriend, girlfriend, health, prosperity.
God becomes disfigured.
He becomes a non-God.
They forget my name because men are employing
my name deceitfully.
But let the one who has my word
speak my word faithfully.
What has straw in common with wheat, says
the Lord, is not my word like fire,
says the Lord, and like a hammer that
breaks a rock in pieces.
See, therefore, I am against the prophets, say
the Lord, who steal my words from one
another.
See, I am against the prophets, says the
Lord, who use their own tongues and say,
saith the Lord.
See, I am against those who prophesy lying
dreams, says the Lord, and who tell them
and who lead my people astray by their
lies and their recklessness when I did not
send them or appoint them.
So they do not profit this people at
all, says the Lord.
Well, you can read that chapter at leisure,
painstakingly looking also at chapter 13 of Ezekiel,
where there's another profound statement of false prophets
who follow their own spirit in verse 3
of chapter 13 of Ezekiel.
They're called senseless prophets who follow their own
spirit, senseless, reckless, mischievous, taking great liberties with
God without fear of consequence, and they have
seen nothing.
You have not gone up to the breeches,
it says in verse 5, or repaired a
wall for the house of Israel so that
it might stand in battle on the day
of the Lord.
They have envisioned falsehood and lying divination.
They say, saith the Lord, when the Lord
has not sent them, and yet they wait
for the fulfillment of their word.
Talk about deception by men who are reckless,
taking liberty, saying, thus saith the Lord, in
lying divinations out of their own imagination, and
yet by their own deceit are themselves deceived,
even to expect that there will be a
fulfillment of that word.
That's the last, what shall I say, the
last statement of deception is that the deceived
one expects that the lie itself is going
to find fulfillment.
And we saw that in Elijah with the
false prophets of Baal, who accepted Elijah's challenge
to put up their own sacrifice, and he
would put up his, and let that God
who answers by fire be God.
They expected to have an answer, and when
their answer didn't come, they leaped furiously, and
they danced, and they cut themselves, and they
drew their own blood, and they conducted themselves
maniacally until Elijah had to come and tease
them, provoke them.
Where's your God?
Maybe he's asleep.
They say that the Hebrew says, maybe he's
in the lavatory.
Elijah even uses a kind of a profane
attack to taunt and mock these false prophets.
Where's your God?
The remarkable thing is they seem to have
expected him.
They seem to have expected fire.
They actually believed that they were in communion
with God who is God, but of course
there was none to answer, because the God
whom they had been serving is the God
Baal, and not the God Israel, and the
God who is God refused to answer by
fire.
He only answered the lonely prophet's sacrifice, which
he saturated with water 12 times over, so
much as almost to say, if God be
God, let him see what he'll do with
this against every human natural reckoning.
Let him consume this, and the fire of
God fell on Elijah's sacrifice.
It did not fall on the false prophets,
and consumed not only the sacrifice, but the
altar, the stones, the dirt, everything.
Licked up the water until the people fell
on their faces, and they cried, the Lord,
he is God.
The Lord, he is God.
We may come to that, and I'm sure
that those who'll be dancing on the false
sacrifice actually believe that they're in touch with
the God who is God, but there'll be
no answer.
They're deceived, and yet the fact that they
expect an answer shows them the effect of
the deceit upon themselves, and not only falsely
lying to others, but to themselves.
It's a terrible corruption, and I don't think
it happens in a day.
I don't think it's a momentary thing.
I think it's a process by erosion, by
carelessness, by neglect, by taking the word of
the Lord cheaply, by using the name of
the Lord glibly, by punctuating our hopeful prophecies,
by saying, thus saith the Lord, when the
Lord has not said.
How jealous must we be?
I've always been astonished at how prolific and
vocal God has become in our generation.
I don't think that he says all that
much.
I don't think he needs to, that there
seems to be too great a frequency of
prophecy, and that we can't even discern that
which has its origin in God, and that
which originates out of the souls of men,
that we already are set in the process
by which we will lose any ability to
distinguish.
There's a jealousy that needs to be with
God's people over the phrase, thus saith the
Lord.
What would be the provocation?
What would be an environment that would be
conducive to drawing us onto false ground, to
encouraging false prophecy, to encouraging a kind of
religious recklessness and carelessness by which we say
the Lord said when he didn't say?
I think it's the expectation of men.
I think it's a necessity to have successful
meetings.
I think a desire to see some measure
of excitement and something that meets the grayness
of our ordinary Christian life would be a
temptation to break into that and to bring
something of a scintillating kind and the hopeful
thought that it might well be God who's
saying.
He said, but I did not send them,
but yet they ran.
I did not give them a word, yet
they spoke.
They envisioned falsehood and lying divination.
They say, thus saith the Lord when the
Lord has not sent them, and yet they
wait for the fulfillment of their word.
Have you not seen a false vision or
uttered a lying divination when you have said,
says the Lord, even though I did not
speak?
Therefore, thus says the Lord God, because you
have uttered falsehood and envisioned lies, I am
against you, says the Lord God.
My hand will be against the prophets who
see false visions and utter lying divinations, who
say peace when there is no peace, and
who whitewash the wall and say to those
who, and I say to those who smear
whitewash on it in verse 11 that it
shall fall.
Whatever is false, whatever has been lightly gilded
over, whatever has been disguised, whatever has been
made acceptable by a glib and easy use
of words, if its foundation is false, it
will fall no matter how the wall has
been smeared.
In my wrath I will make a stormy
wind break out, and in my anger there
shall be a deluge of rain and hailstones
and wrath to destroy it.
I will break down the wall that you
have smeared with whitewash and bring it to
the ground so that its foundations will be
laid bare.
When it falls, you shall perish within it,
and you shall know that I am the
Lord.
Thus I will spend my wrath upon the
wall and upon those who have smeared it
with whitewash.
It's not if it falls, it's when it
falls.
Why wasn't the false foundation recognized?
Why was it covered over with a kind
of whitewash by which the truth of its
condition and its need could have been revealed?
Because there are men who are accommodating, men
who want to go along, men who want
to sanctify the things that are, even when
they need to be identified as being in
error, needing to be corrected because the fall
will come.
So I'm concerned now for the great popularity
of the prophetic call and the numbers of
men who are being designated or called or
allow themselves to be identified as prophets, as
the oracles of the hour.
And I would ask, have they been sent?
God says, I did not send you.
What is the nexus?
What is the origin of the one who
is true?
There's a place of sending.
He doesn't come out of the air.
He doesn't suddenly come on the stage of
history and religious society and find the ready
acceptance.
So I would ask, what are the formative
relationships in the body from which these prophets
have come?
Where have they been nurtured, not only in
their gift, but their character, before they were
visited on the church?
How long and rightly have they been part
of a local fellowship?
Had they been sent out by the same
in ascending that is more than a ceremonial
thing?
God said, I did not send them.
And yet they ran.
There's got to be ascending.
There's got to be a place from which
a prophet is sent.
There's got to be an environment that is
conducive to the growth of prophets.
When I look back with embarrassment over a
more than quarter of a century history, my
God, how ungainly a man is in that
calling, in its first expression.
What a mixture there is of things that
emanate out of his own soul and are
coupled with that which is given by the
Spirit.
God is not going to send men out
in that condition who are first not groomed
in the fellowship that can hear them, receive
them, lovingly counsel them, and say, you were
doing beautifully until you mentioned this.
When you said that, I felt that you
had lapsed out from God and had come
into yourself.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Now that you say it, you see the
kind of...
A prophet needs to be in a prophetic
context.
There's a church.
There's ascending.
There's a body.
They don't come out of the air.
They're not your men of the hour that
have no history, no background.
I did not send them, yet they ran.
Not only were they audacious to say, thus
saith the Lord, but they ran in saying,
thus saith the Lord, and expected to see
the fulfillment of their false words.
So the question of false prophet is really
the question of that which is false itself.
I wonder if the symptom of false prophets
is a statement of an age that is
becoming increasingly false, that they're reflecting cheap and
easy standards where truth is falling and where
we're not requiring, we're not fastidious, we're not
careful, where there's not a church that can
send.
There's not a church that even has a
concept of sending and that sending itself has
lost its meaning.
That will be an environment that will be
conducive to men, therefore, who can run though
they were not sent.
So what is the source of their prophetic
speaking if they did not receive it in
the counsel of God?
Where does the prophet get his word if
not out of that secret place?
And how is it then God's word?
And if men claim to be conditioned, we
have every right to look for the evidence
that they have stood in that place, that
they have been in the secret place and
in the counsel of God, that the word
is not their own but the Lord's.
It's going to be rare because who has
stood in that place?
How many real prophets are there?
I don't know.
There may not be all that many.
It may be a very rare phenomenon.
How many Jeremiah's were there for their, for
his own generation?
And the very multiplicity, the numbers that are
available today are already a disturbing sign.
And yet God calls them prophets because maybe
the gifts and callings of God are without,
God is without repentance.
And they had the calling to begin with,
but over a process of time became false.
I went, I sent out this circular letter
to 50 men concerned over the prophetic call.
And I raised the question about whether a
prophet is to be determined by the accuracy
of his prediction or the quality of his
statement.
And I said something like prophets need to
be protected and to be observed, watched, exhorted,
even rebuked in a fellowship where men have
access to them.
But if they are in some kind of
institutional mode or ministerial setting where they have
only a circle of paid employees to affirm
them, where will the corrective word comes that
a prophet most desperately needs?
I think Dale this morning said that there's
no ministry more dangerous than the prophetic call.
There's no ministry more susceptible to the propensity
for error and for deception than in the
prophetic person.
If anyone needs to be guarded, needs to
be observed, needs to be counseled, needs to
be exhorted, it's such a one.
But are these men in such a place?
And if they're in a ministry where the
salaries are paid to those who are around
them, they're necessarily going to be affirmed and
not be challenged.
And yet God calls them prophets.
They still retain their title, but what they
are performing under that title in God's sight
is an abomination because there's nothing more profane
when the sacred is no longer sacred.
When you say, thus saith the Lord, and
the Lord has not said, you're taking what
is sacred and rendering it profane.
You're cheapening it, you're controverting its value, and
you've let go a leaven that comes into
the whole society, into the whole nation, into
the whole church that is corruptive.
The priest shall teach the people the difference
between the sacred and the profane.
And if the prophets profanate the name of
the Lord, if they use it cheaply, commercially,
commercially, then the word sacred itself has suffered
because it has become a device to win
the attention of the hearers, but in the
use of it, God himself is desecrated.
The sacred, the holy is made unholy.
Thus saith the Lord becomes a cheapy, becomes
a cliche, becomes a kind of a thing
that anyone can invoke to sanction whatever thought
they have as being the Lord's.
And that must be the essence of what
a false prophet is, who gives false comfort
and false assurance of peace, and does not
regard the truth of the conditions that need
to be faced.
He will not see the corrupting foundation.
He will not see a wall that must
fall, but will rather disguise that condition, flatter
people, give them a false sense of security,
encourage them, because that's what men want to
hear and will pay to hear.
And those who bring that kind of word
will receive the congratulations and the applause of
those who are comforted by it.
But who has stood in the counsel of
the Lord?
Because the counsel of the Lord is the
place of relationship.
And you don't go into the counsel of
the Lord to obtain the word of God
as an expediency.
When God called Moses up to the mount,
he said, come up onto the mount and
be there.
And I will give you the tablets of
the law that you might teach them.
So Moses took 40 days, neither eating nor
drinking to ascend to the mount.
And at the base of the peak, he
remained for six days in the thick smoke
of the cloud that was the effulgence of
God's glory.
Smoke is the most disorienting of all phenomena.
And Moses, however much he was a prince
of Egypt and a Levitical giant in himself,
had to come in to the smoke before
he could ascend to God.
He had to be thoroughly disoriented, not just
from error, but things that are correct.
He had to be stripped.
He had to be removed before he could
come up unto me and be there.
Not for what I'm going to give you,
not for what you'll be able to employ,
not for the expediency that will help you
in your ministry, but come up unto me
and be there.
And then I will give you, then you
might teach the tablets of the law.
You know, dear saints, this is an expedient
generation.
This is a utilitarian society.
This is an age in which we give
in order to get, we extend something in
order to obtain something.
It's utility.
There's a lot of use, there's manipulation, even
with God.
But the counsel of God is not a
place where you go to get.
It's a place where you go to be.
It's a place where God is.
Come up unto me and be there.
And in the being there, something can be
communicated.
But you're not going there for the convenience
of the obtaining of a word, for the
goal for convenience is already to destroy the
counsel of God.
It's already to negate the thing that God
wants to communicate.
If we come seeking God in order to
obtain the word, we're already on the false
ground that is no longer holy, but profane.
Am I getting too fancy?
Am I wildly speculative?
Is that...
Am I getting too fancy?
Because the word of the Lord that will
be given is going to be contrary to
the whole tenor of the society in which
it's going to be addressed.
It's going to come out of his holy
heart.
It's going to be other.
It comes from a God who is other,
that men need to hear or to be
lost and dissolved in their own wisdom, their
own understanding, their own values.
It's God himself.
It's what he is in himself that is
being communicated.
And so anyone who comes up in the
hope of obtaining a word only to speak
it and is not jealous for the relationship
out of which the word is given and
comes for the expediency of the word is
already contradicting the prophetic call.
Because the prophet is a foundational man like
the apostle.
And the foundation of the church is not
the heady knowledge and understanding of its principles
and its dynamics, however important that is.
The foundation is the knowledge of God as
God.
It's communicating what God is in himself.
So little wonder that Moses describes himself as
being the author of the five books of
Moses as the meekest man upon the face
of the earth.
Sounds almost like Paul.
Follow me as I follow Christ.
That's either audacity and arrogance or it's humility
of a kind that we have not understood.
That a man can say of himself, I'm
the meekest man on the face of the
earth.
It's because he knows that it's not an
accomplishment that he has achieved, but a sense
of what God is in himself that he
has obtained by being in communion with that
God in the holy place in the council
of God.
And that's how you'll tell true and false.
The false is arrogant, pretentious, lying, confident in
the lie, expecting to see its fulfillment, disappointed
if it doesn't come.
But the true apostle or prophet has an
appropriate meekness.
Now, if they'll speak with audacity, when they
will say, thus saith the Lord, you know
what the ironic thing is?
They will be accused of arrogance.
And yet the false one will have a
seeming humility and a seeming deference and a
kind of commercial salesman-like ability to be
self-effacing.
But the truth of that is arrogance and
conceit and posturing and presumption.
Are we in a place to discern one
from the other?
Can we recognize the humility of God when
a man will say that the word that
he's speaking is the word of the Lord?
And it indeed is because he has received
it out from God.
Because when it comes and when it's spoken,
it will be with a certain certainty and
a certain assurance that there's no question.
When I say that disaster will come to
Israel, that there's a calamity that's future,