The Holy Spirit in the old Testament << | >> The anointing Spirit of God
The Holy Spirit in the Prophets
These are the words of a New Testament apostle, the leader of the twelve whom Jesus had chosen and taught, a man who had spent three or so years in our Lord’s presence during his public ministry. He was one who had been summoned to become an apostle, to speak in the name of Christ, with all of our Lord’s authority behind his words so that all who received Peter received Peter’s Lord, even as it is today. Peter’s special calling was to feed Christ’s sheep and lambs - and such, O Lord, are we. Peter was the one who was filled with the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost and preached the word so faithfully that God honoured his message in converting three thousand men. He was later inspired to write two letters, and in the words before us he is giving us his view, and so the Lord Jesus’ view also, on a most important subject, the nature of the Old Testament Scripture. You will see how earnest he is about this matter. “Above all,” he says, that is above all else Peter had already written in the previous nineteen verses. “You must understand,” he adds as some essential matter, that is, his readers must get this straight and settled in their minds, that “no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
1. THE INSPIRED APOSTLE BOWS BEFORE THE INSPIRED PROPHETS.
What Peter is saying is this, that the origin either of the prophetic portions of Scripture or the entire body of Scripture (and I favour the latter interpretation) did not come into being as a result of individuals getting hunches and feelings and convictions and writing down their own conclusions about God and the world. The Scriptures are not the product of human investigation and reason, that is, “by the prophet’s own interpretation.” Then to make this absolutely clear he adds these words, that “prophecy never had its origin in the will of man.” So Peter begins on a negative note; his concern is to clear away erroneous attitudes; his first words tell us how Old Testament prophecy did not come. How important that all of us grasp that point that it was not by their own human wills that Moses, Samuel, David, Elijah, the three major prophets and the twelve minor prophets spoke and wrote as they did. What we have from those men has not come down to us because they deeply believed that they had a message from heaven, finally committing it to writing. No! The origin was not in the hearts and minds of any of those men.
Having cleared up away any such misunderstanding with customary Petrine vigour the apostle tells us positively how we do have the prophecies of Scripture; “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” That is the conviction of this apostle of Christ concerning the Old Testament. That is what he is teaching the New Testament church, that our attitude to the Old Testament is not an optional choice whereby we can take one golden part or leave another part; “I love psalm 23 but I don’t love psalm 137.” If Jesus Christ is our God, and he has appointed Peter to be his spokesman and apostle, then we are under moral obligation to have this same conviction concerning the spiritual nature of the Old Testament. What it says the Holy Spirit says. Peter’s language is as unmistakable and direct as that of Paul in 2 Timothy chapter three and verse sixteen where that apostle tells us that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God. Here Peter says, “Men spoke from God.” That is, what God said, they said and what they said, God said. How was that possible? He tells us that it was so because “they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” The Scripture is not a magical book which has descended from heaven. It is not just a religious book but rather it is the book of the Holy Spirit, given to the church by God through the means of the men who spoke from him. Let me quote to you some helpful words by a revered former teacher of mine, Dr. Edward J. Young of Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia.
“The language is quite striking. The men who spoke from God are said to have been borne by the Holy Spirit. That is, the Spirit actually lifted them up and carried them along, and thus they spoke. They were borne or carried along under the power of the Spirit and not by their own power. If a person picks up something and bears it, he does it by his own power. That which is picked up and borne, however, is absolutely passive. So the writers of Scripture who spake from God were passive. It was the Spirit of God who bore them. It was he who was active, and they who were passive. In being borne by the Spirit the writers were passive; in speaking and writing they were active. This might seem to be a contradiction, but it is not. It is simply an expression of the mystery involved in the truth that the words of Scripture are divine words and yet are also the words of human writers. Thus he bore them to the goal of his own desiring.
“If we examine closely the language of Peter, we shall note that it was while they were in this condition of being borne by the Spirit that men spoke from God. The source of their words is said to be God, and they spoke these words while they were being borne of the Holy Spirit. While they spoke they were passive, and God was active. It was he who bore them, and as he bore them, they spoke. It was, therefore, not in the void, but rather through the instrumentality and medium of men who were borne by the Spirit, that God spoke.
“Peter thus makes it clear that human beings actually spoke from God. That is, there were human writers of the Scriptures. The things which they uttered were not their own, but, since they had been borne by Him, were of God Himself. Since God gave His word through human writers, we may truly speak of a human side to the Bible. The message of God was communicated by means of the instrumentality of men who were under the influence of his Spirit” (Edward J. Young, Thy Word is Truth, Banner of Truth, 1963, pp. 225&26).
If you want to press the issue and ask how the Spirit actually controlled the writers of Scripture so that they wrote exactly what he desired and yet at the same time they remained individuals with personalities which were not stifled, I cannot answer you. How could Amos write, “The words of Amos . . . which he saw” and yet how could they be words which had their origin in Jehovah? If God was their author how could Amos be regarded as their author? We can only say that that is what Scripture says, and everywhere you come across the Bible’s teaching about the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man you are going to meet the same unreconcilable tension. These doctrines are two parallel lines of truth which meet in infinity, and so it is in Scripture. They both stand in the light that the Word of God casts upon each them, and our portion is to be believers, that is to trust in God as we meet such apparent antinomies. God has spoken. Let us hear his voice, and beyond that let us not seek to go.
2. THE TESTIMONY OF ISRAEL’S OWN LEADERS AND PROPHETS CONFIRMS THE APOSTLE’S WORDS.
I want you to see this from two perspectives;
i] The later leaders of Israel believed this. During the Old Testament the men of God of the exile looked back to the time of the prophets and acknowledged that it was by the Holy Spirit that the prophets had so courageously and faithfully spoken. Consider Nehemiah, for example, the leader of the people when they returned to Israel from their seventy years of exile in Babylon. There is a famous and moving prayer of confession in Nehemiah chapter nine, and there we find this man of God speaking to Jehovah about Moses and the years in the wilderness. Nehemiah says, “You gave your good Spirit to instruct them.” (Neh. 9:20). It was Moses who was teaching the people, but Nehemiah recognizes that it was by God’s good Spirit that the word came to the people in Egypt and the wilderness. Nehemiah is saying just what Peter says in the New Testament.
Again Nehemiah later in that prayer comments on the hard-heartedness and disobedience of these people, and in verse thirty he says, “For many years you were patient with them. By your Spirit you admonished them through your prophets. Yet they paid no attention . . .” Moses was the prophet who exhorted the people and rebuked them, and yet Nehemiah says that those admonitions came by the Spirit of God. It is the same conviction as the New Testament apostles that the word of God through the prophets came by the Spirit of God.
You find the same lament in Zechariah chapter seven as that prophet met resistance to his message summoning the people to live just and caring lives as the Israel of God. Zechariah preached to them from the Scriptures of Moses and the earlier prophets, but his words were rejected, and these are the words with which he described this rejection (in verses eight through twelve), “And the word of the LORD came again to Zechariah: ‘This is what the LORD Almighty says: “Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.”’ But they refused to pay attention; stubbornly they turned their backs and stopped up their ears. They made their hearts as hard as flint and would not listen to the law or to the words that the LORD Almighty had sent by his Spirit through the earlier prophets. So the LORD Almighty was very angry.” So eight hundred years after the death of Moses leaders in Israel like Nehemiah and Zechariah could look back to their fathers and they acknowledged how those men were carried along by the Spirit of God in their ministries.
ii] The prophets themselves were conscious of assistance from the Holy Spirit. They knew that their messages came with the illumination and authority of the Spirit of God. For example, the prophet Micah says, “as for me, I am filled with power, with the Spirit of the LORD, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression, to Israel his sin.” (Micah 3:8). Isaiah says, “And now the Sovereign LORD has sent me, with his Spirit. This is what the LORD says - your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I am the LORD your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go” (Isaiah 48:16&17). Or again you remember how David’s last words begin, “These are the last words of David: ‘The oracle of David son of Jesse, the oracle of the man exalted by the Most High, the man anointed by the God of Jacob, Israel's singer of songs: The Spirit of the LORD spoke through me; his word was on my tongue. The God of Israel spoke, the Rock of Israel said to me . . .’” (2 Sam. 23:1-3). So when Solomon built the Temple and he exactly followed the plans left by David was it out of reverence for his dead father that Solomon did what the king had written or was it out of conscious obedience to God? The reply that Scripture gives is clear and definite, for we read, “Then David gave his son Solomon the plans for the portico of the temple, its buildings, its storerooms, its upper parts, its inner rooms and the place of atonement. He gave him the plans of all that the Spirit had put in his mind for the courts of the temple of the LORD” (I Chron. 28:11&12). So the prophets themselves and the later leaders in Israel were conscious that the words they preached were delivered by the inspiration of the Spirit.
3. THIS VIEW OF INSPIRATION DOES NOT PROVIDE ANY SUPPORT FOR THE DICTATION THEORY OF SCRIPTURE.
So am I giving you a dictation theory of the inspiration of Scripture? The Muslims claim that the Koran was already fully spelled out in Arabic in heaven, and came down to earth with no change whatsoever. For this reason Muslims have been slow to give permission for any translation of the Koran at all since no other form is admissible but the flawless Arabic one given to Mohammed. We reject entirely such a theory of the inspiration of the Scriptures. God did not annihilate the personalities of Moses, Samuel, David and Isaiah and the others. Their styles and temperaments and personal feelings are everywhere apparent in what they wrote. Yet we evangelicals who hold to historic Christianity are pilloried as teaching that the prophets were little better than human dictaphones, that they recorded mechanically the words God spoke to them. We do not believe in parrot-like reproduction.
Our critics simply refuse to believe that God could so supervise the upbringing and education and experiences of a man and shape him in his composition of the written prophecy that what he wrote was exactly what God intended. No Protestant theologian has ever believed that Jeremiah, for example, was some mere typewriter. Rather the Spirit of God completely adapted his inspiring activity to the cast of Jeremiah’s mind, his outlook, temperament, interests, literary habits and stylistic idiosyncrasies which God had prepared for this very purpose. You turn to the New Testament and you find that though the disciples were all in the school of Christ for three years each remained an individual man. The twelve did not come out of the ‘Jesus experience’ brain-washed stereotypes. There is the fervent impetuosity of Peter, and John the sanctified son of thunder, and the practical genius of James. When Isaiah wrote the 53rd chapter of his prophecy he did so in wonder, love and praise. When Jeremiah composed the book of Lamenations he put pen to scroll with enormous sympathy in his heart. When David wrote some of the psalms he could hardly contain his joy unspeakable so that all the palace might have echoed with his doxology. A dictation theory of the origin of the Bible never existed at any time in the past century except in critics’ imaginations. We don’t believe in the stiff, mechanical, dictated view of Scripture. When the modernists solemnly warn the church ‘not to return to that old view’ then we reply, “It has always been an imaginary view. Christians have never professed that view of how the Holy Spirit worked in the Old Testament. You are pillorying us.”
But I feel I’m getting over-defensive in rejecting the theory of dictation, and in my scorn for the liberals who suggest we hold to it. Let me show you just how close to divine dictation the Holy Spirit carried along these men. In the opening words of Jeremiah chapter 36 we read this, “In the fourth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, this word came to Jeremiah from the LORD: ‘Take a scroll and write on it all the words I have spoken to you concerning Israel, Judah and all the other nations from the time I began speaking to you in the reign of Josiah till now’” (Jer. 36:1&2). But Jeremiah was bound and he couldn’t write, so he beckoned to his servant to come to him: “So Jeremiah called Baruch son of Neriah, and while Jeremiah dictated all the words the LORD had spoken to him, Baruch wrote them on the scroll. Then Jeremiah told Baruch, ‘I am restricted; I cannot go to the LORD's temple. So you go to the house of the LORD on a day of fasting and read to the people from the scroll the words of the LORD that you wrote as I dictated. Read them to all the people of Judah who come in from their towns. Perhaps they will bring their petition before the LORD, and each will turn from his wicked ways, for the anger and wrath pronounced against this people by the LORD are great.’ Baruch son of Neriah did everything Jeremiah the prophet told him to do; at the LORD's temple he read the words of the LORD from the scroll” (Jer. 36:4-8). Then the great officials of Jerusalem came with questions to Baruch, Jeremiah’s servant; “Then they asked Baruch, ‘Tell us, how did you come to write all this? Did Jeremiah dictate it?’ ‘Yes,’ Baruch replied, ‘he dictated all these words to me, and I wrote them in ink on the scroll’” (Jer. 36:17&18).
In other words the chained Jeremiah had been carried along by the Holy Spirit and as he spoke aloud at dictation speed the message which he had received from God then Baruch, with the unrolled skin or a sheet of papyrus and a reed pen which he dipped again and again into an ink horn, wrote down those words one by one. When it was completed then it was sacred, because it was just what God wanted to be written. It was Jehovah’s message to Israel, and when the people heard it there was no discussion of the method or timing of the composition. The hearers only gave their attention to what God was saying to them.
I still have not finished with this fascinating incident because I want you to see one more thing, that the king in his sullen rage had the scroll of Jeremiah read out to him. He held in his hand a knife and as the Scriptures were being read the king cut them out of the scroll, paragraph by paragraph, and tossed them onto the fire (it was winter time that this incident occurred) until all that Scripture was destroyed. The king could not accept that the words of Jeremiah were words from God, true words, and words inspired by the Holy Spirit. For him that was an emotional impossibility. His heart was revulsed at such words of judgment being Spirit-given words coming from heaven. So he totally rejected them and wanted them destroyed. He was happier with other parts of the Old Testament that were acceptable. Then we are told this, “After the king burned the scroll containing the words that Baruch had written at Jeremiah’s dictation, the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah: ‘Take another scroll and write on it all the words that were on the first scroll, which Jehoiakim king of Judah burned up. Also tell Jehoiakim king of Judah, “This is what the LORD says: You burned that scroll and said, ‘Why did you write on it that the king of Babylon would certainly come and destroy this land and cut off both men and animals from it?’ Therefore, this is what the LORD says about Jehoiakim king of Judah: He will have no-one to sit on the throne of David; his body will be thrown out and exposed to the heat by day and the frost by night. I will punish him and his children and his attendants for their wickedness; I will bring on them and those living in Jerusalem and the people of Judah every disaster I pronounced against them, because they have not listened.”’ So Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to the scribe Baruch son of Neriah, and as Jeremiah dictated, Baruch wrote on it all the words of the scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire. And many similar words were added to them” (Jer. 36:27-32).
Two things; first that this seems very solemn and a very contemporary attitude to the Scriptures. God did not treat lightly this king’s pick’n’mix attitude to the Old Testament accepting some of his words and destroying the rest. This king had become his own ultimate authority for what to believe, not the Bible. He chose to receive what he felt he could, and what he couldn’t accept he dismissed. So he had pushed God off the throne of his life and put himself on it. Then again, let me say this, that what we find in this incident, describing how Jeremiah’s words came into being via Baruch seems to us very like the dreaded ‘dictation’ theory. However, we are simply claiming that that is how it was done here, in this one incident in the life of Jeremiah. We are not claiming that it happened like this always in this prophet’s life, or in the ministries of other prophets at all. Moses, for example, had been trained for writing the crucial first five books of the Bible over decades of preparation, and in two strange places, first his elementary education was in Pharaoah’s palace. Then he did his graduate studies during forty years in a wilderness, at the back side of the desert, with sheep and herdsmen and family as his companions. That is how God prepared him to become the leader and prophet to Israel, so that almost naturally he wrote the Pentateuch over a period of some years, almost unconscious at times that he had become the amanuensis of God. But he had been, “For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
4. WHEN THE SPIRIT OF GOD CARRIED ALONG A PROPHET THE RESULT WAS THAT HE COULD NOT SPEAK ERROR.
Let us consider in closing a man we come across in the book of Numbers chapter twenty-four and verse two of whom we read that “the Spirit of God came upon him and he uttered his oracle.” The man’s name was Balaam and he was not an Israelite. He came from the east, a diviner who lived in Mesopotamia. The background of how he became involved in Israel is this that it was at the time of the entry of the nation of Israel into the promised land, and the nation of “Moab was terrified because there were so many people” (Nums. 22:3). The king of Moab was a man named Balak and so what he did was to hire this man Balaam to put a curse on Israel. Balaam had a huge reputation in the whole area. The king says to him, “I know that those you bless are blessed, and those you curse are cursed.” (Nums 22:6).
So Balaam accepted the job, but when he tried to curse the Israelites God rejected him and said, “You must not put a curse on those people, because they are blessed” (Nums. 22:12). King Balak tried again, sending distinguished princes and offers of great gifts if only Balaam would curse the people of God. Balaam is adamant, “I could not do anything great or small to go beyond the command of the LORD my God” (Nums. 22:18). Balaam does go to Moab to explain this to the king though God tests him on the journey. When he reaches Balak the king is angry that he has taken so long and still not cursed the Israelites. He says to the prophet, “Did I not send you an urgent summons? Why didn't you come to me? Am I really not able to reward you?” (Nums. 22:37). What was Balaam’s response? See how important it is for our trust in the truthfulness of biblical prophecy; “‘Well, I have come to you now,’ Balaam replied. ‘But can I say just anything? I must speak only what God puts in my mouth’” (Nums. 22:38). That is the consequence of the Holy Spirit carrying the prophets along. Then king Balak gets increasingly angry as every attempt he makes to insist that Balaam curses the people fails. Balaam is persuaded to go to God again but again the quest is fruitless; “How can I curse those whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce those whom God has not denounced?” (Nums. 23:8). King Balak protests, “‘What have you done to me? I brought you to curse my enemies, but you have done nothing but bless them!’ He answered, ‘Must I not speak what the LORD puts in my mouth?’” (Nums 23:11&12).
Can a prophet who speaks from God, who is being carried along by the Holy Spirit – can he change what God has given him? Can he discard the divine message and give his own instead? Listen to what Balaam says, “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfil? I have received a command to bless; he has blessed, and I cannot change it” (Nums 23:19&20).
By this time king Balak is desperate. Balaam is now actually blessing the people of God, and Balak’s plea becomes that Balaam should ignore them. The king is wishing he’d never dreamed up this scheme of asking for them to be cursed. He pleads with the prophet saying, “‘Neither curse them at all nor bless them at all!’ Balaam answered, ‘Did I not tell you I must do whatever the LORD says?’” (Nums 23:25&26). Now king Balak is at his wit’s end. We read, “Then Balak’s anger burned against Balaam. He struck his hands together and said to him, ‘I summoned you to curse my enemies, but you have blessed them these three times. Now leave at once and go home! I said I would reward you handsomely, but the LORD has kept you from being rewarded.’ Balaam answered Balak, ‘Did I not tell the messengers you sent me, “Even if Balak gave me his palace filled with silver and gold, I could not do anything of my own accord, good or bad, to go beyond the command of the LORD - and I must say only what the LORD says”?’” (Nums 24:10-13).
This conviction controlled the devotion and thoughts and words of the prophets in the Old Testament. You find it again with a prophet we hardly know at all. His name was Micaiah and there is a fascinating incident in his life that shows again that he was a true prophet of the Lord. He was hauled before kings Ahab and Jehoshaphat to give his prophetic blessing on their armies before they go into battle. We are told, “All the other prophets were prophesying the same thing. ‘Attack Ramoth Gilead and be victorious,’ they said, ‘for the LORD will give it into the king’s hand.’ The messenger who had gone to summon Micaiah said to him, ‘Look, as one man the other prophets are predicting success for the king. Let your word agree with theirs, and speak favourably.’ But Micaiah said, ‘As surely as the LORD lives, I can tell him only what the LORD tells me.’ When he arrived, the king asked him, ‘Micaiah, shall we go to war against Ramoth Gilead, or shall I refrain?’ ‘Attack and be victorious,’ he answered, ‘for the LORD will give it into the king’s hand.’ The king said to him, ‘How many times must I make you swear to tell me nothing but the truth in the name of the LORD?’ Then Micaiah answered, ‘I saw all Israel scattered on the hills like sheep without a shepherd, and the LORD said, “These people have no master. Let each one go home in peace.”’ The king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, ‘Didn't I tell you that he never prophesies anything good about me, but only bad?’ Micaiah continued, ‘Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne with all the host of heaven standing round him on his right and on his left. And the LORD said, “Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?” One suggested this, and another that. Finally, a spirit came forward, stood before the LORD and said, “I will entice him.” “By what means?” the LORD asked. “I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,” he said. “You will succeed in enticing him,” said the LORD. “Go and do it.” ‘So now the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouths of all these prophets of yours. The LORD has decreed disaster for you.’” (I Kings 22:12-23). So do you see once again that the true prophets of God could not speak error when they were speaking in the name of the Lord because they were carried along by the Spirit.
So what have we done in this sermon? We have sought to show to you the truth of the words of Peter, “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:20&21). The minds and souls of these prophets were controlled by the Spirit of God; they were conscious of the brevity of life and after that the judgment. Soon they had to give an account to God of every word they’d spoken, especially in his name. Had they been faithful to the great commission God had given to them when he called them to be his prophets? They also lived under the authority of the ninth commandment, “You shall not bear false witness.” Of course they were sinners, and there were times when as individual men they might lie and lose their tempers. There was an occasion when the author of the 23rd Psalm wrote a letter to his general Joab. It was a despicable letter saying, “Put Uriah in the front line where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so that he will be struck down and die” (2 Sam. 11:15). For ever those words blacken the record of David. They came out of the flesh; they were a stratagem devised to cover the king’s sin. He was not being carried along by the Spirit when he wrote it. Only when these men spoke and wrote in the name of the Lord, when they were borne along by the Holy Spirit did they speak the truth, and nothing but the truth. Apart from that they were sinners who erred just as other men err. But when the Spirit was carrying them along they had to say what the Lord said.
5. THE EXTRAORDINARY CHARACTER OF OLD TESTAMENT PROPHECY.
From my late teacher, Edward J. Young, we can gain three striking facts about the prophets of the Old Testament.
i] The self-consciousness of the Old Testament Prophets. These men all believed themselves to have been the spokesmen from God, carried along by the Spirit of God. In his book on My Servants the Prophets (pp. 171-175) Edward J. Young shows the fruit of his lifelong study of the prophecy of Isaiah, for in those pages he has outlined no less than 126 occasions where that prophet said words like “Thus says the Lord.” With constant ease Isaiah repeated the conviction that Jehovah had spoken these words to him. They were unoriginal words; he was passing on what he had also received. Thus all the prophets came before the nation and they uttered God’s word. God had spoken to them and that was the compelling reason for how these prophets lived, what they suffered, what numbers of them died for, and all they said. Where did such a conviction come from? Was this a delusion? Was it the product of a deliberate attempt to deceive? Or did God actually speak to them as they claimed he had? That is the conviction of the church from New Testament times, for it was that of the infallible Son of God.
ii] The prolonged testimony of the Old Testament Prophets. The apostles of the New Testament were a small group of men, and their labours lasted, at the most, fifty years and at the least forty years. Then the gift of apostleship was removed, never to return again because it was not needed. It was a foundation gift. How different were the prophets. The patriarch Abraham was in fact called a prophet and he lived 2,000 years before Christ. We can meet an isolated prophet after him, but it is from the time of Samuel down to the close of the Old Testament period that the prophets stood forth, in other words, from about the year 1000 for the next five hundred years at least. That psychological conviction that they were being carried along by the Spirit and speaking for God was not limited to a few men for fifty years. That overwhelming assurance characterized the entire history of the prophetic movement. At the time of Samuel an unnamed man of God came earnestly to Eli and said to him, “This is what the Lord says . . .” (I Sam. 2:27). That was the commencement of the era of the prophets; centuries later Malachi at the end of the Old Testament introduced his message with the words, “An oracle: The word of the LORD to Israel through Malachi” (Mal. 1:1). Wherever we turn in the Old Testament we find the prophets speaking forth in the name of Jehovah with the deepest earnestness. Such a phenomenon is nowhere else to be found in the whole world. The explanation is that God was actually speaking to his people throughout all those centuries.
iii] The body of predictions which characterized the Old Testament Prophets. Gather them all together and you will see that they are all looking forward to the “last days” when God would visit his people in blessing and salvation. That theme was woven into their whole ministries. As Peter very significantly said, “all the prophets from Samuel on, as many as have spoken, have foretold these days.” (Acts 3:24). The nineteenth-century Oxford professor Henry Liddon traced no fewer than 332 Old Testament prophecies fulfilled by Christ. These covered his family’s social status, his lifestyle, his general demeanour, his teaching and his extraordinary powers. They included minute details of the events surrounding his death. The prophets said that he would be forsaken by his followers betrayed for thirty pieces of silver (which would then be used to buy a potter’s field), wrongly accused, tortured and humiliated (in response to which he would not retaliate), executed alongside common criminals, and put to death by crucifixion.
Then let us accept the claims of the prophets at face value. The wonderful message that came forth from their lips was not of human origin. It came from God. When you hold a Bible in your hands you are holding a book that comes from another world, whose words are absolutely true and completely reliable. They are words which are spirit and are life.
We should then grieve if we are under a ministry which never or very rarely preaches from the Old Testament. That is not a Spirit-anointed ministry in spite of crowds and decisions. Consider Peter on the Day of Pentecost, baptized with the Spirit, and preaching under the mighty blessing of God - as it is recorded in Acts chapter two. What is that sermon? It is a message full of the Old Testament Scripture. If you really are someone who has the Spirit of God you will recognize the Spirit as the one who earlier carried these prophets, men who are your fellow believers, so that they wrote exactly what they did. Any Spirit-filled minister believes and preaches the Old Testament. If we are unfortunate enough not to have such a ministry then let us make sure that we temporarily compensate (until we can sit under better ministry) by studying these Scriptures for ourselves, believing every truth they affirm and obeying every divine command. Let us study the word of God much, and read it consecutively and with constant self-application, and seek every help to understand what it teaches. It is all inspired but it is not all easy to grasp. Expect often to be perplexed, but keep asking God for illumination by the same Spirit who inspired its writing, and he will give it to you. Let us read the Scriptures as if God were speaking to us, and that we answer him with words of gratitude, reverence, faith, joy and fear, even as their promises or their warnings apply to us.
June 1 2008 GEOFF THOMAS