Esther iv. 13-17.
THE subject to which I invite your attention to-night is the Story of Queen Esther. The kernel of it has been read to you in the fourth chapter. I shall read the closing verses, so as to give you the key-note to the meaning of the narrative. After Esther had refused to go and plead for the Hebrews with the King of Persia, "Mordecai commanded to answer Esther, Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king's house, more than all the Jews. For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this? Then Esther bade them return Mordecai this answer, Go, gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and my maidens will fast likewise; and so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish. So Mordecai went his way, and did according to all that Esther had commanded him."
It is a very difficult task to calculate how much religion there is in the world—true religion, that God accepts. Elijah once tried to calculate, and concluded there was nobody true to God but himself; blind to the seven thousand that had not bowed the knee to Baal. It is quite possible to take superficial, indulgent, optimistic views of the progress made by mankind, but God knows there are as deadly and wicked and more blasphemous errors committed by good men, who talk of this world as if it were given over to the devil to reign and rule in it, as if things were growing worse and worse, as if the number of men and women whose hearts are God's were few. I think the blunder comes from looking for goodness often in the wrong place, from a mistaken idea of what true religion is. It won't do to reckon up our church members; they are not all genuine. It won't do to count our acts of worship, our prayer-meetings, our praises. These are often mere sound, breath, empty air. If you want to know how much of Christ there is in this world, you must go outside the churches, into the workshops, into the homes of the people. Ay, you must go to lands where Christ's name is not often heard, and you have got to listen with a sympathetic ear, and whenever you hear the accents of Christ's human voice ringing out in any way of genuine love and tenderness, whenever you see duty done patiently, and loyally, and uncomplainingly, whenever you see a heart or a soul follow the light, however dim and glimmering, understand that there you are touching Christ, and stand on a bit of the kingdom of heaven. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews is the golden roll of the Old Testament heroes, men of God, stamped by God Himself as genuine; and the deeds recited, too, as having been done by them, that gave them their degree and title as heroes, and nobles, and princes in heaven's kingdom, are not the preaching of sermons, or the writing of books of theology, or the fighting about petty little trivialities of doctrinal explanation, or the performance of rites and ceremonies and acts of worship, but brave deeds of battle, noble, dauntless generalship, heroism, and courage, and self-sacrifice, loyalty to the cause of truth and righteousness in this world. These are the deeds that were done, following the guidance of God, under the inspiration of Heaven, and the men who did them are recited in one long unbroken chain, and linked on in line direct with Jesus Christ, whose death and redemption are presented as the crown and consummation of that long series of priests, and kings, and prophets, and warriors, and heroes, true-hearted men and women who lived for God and fought for God in the olden time. It is sometimes said that Christ was not present in the Old Testament times. True, the human Jesus of Nazareth was not there, but oh, the spirit of Him was! He was the very heart-beat, and pulse, and inspiration of all that long, continuous struggle to bring heaven down into earth, for that is what the Old Testament story presents to us. In every brave deed, in every true word, in every pure and righteous life, it was not the heart of man that glowed, but the very spirit of Christ—Christ coming to full birth and maturity in this world's story.
Some people are puzzled to discover how the Book of Esther comes to be in the Old Testament. It is said to be a romance of history. It contains no religious teaching. The name of God is not once mentioned in it, from the first verse to the last. How comes it in the Bible?
Now, it is quite true that there is no direct dogmatic teaching of religious truth. It is absolutely true that the name of God is not to be found in its pages. But what of that? what of that, if the book is one of the most powerful presentations of God's providence working among men, if the book itself has for its very soul and idea the conception of God overruling events in a marvellous fashion to preserve His kingdom on earth? Is the great thing to get the name of God, spelt with its three letters, or to be shown God? Ah! it is the same kind of blunder that causes us to make so much of mere forms of words in the Church, instead of looking to see if the Spirit of God animates the man and woman and the preacher who inhabit the professed house of God on earth. There may be no teaching of religion, no prophesying of Jesus, no foreshadowing of the evangelical truths of redemption in the Book of Esther; but what it does paint for you is a majestic picture of a human heart struggling against its own weakness, rising to a grandeur that had in it the glory of Christ's own self-sacrifice. The name is not there, the phrase is not there; but the core, and kernel, and heart of Christ's love, and faith, and redemption of men are pulsing and beating in the book.
It is a puzzling book. There is a great deal in it that is revolting. The background on which Esther's deed of heroism was done is ugly and repulsive. She lived in a social state that was degraded and base, containing in it customs and habits that almost sicken us who, through Christ's mercy, have been lifted into comparative purity and sweetness.
You remember the story. A dissolute Persian monarch, in a drunken frolic, requires of his queen to do a deed that ran against all that was womanly within her, and she refused. Mercilessly he deposes her from the throne, and he sets to to select another queen. The fair maidens of the land are collected, and in a very disgusting fashion presented to the tyrant, and from among them he chooses the beautiful young Jewess Esther, and makes her his queen. One cannot but pity her for having lived in such a time, for having had to play a part on such a stage of the world's story. One may even fairly ask the question, if it had not been nobler if she had not been presented by her guardian in such a revolting competition? But it is no good for us finding fault with the actual course of the world's story. If God was not too fine to lead men in all the bygone days—polygamy and such like practices were tolerated in the Old Testament time, because of the lowness of men's hearts, as Christ explains to us—it is a mistake in you and me being too fine to recognise God where God was numbering Himself among transgressors, that He might lift mankind to His own level. And then the narrative proceeds; presents to us a succession of cruel, unscrupulous intrigues, mainly between Esther's guardian, Mordecai, (a Jew whom one cannot admire and love, taking the picture of him drawn in this book) and the king's favourite courtier, Haman. In the course of the rivalry between the two, the very existence of God's people throughout the Persian empire is imperilled. Partly through Haman's scheming, but also through dauntless devotion to what they believed to be the cause of God, and which was the cause of God, in spite of the earthliness and imperfections attaching to its soldiers and defenders, partly by evil fixed to them, partly through nobility and goodness, a drama is presented to us, a struggle of heroism and bravery, and in the centre of it is that young queen doing a deed that we cannot but call Christlike.
Now, I want to say this to you: Men's lights in the world are very diverse. The possibilities of goodness and attainment for one man are far greater and far higher than for another. Some of you may be so entangled with evil customs and habits of commercial or of social life that you feel your very position there is impossible to make quite consistent with the full requirements of Jesus Christ. Thus things are. It is no good blinking them. And what are you to do? To despair, to give up any attempt to be good, and pure, and noble? Never! never! Look at all that Old Testament story—men far behind in their notions of common morality, yet on that low, degraded background discerning always a higher that may be done, a lower that may be avoided. No matter where you may stand, no matter how difficult the achievements may be, the one great question is, not what is the framework, but what is the painting you put in it. Are you living for self? or are you living for God? living to your own self-will, or striving to do your duty as far as you can do it?
From a very lowly lot Esther rose to be the first lady in the land, and I suppose all her sister Jewesses envied her, and thought that there was nothing that was not happy, and prosperous, and pleasant in her position. Yes, it was a position of great advantage, of great pomp, flattering to her pride—rich raiment, jewellery, the adulation of fawning courtiers, the admiration of the great monarch of the mightiest kingdom in the world, promoted to the throne as queen, wielding power over the destinies of man. Ah! it was a very enviable, happy lot, and yet not altogether so very enviable. I will tell you why—a thing that we apparently forget. When we all of us enter into our estates, when we come of age, nearly all good fortune in this world is heavily mortgaged. It is encumbered estates that we come heir to; and without disloyalty, without being renegades and dishonourable, we cannot cast off these encumbrances. The present has always got to pay the purchase price to the past. You must not kick away the ladder by which you rose to fortune. Ah! and sometimes into the bright sunshiny present the past comes with a very long bill to pay—comes with a very stern face and a demanding hand, and bids you, perhaps, risk all that is making your heart so warm, and so proud, and so gay.
That was the case with Esther. She was a Jewess. She owed her birth and her breeding to that despised, exiled people. She had won her proud position on the emperor's throne through the planning, and toiling, and sacrifice of her Jewish guardian. And now her people's destiny hangs on the balance. A deadly conspiracy against them has brought it about that on a given day, rapidly approaching, there is to be a universal merciless massacre of these defenceless Jews. And through the mouth of her old revered guardian the demand comes to her—the one human being that might have influence with the cruel king to cancel the decree and save the lives of men, women, and children—at the risk and peril of her own life in asking it, to go and intercede for them.
Hard! oh, how hard! Don't you judge harshly the poor queen when she shrank away from it and could not face the stern summons. Think of it, the young flesh, the soft heart—a woman's heart—within her, and think of the cruel death by torture that was wont to be inflicted upon any one that, unbidden, dared to force his way into the king's presence; coming, too, in the bright noonday of all her good fortune. It would have been easier to risk life when she was an unknown Jewish maiden; but oh, in this good luck, this fortune, this love, this adulation, this admiration, with her right fair beauty all upon her, to take it all and go and confront grim death! it seemed too much to ask. And so Esther began arguing within herself: Was she bound to hazard her life for these Jews? After all, what had they done for her? They were her race, her kindred, but what of that? Had she not come out from among them? Has not destiny taken her lot and separated it from theirs? Why cannot she live her own life apart from them? Why should she come down from the throne and take her stand among them, exposed to cruel massacre and death? What is the obligation? Where are the ties that bound her lot to theirs? Ay, where were the ties of love and the obligations to generosity? They are too fine and impalpable to be proved by argument. The moment you begin discussing them or questioning them—ties that bind brother to brother, sister to sister, child to parent—they vanish like life dissected for. You destroy them. They have to be felt, not proved, but are more real, more solemn, more important in determining a man's destinies than all the legal bonds and moral obligations that bind him in society.
But then, again, the queen would ask herself, What would be the good of her running such a risk? Is it reasonable that she, a single weak woman, unskilled in the ways of courts and of cunning courtiers; that she should be asked to plunge into a whirlpool of race-hatreds and furious feuds between unscrupulous nobles and potentates about the court; that she should confront the reckless rage of the royal tyrant—she, so defenceless, so impotent, so frail? Ah, yes! once again the argument was good to shirk the path of heroism; but once again, what business had she to argue? When duty comes to you it is not a thing to reason about. You have got to just go and do it.
Mother, when your little one was struck down with the deadliest and most infectious ailment, did you reason for one moment whether you could be expected to risk your life, whether you were not too delicate to make it worth while doing it, whether you would not be throwing away your existence? If any man came and suggested that to you,—"No!" Love, duty, they do not argue, they command.
The fact of the matter was, the queen was standing in a false position. She could not see the truth, she could not see the right, where she stood. I hope I have been able to show you how very plausible, how very weighty, the grounds were on which she made her refusal to risk her life. But have not you yourselves felt something about a home atmosphere in which such reasoning moved that is contemptible and despicable? Have not you recognised its infinite pettiness and littleness? Oh, what a narrow, contracted, selfish world that woman's heart is living in! It has been all a question about Esther—Esther's life, Esther's risks, Esther's obligations, as if that were the whole. Why not break down those prison walls of littleness? Look at those thousands of Jews—fathers, mothers, young maidens, brave lads, little children with their bright eyes, and with terrible death impending over them. How is Esther so forgetful of them, with their white faces and their anxious eyes, and of God's purposes in this world? Ah, no man can ever choose the path of right, of heroism, of goodness, of duty, till he sees and feels himself in God's big world, and with God above him up in heaven!
Mordecai recognised the root of the queen's cowardice, and swiftly and sternly he sent back a reply that shattered those barriers of her selfishness, and lifted her out of her little self-centred world, and set her on the pinnacle whence the whole line and way of duty shone out unmistakably. "Go back," said he—"go back and tell the queen to be ashamed of her despicable selfishness. Does she imagine that she lives separate and unconnected in this world of God's, so that she can save her own life by sacrificing, cowardly, the lives of her kinsmen? Go, tell the queen that she does not live in a will-less, random world, where she may pick and choose the best things for herself. Go, tell her that confronting her, sweeping round her, seizing her in its currents, the great will of God is moving on down through the centuries. If she will not save God's people, then God will find another deliverer, and she herself shall be dashed aside. Go, tell the queen she may refuse the task, but the deed shall be done. God's purpose in His chosen people shall not be baulked. Deliverance will come to the Jews, but she, poor blind queen, may have missed a noble vocation. Go, bid the queen look at the strange providence that picked her out among her people, that placed her on the throne, that set her by the side of the despot in whose hands the fate of her people is held, and then bid her ask whether she thinks God did that deed out of partial, indulgent favour of her petty self, or whether it is not clear as noontide that just for this hour of peril, and of danger, and of death, to be the redeemer and the saviour of the Jews, God gave her that dignity and set her on the throne."
Ah, what a new world we are in now! what a new light floods everything! The queen felt it. All that was noble, all that was good in her waked and gained the upper hand, and crushed down her baseness, and her meanness, and her selfishness. And yet heroism had a struggle with the weakness of the flesh. That is nothing strange. Remember Christ in Gethsemane: "Oh, watch with Me, with your human sympathy and fellowship, in My dire hour of need!" It was a cry like that that made Esther send back that message to Mordecai. She wanted to feel the binding force of the ties of common human brotherhood that connected her with her people to make her strong. She saw how it was. Away from them, and living alone, proudly, selfishly, her heart had got hard, and she could not go out among them; but it would mean a deal for her during those days if she knew that in every Jewish home men and women, young men and maidens, and little children, from morning till night, were fasting, and by the pain and abstinence of fasting kept thinking, from morning till night, of the deadly danger hanging over them, and Esther steeling herself to risk her life for love of them. Oh, wrapped round with that sense of human sympathy, nerved and braved by the thought of all these human lives hanging on her heroism, the weak woman conquered, and she could go and do the deed of valour!
But one thing more: the other element, the sense of her own weakness, her own impotence—for that she needed to fall back on God. Ah, if it were the case simply of a nation pleading with her to intercede on their behalf, she could not have done that all alone! But when she herself, through those two days, lived face to face with God, till this world was filled with His presence, till all the old stories of the generous rescues of bygone days were blazing resplendent before her eyes, guaranteeing that it was a call of God, that God would be behind her and with her and that His strength would be sufficient for her weakness—so backed with intimate love and sympathy with her fellow-men, and a strong faith in God, she could go and do her duty. Look at this striking contrast. Read that first refusal of hers—selfish, self-centred, cowardly, prudent. I think you feel all through it a restlessness, a dissatisfaction, a vacillation, a nervous excitement, a sense of uneasiness, a hidden doubt whether in saving her life she may not be losing it. Read that reply now, when she pledges herself to go and dare the king's deadly rage. How grand, and majestic, and calm it rings out! solemn, earnest, like the voice of a brave veteran going on a forlorn hope, but with the tranquillity, the serene certainty, of a brave heart doing what it knows to be duty. Ah, the man that goes through this world regardless of right or wrong, not asking what is duty, taking and choosing what shall be for his own advantage, trimming, and chopping, and setting his sails to catch every breeze of dishonourable prosperity, the restless heart that made response hanging upon himself, every step his own, if wrong then the upbraiding and the remorse all will be his. Oh, the sweetness, the grandeur, the calmness of the man who has asked simply, in any circumstances of danger and difficulty, "What is right? what is duty? what is the will of God? what alone can and ought to be done?" and then does it, ay, with death hanging over. He can sleep tranquilly. He is not responsible for the issue, no matter what it be. Here on earth he has done the right, done his duty, and the responsibility rests on God.
Esther, by that deed of heroism, delivered God's people from destruction. In her measure she did the same thing that Christ did perfectly later. Like Him, too, she laid her own life down on the altar. That it was not sacrificed does not diminish the value of the offering. A man does not need to perish in saving another from drowning, if he plunge into the wild, stormy sea, to deserve an admiration as great as if he had perished in the task.
She did a deed of Christ. That deed roused the admiration of her day and generation. That deed of hers was told with kindling eyes and ringing voice, and pride and triumph, from father to child, generation after generation. That deed of hers stood out as a pledge, a guarantee, of the reality of God's purpose for His kingdom on earth. By her deed, in her own day and generation, she saved God's people from imminent destruction; by that deed, preserved in history, she lifted up and made strong the hope and faith of generations after. And so, rightfully, her story finds its place in that long record of the hearts, noble, and brave, and true, who, for love of men and faith in God, at the bidding of Heaven, loved not their own lives to death, but laid them down for their brethren.
Oh, we men and women have got to learn this lesson from this Bible of ours—the real service of God, that is real religion, and that does build God's kingdom on earth, is done not altogether, by a long way, in our churches, in our religious exercises of worship; but done in purity, love, and truth, and goodness, out of generous kindliness to one another, at the bidding of God, through all the common chapters that make up our daily life.
"Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of the Lord, for an example."—James v. 10.
WE possess the books produced in olden times by a number of different nations. Each national literature has its own peculiarities. The literature of Israel has various features that are very characteristic of it. Among them all, one stands out and is unique. All along the nation had a conviction that they were destined to be the greatest nation in the world, and they believed that this destiny of theirs lay in the fact that through their government the world was to be made good, righteous, holy, and happy. They believed that God had a large plan, embracing the whole world in its operations; they believed that God was using all the different races as tools to work out that design of His; but they held that infinitely beyond all lesser instruments, He had made up His mind to employ Israel in accomplishing that great purpose of His high heart; through Israel He was to make the whole world into one Divine kingdom, ruled by Himself, and reverencing Himself as the one only God and Lord.
The mass of the people constantly forgot that sense of a lofty destiny; they constantly tired of that great ideal; they chose to prefer present gain and advantage; they disregarded that predicted end of their history in determining their contemporary policy in relation to other nations; they were dumb, and blind, and deaf to that feeling of God's movement in history and His purpose for the future. Nevertheless, in every age down through that nation's story there existed in their midst men who were possessed by a supreme conviction of this presence, and power, and purpose of God, men who sacrificed bread, profession, home, happiness, and life itself, that they might seek to carry out that intention and desire of God. In every age they declared what God wanted Israel to be and to do. In every age they recommended a policy founded on that destiny of Israel and that design of God. The darker the national history grew, the more decided was their certainty of the fulfilment of God's purpose. But this singular change took place in the form in which they conceived that fulfilment: In the earlier times Israel—the whole nation—was to be the minister of God's intention; but as age after age exhibited the depravity, the unholiness, and the jealousy of the nation, the thought of the coming kingdom of promise, and of gladness and goodness, concentrated itself not so much about the people, but about the King. More and more, it was not the chosen people of Israel, but it was the chosen Son of Israel, the chosen Heir of David, the coming Deliverer, the King, that was to bring it in. It is a strange spectacle to behold how God, by His external dealings with the people of Israel, and by the development of their conduct, led His servants the prophets to see that if ever this grand purpose of God for mankind was to be accomplished, it could not be done by the whole people, or any number of them, but must be done by one single individual, who should combine in his character all the goodness, and all the truth, and all the knowledge, and all the power of God that were necessary to make a kingdom of God on earth. So it came to pass that inside the progress of Israel's history, as a wall down the long march of that history, there was a line of men first of all foreseeing a grand future, mainly connected with Israel in the government of the nation, and gradually defining more brightly the covenant, and the establishment, and the maintenance of that kingdom as contained in the person, in the character, in the work, in the heart, in the sufferings, in the triumph of a great coming Messenger of God, a Man of God, a Son of God, yet so stamped with Divinity that He gets names which set Him on a level with God. It is the long procession of prophets, the line of foreseers, who, in succession to the patriarchs, touch, ages in advance, the coming of Christ, and make the world expect it, and preserve faith in mankind till Christ does come.
The history of these men within their own nation is striking. As a rule, they stood in a small minority, were despised and disbelieved, had to maintain the truth of their Divine conviction in the face of almost universal denial, were ill-treated and persecuted, were declared to be impostors or traitors to the national cause, were cast out, and an immense number of them were killed. But as time rolled on the development of events proved that those men had seen the calamities and vengeances of God which had been foretold as about to fall on Israel, because of Israel's sin. The people were cast out of their own native land; they were driven into captivity, and in captivity they remembered what the prophets had spoken; and then, with humble hearts and penitent spirits, they said to themselves "Those men were right; they spoke true; they anticipated what has come to pass; God was with them; they were His messengers; we were in the wrong; it was a true word from heaven that they uttered amongst us;" and so the old contempt and disbelief vanished away, and there came a reverence and a faith for those prophets that almost reached the verge of superstition; they gathered together their writings; they treasured them, and made the books of those prophets into their Bible. It is in that fashion that our own Old Testament of the prophets was formed. The prophets were first rejected, derided, put to death, and, then with repentance and humility, accepted as the true messengers of God, taken as authoritative interpreters of God's mind and will; their writings were treasured and preserved, and made into the national Bible.
It is these prophets that the Apostle James bids us take as an example. He means that every Christian man and every Christian woman is, in a measure, to be a prophet; He means especially that every Christian man and every Christian woman in the battle of life stands in some measure between God and others, and is to be a prophet. He means further that every father is to do for his children what those prophets did for Israel—he is to make them know God. He means that every mother is to be the very channel of making her children come into contact with God's character, and comprehend God's intentions for them. He means especially that every Sunday-school teacher is to be just what those old prophets were in Israel—to make others who are more ignorant than he is sensible of the presence, and purpose, and progression of God's designs through life in his own present age and time. He means that every preacher, and every teacher, and every man who speaks about religion is, in his conduct and character, and what he teaches and what he preaches, to be a prophet. And above all, he means that one and all of us of this age shall, even down to the humblest Christian, who hardly has any influence, act as a mediator or interpreter between other men and God, as did many of the prophets, with an unswerving belief of the truth, and with a patience and perseverance of spirit in every unenlightened time, and amidst the most adverse circumstances, founded upon the certainty of the fulfilment of God's promise that Christ should come, and shall come again.
Now I want to say a few things to you about the character and the office of those prophets in the world, that we may see some respects in which we may and certainly ought to imitate them. What was a prophet? I imagine that many of us are content with a very superficial notion of the part played in actual life by those men. I imagine, because of the class of books that has been written in great profusion in our present century, and is still written, that we are apt to think of a prophet simply and only as a man who predicted things that were going to happen—incidents and events that were to fall out in the unfolding of history. The prophets did a vast deal more than that, and the very essence, and life, and grandeur of their character and conduct appear only in a small fragment in that portion of their office. Their real movement and meaning are in quite another department.
If we wish to know what a prophet is, we may, first of all, take the names given to the prophets in the Bible. Then, again, we may remember who were the prophets. And then we may take their writings, the records of their deeds, the history that tells of their fortunes. What are the names given to a prophet in the Old Testament? The first and holiest is "a man of God"—"the man of God." All that that tells us is that in a peculiar sense the prophet belonged to God. The next name is "the servant of God." That tells us that he belonged to God in the sense of serving God, doing things for God. Then he is called "the ambassador, or the messenger, of God." That tells you that he served God by bringing messages from God. Then he is called an interpreter. That tells you that it was to men he took God's message, and that he had to make it understood by them. The next thing that we come to is a "seer," connected with the word "watchman," a spier or seer. It means one who saw what other men could not see, who saw into God's mind, who saw God, who saw what God was about. It tells us how he got to know his message, how he learnt it; it was by insight, seeing into the hidden, underlying purposes of God. Then the last name of all is what we translate "prophet," and it literally means a man who bubbles up and runs over, whose heart gushes out, in the sense of being poured into, that what is poured in comes out of him. It tells us that he pours out what he has learnt, to other men; and it adds this shade of meaning (the very form of the Hebrew word does so), that he is, as it were, spoken through; it does not end with himself, nor does it take its rise with himself, but it comes into him like a flood, and it overflows; he cannot help himself; he is possessed, he is pressed; he is compelled to utter what his God tells him.
The names of a prophet, therefore, tell us this; this is his function; he, beyond other men, has to do with God, belongs to God; he belongs to God in being God's servant; he is God's servant in being God's messenger; he is God's messenger in bringing things to men that God wants men to know; he learns what he has to tell men by seeing it himself, by knowing it, understanding it, feeling it, and then he utters it by a resistless compulsion and impulse, the fire burning in his heart, a pressure being put on him to tell what God has taught him. Already you have got the thought of a man with a grandeur, a greatness, a significance, and a meaning immensely above what you think of when you think of a man who can tell you where an axe which has been lost is to be found, or whether a sick person will die or live, or whether a town is going to be destroyed or not. What you have is a living, breathing, warming channel of communication between the great God in heaven and the human hearts of men on earth.
Then, who were the prophets? Moses was a prophet, the greatest of all the Old Testament prophets. He was a prophet because of his whole life work, not because once or twice he predicted a thing which was going to happen. Because he was Moses, the moulder and the maker of Israel, and the giver to them of all their knowledge about God which is contained in God's law, therefore Moses was a prophet. Samuel was a prophet; Saul the king was a prophet for one night, when he lay on the ground in an ecstasy, and uttered strange sayings. There were all kinds of prophets; I cannot deal with them all. Isaiah was a prophet; Daniel was a prophet supremely. Christ was the Prophet, and the complete Prophet. How? Because He foretold the doom of Jerusalem? Because He foretold His own death? Undoubtedly because He did those things; but that was not why He was called the Prophet. Why was it? A very excellent book, the Shorter Catechism, puts it better than I can: "Jesus Christ is a Prophet in making known to us the mind and will of God for our salvation."
I put this deliberately and very strongly, almost unduly depreciating the idea of foretelling future events, just because I know from my own experience, and certainly from the experience of others, that one thinks that the latter is the whole meaning of the word. It is startling and intensely interesting when you can pick out a prediction which was uttered ages before, and which was afterwards fulfilled. By all means take that; but never forget that, just like Christ's miracles, it was, as it were, only the accompaniment of the prophet's main work as a prophet, and that the real work of a prophet is making known unto us the whole character, and heart, and mind, and will of God, as these are revealed in working out the world's salvation.
If you turn to the writings of the prophets in the Old Testament you instantly discover that that is the true idea of a prophet. Take Isaiah, take Micah, take Jeremiah, take any prophet you please; every here and there you come upon a prediction—"Babylon shall be destroyed;" "Nineveh shall be destroyed." Yes, but it is one prediction, as an impassioned declaration of God's ways to men, showing how He must punish their wickedness, and must visit the impenitent. But the story of God's character and dealings for the world's redemption is, after all, the grand substance of Old Testament prophecy; it is a record of God's pity for mankind, and His determination to make them holy and happy, and of the fact that it is all to be done by the great coming Christ, the world's Sacrifice and the world's Saviour.
And when you are told to take the prophets as your example do not go away saying, "I cannot predict future events, and astonish people, and make them feel that I have some supernatural power." No, they could not be that example to you. A prophet was a man who knew the character of the true and living God; and because he knew and loved Him, and was living with Him, he made other men know Him, and feel Him, and understand Him too.
I have no time to enter into all the questions concerning the precise manner in which the prophet got to know God's mind and will—by dream, in ecstasy, in lofty rapt thought, in wonderful insight into the Spirit of God, and sometimes by a vision like that of Isaiah, where he "saw the Lord, high and lifted up," on His throne. Or, the prophet got to know God in a similar way to that which we read of in the case of the child Samuel, when the voice of God in the lonely Temple struck upon the child's ear so that there was nothing startling, and he thought it was his master's voice calling him; but he lived to see the terrible fulfilment of the first teaching which God gave to the child, in that which befell the master. I have no time to go into all that, nor to enter largely into the place and purpose of the prophets in working out that history which shows, when properly understood, nothing else but the growth of the Spirit of Jesus Christ through the ages, till that Spirit came in its completion in Jesus the Son of Mary; for there is the whole meaning of the prophets in Israel; they were an incarnation of the very same heart, and mind, and will of the Divine dispensation and of God for the world's redemption which were in Jesus; it was the Spirit of Jesus. And do not put away the words as a mere figure unless you put away the words as a mere figure when you read that Jesus was the incarnate Son of God. It was the very Spirit of God. The same Spirit as was consummate in Jesus, the perfect Prophet because the perfect Revelation of God, in its measure was present in every prophet who made the people believe God as they had never done before, and recognise His presence in the history of their time. The prophets taught them to repent of their sin, to live for God, to take their share in the great conflicts for righteousness that God was fighting in their age. In a measure the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, was present in every age of it. There is scarcely any occurrence, any story, any Psalm, in the prophecies of the Old Testament, which has not an application to Jesus Christ, and a meaning showing that He is in it. It is made a specimen, as it were, of all that is practically to be found in Him. The history of Israel in prophecy, which was the rising and the beginning of the future history of Israel, was just the growing of Jesus through the ages, till at length He culminated in the Son of Mary.
I want to-day rather to tell you some of the qualifications of a prophet—some of the elements of character that a man must have if he is to play the part of a prophet to the people he lives among, bidding myself and you take the prophets as an example. One thing is remarkable—the office of a prophet was not hereditary. The great departments of God's government, and teaching, and dealings with Israel were the kingship, the priesthood, and the prophethood—the rule, the fellowship, and the teaching and guidance. Now, all these culminated in Jesus; He is Prophet, Priest, and King. In Israel no mere man or body of men was fit in unity to fill those offices; they were distributed. The burden was too great, the power was too grand, for any single man, except the perfect Son of Man, to combine them in their fulness, and so they were divided in Israel, to be reunited in the perfect embodiment of Israel, God, Prophet, Priest, and King to the people. God's meaning was that all Israel in its completeness should be king, and prophet, and priest, without any active, separated, divided government; that it should be a theocracy, as God's kingdom, ruling themselves, every one of them being a king to God, every one of them being a priest, every one of them being able to come direct to God for himself, and to bring his prayers to God without any intervention of man; in the same way every man, as a prophet, hearing God's voice direct to his heart, and being taught the truth that God revealed. God wanted them all to be prophets; God wanted them all to be priests; God wanted them all to be kings: but they were not fit for it, and so among them special men had to be cultivated to fill those offices. Now, there is this distinction between those divided offices or faculties of God's rule and guidance in Israel: the kingship was hereditary; the priesthood was hereditary: the prophethood was never hereditary. A priest's son was born a priest; a king's son was born a king: a prophet's son was not born a prophet. The prophets were selected, not born. Why? Because it was the supreme and grandest office, the most difficult, the most responsible, the most sacred. Any man was fit to be a priest, to conduct the ritual and external ordinances of worship, through which men's hearts were brought to God. And any man, comparatively, might be a king, so long as he devoted to his office that amount of thought and time which was necessary. It needed no special moral qualifications and no special insight. A man was the better who had these, but he could be a good enough king without them. But a prophet could not be born a prophet; a prophet had to be chosen, a prophet had to be made by God. And the reason was this: the prophethood was a creative office and function. God's dealings with Israel were not done when He had given the ancient economy of a religious priesthood and kingdom. God had to reshape, and remodel, and adopt His laws, and teaching, and meaning, and the outward ordinances of religion to every age. As the nation both externally and internally altered, new teaching had to come to it at the hands of the prophets.
Were the priests the channel by which God could do it? Their duty was fixed, and in the law, as well as in the form of government, men could not err; they could follow the Divine precepts exactly in administering them. But when an addition has to be made, and a remoulding to take place, it wants a man capable of entering with strange, grand insight into God's purposes, a man with eyes, with soul; it needs a man lifted up. And so the prophets' office was never hereditary; they were always selected; God chose them; why? Why did God choose one man, and not another? I think that He chose a man, first of all, who had a natural adaptation, who had rare powers of mind, who had rare genius and sympathetic feeling, and not a mere presentiment of the movements of the world and its destiny as it went on round about him. I think that, as a rule, God selected a man with a natural adaptation, and prepared him for all that he had to do and tell. It transformed a man's life; it took him clean out of the common world in which men lived. We presume that it was so from what is recorded, and from the facts which we know concerning the prophets' characters and lives. God caused something to happen to a man that made God appear to him what He was not to common men. An awful vision was presented to Isaiah of the great, grand God, and thenceforth all earthly considerations were nothing to Isaiah. He had seen God, and the future was God's making. In the face of empires, however mighty in name and in armies, it is the will of God that settles the future, and such a man disregards all earthly advantages; he knows that God means to do His deed; he says, "It shall be done; and if you set yourselves against it there is no other end than destruction, which is sure to fall upon you, for God will do the deed which He means to do." It was a revelation of God which made the man a prophet; it made him a man who felt God to be supreme; it made him to be certain of God's sovereignty, and absoluteness, and the goodness of God's authority; so that nothing could induce him to swerve from the path that God appointed for him. He was a man who stood like a rock amidst the earthly, selfish, planning, scheming men of his time, and declared the future truly, because he had seen God's meaning, and held men to it; and when they would not be so held he was content to die, declaring the truth of his message, and looking forward to the time when the future would manifest its truth. He was a fit prophet, a living teacher, who spoke of the future—a grand man, with a grand office and a grand destiny to play in the world.
The man, the father, the mother, the teacher, the preacher, who takes the prophets as examples, who will play his destined part in his own little home, in his own Sunday-school class, in his own congregation, in his own neighbourhood, in the great world round about him, must be a prophet; he must be a man who knows God; he must be a man who feels God to be all about him; he must be a man who is not merely orthodox in theology, and believes all that is written about God's dealings in the past; but he must be a man that will make you know that God is living, and moving, and loving in the events of his own time; he must be a man who recognises God in the providences of his own life; he must be a man who does not shape his conduct for earthly gain or for social advantage; he must be a man despising all these things, and paying heed to his own high destiny, yet whose character and conduct move on the lines which I have indicated; who says, "God is making me great, but He bids me live as He lives—but He bids me sacrifice friends and home; I must do it; I must tell this truth, though all good men should be against me, for I have learnt it of God, at my risk of having mistaken its meaning; yet I must speak it." Ay, even if such a man makes mistakes in learning this new lesson of God, and does not read it quite right, even if he goes wrong, nevertheless he has life in him, Divine life; he has honesty; he is a true man; he is a man who is not of the world; he is a man who is not a mere ecclesiastic; he is a man who is not a mere self-seeker. That man does God's work on earth. And I venture to say that in the Church's story you will find that there has been a succession of men who have done what was the work of the priest in the old time, and there has been a succession of men who have done the work of the prophet. You need both; you need the priest, to keep alive, as it were, the ordinary level of religion, to preserve some sort of uniformity; and in the Church's story you will find that God has raised up prophets, men who sometimes broke loose, who were not always true, who sometimes mistook God's meaning, who had but little of the character of the old prophets, and yet who taught truth, and adapted the old ecclesiastical doctrines to the new necessities, suiting their work to the age; and though disbelieved and openly denounced in their own day, they have become our teachers since. What of the Reformers? what of Wesley? what of Whitefield? what of many another name, much nearer our own time, but which does not diminish the effect of the general principle? Ay, and what of men not so good and great as these, but who had life in them; who broke up the stagnation of ecclesiastical life, and brought new faith to men; who by their dazzling earnestness, and spiritual insight, and their teaching brought up the ordinary level of God's presence? Thank God it is so. It is the lot of the human prophet and priest, and of similar teachers, in our day, to make men know that there is a God, and a Christ, and a soul to be saved, and that they are men, and not mere machines. Thank God for it; but pray God to make you and me true prophets; pray God to give us the passion of prophets, to give us sympathy with all the wants of the age, to give us to know that He is moving, to give us to know what new teachings come from Him; pray God to give us generosity, and self-sacrifice, and liberality, and largeness of heart, with our means, with our abilities, with our whole soul, with our prayers and spirits, and all that we have, to play our part as faithful prophets in the world's story, showing men God, and winning them to follow Him.