I have already said that there is no historical warrant for supposing
that the gift of prophecy, in its narrower sense, was ever bestowed upon
any of these patriarchs. But prediction is only one corner of the
prophetic office. The word is connected with a root which means 'to
boil, or bubble like a fountain,' and it expresses, not so much the
theme of the utterance as its nature. The welling up, from a full heart,
of God's thoughts and God's truth, that is prophecy. The patriarchs were
prophets, not in the sense that they had the gift of beholding and
foretelling visions of the future, and all the wonder that should be,
but in the higher sense--for it is the higher as well as broader--of
being bearers of a divine word, breathed into them by that anointing
Spirit, that it might be uttered forth by them. That sort of prophetic
inspiration belongs to all Christians. It is the result of the
relationship between Christ and Christians of which we have been
speaking. Every one who has been anointed will be thus gifted.
God's 'messiahs' will be God's prophets. If we are in touch with God,
and have our hearts and whole spiritual natures drawn and kept so near
Him as that we are ever receiving from Him of His transcendent and
mysterious life, then silence will be impossible. The lips will not be
able to contain themselves, but will speak forth that of which the heart
is full. And thus every Christian man, in the measure of his true
Christianity, will be a prophet of the most High.
I do not need to point the lesson. A silent Christian is an anomaly, a
contradiction in terms, as much as black light, or dark stars. If Christ
is in you He will come out of you. If your hearts are full the crystal
treasure will flow over the brim. It is easy to be dumb when you have
nothing to say, and that is the condition of hundreds of people who
fancy themselves to be, and are called by others, 'Christians.' 'Mine
anointed' cannot help being 'My prophets.' If you are not prophets, if
there never is any bubbling up of the fountain demanding utterance, ask
yourselves whether there is any fountain there at all.
III. And so, lastly, every Christian man, in his double capacity of
anointed and prophet, is watched over by God.
One is tempted to diverge into wider considerations, and speak of the
relative importance of things secular and sacred (to adopt a doubtful
distinction) in the history of the world, and how the former are for the
sake of the latter. But I do not yield to the temptation. Let me rather
take the thought here as it applies to our own little lives.
Abraham more than once in his lifetime, though sometimes by his own
fault, was brought into very perilous places. There are one or two
incidents which are familiar to most of us, I dare say, in his life
which are evidently referred to in the phrase 'He reproved kings for
their sakes.' The principle remains in full force to-day, and God says
to every thing and person, Death included, 'Do My prophets no harm.'
They may slay; they cannot harm. If I might use a very homely metaphor,
sportsmen train retriever dogs to bring their game without ruffling a
feather. God trains evils and sorrows to lay hold of us, and bring us
to, and lay us down at, His feet untouched.
There is no real harm in so-called evil. That is the interpretation that
Christianity gives to such words as this of my text, not because it is
forced to weaken them by the obstinate facts of life, but because it has
learned to strengthen them by the understanding of what is harm and what
is good; what is gain and what is loss. Peter shall be delivered out of
prison by the skin of his teeth when they are hammering at the scaffold
on the other side of the wall, and the dawn is just beginning to show
itself in the sky; whilst James shall have his head cut off. Was that
because God loved Peter better than James? Was one harmed and the other
not? Ah! Peter's turn came all in good time. Peter and his brother Paul
had both to bow their necks to the headsman's sword one day, although
one of them said, 'Who shall harm you if ye be followers of that which
is good?' and the other said, when within sight of his death, 'He shall
deliver me from every evil work.' Were they disappointed? Let us hear
how Paul ends the same verse: 'and shall save me into His heavenly
kingdom.' Ay! and he _was_ 'saved into the heavenly kingdom' when
outside the walls of Rome; where a gaudy church stands now, he died for
his Master. No harm came to him. God said to Death, 'Do My prophet no
harm!' and Death docilely did him good, and brought him to his Lord.
Only, dear friends! let us remember that the inviolableness of the
ambassador depends on his function, and not on his person; and that if
we want to be kept from all evil, we must do the work for which we have
been sent here. So let us understand the meaning of our difficulties and
sorrows. Let us set ourselves to our tasks, live up to the level of the
high names which we have a right to claim, and be sure that there is no
harm in the harm that befalls us; and that all evil things 'work
together for good to them that love God.'