01.06. CHAPTER VI - THE PASSION OF THE PROPHETS
CHAPTER VI - THE PASSION OF THE PROPHETS No one can look at Sargent’s picture of the Prophets in the Boston Public Library without feeling a tug at his soul. What glorious men they were laymen all of them gatherers of sycamore fruit, cup bearers to the king, but whatever else they did, one great absorbing passion for the Israel of God was on their souls. They were not only forth-tellers of the truth, but they lived it out. There was Israel turning from God, giving herself up to idols, and they were sore distressed.
See stern old Elijah, the greatest of them all, for whom to this day every child of Abraham sets a chair at his solemn feast, the man whom they say locked up by his prayers the cisterns of the heavens and carried the keys of them for three long years in his pocket! How shall he let Israel and its king go on to their destruction? A king is seeking him but he will not temporize his message, “Art thou he that troubleth Israel?” Elijah answered, “Not I, but you and your father’s house have wrought the overthrow. of this people. ’ ’ And he told him that in Naboth ’s vineyard, where of all places on God’s green earth the king would least desire to meet the prophet of Jehovah.
See him on Carmel calling back Israel to her oldtime faith. He will not temporize or equivocate, stern old prophet of righteousness. He will not let things drift. It is a time of decision. “Choose ye this day whom you will serve; if God be God, serve Him, and if Baal, serve him.” More of the Saviour’s challenge decide something, don’t drift! And then that a race to Jezreel a king in a chariot bested by a prophet on foot, and the prophet oversped by the rain drops of the mercy of God! Small wonder that when John the Baptist came, they said it was Elijah, and when Jesus came they said it was the spirit of Elijah and the thunderous voice of John the Baptist rolled into one. And here is Isaiah, perhaps the most gifted of all the prophets, a man of great natural endowments, intensified and consecrated to the loftiest ends by his self-surrender to God. He had the intellectual grasp of a great statesman and the fervid imagination of a great poet. He was a seer who could see. How his yearning soul portrayed the love of God and His righteous indignation! What irony, what ridicule, what challenge to heights of spiritual experience! How utterly all his gifts were mastered as he sought to win Israel back to God. His were the words that Jesus loved to quote, and no prophetic words are oftener on the lips of preachers today than the words of this marvelous prophet. He is the great evangelist, the proclaimer of the good things. “Ho, everyone that thirsteth come ye to the waters, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” And those Messianic prophecies “He was wounded for our transgressions; the chastisement of our peace was laid upon him, and by his stripes are we healed. ’ ’ May my soul stand in holy wonder before such a flaming heart and fiery tongue until I myself have caught the blaze of it! Of Jeremiah it was an English preacher who said, “However many Isaiahs there may have been, I am glad there was only one Jeremiah.”
He seems to think that one weeping prophet and one set of jeremiads was enough, but would it not tend toward the multiplication of good shepherds who would give their lives for the sheep if there were many who could come to say “0 that my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people.”
What shall I say more for the time would fail me to tell Daniel and Nahum and Amos, gatherer of sycamore fruit, and Jonah, and Habakkuk, whose prayer, Webster said, was the most sublime thing in literature, and all the long list of the prophets down to Malachi, who with a challenge which burns in our soul, cries, “Will a man rob God,” and all the yearning of his soul condensed into one glorious prophecy at wMch the heart of God’s people will bound for joy until they see the prophet himself in the land of his fruition, “Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another and the Lord harkened and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord and that thought upon His name, and they shall be mine, saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels and I will spare them as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.”